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Once upon a time a high-level Cleric and a Magic-user hatched a get rich slow scheme. They found a rocky planetoid in a pocket dimension and sold/built high-end tombs to the wealthy and powerful across the multi-verse, headquartered in a mausoleum.  They died and the tomb complex was forgotten. The party get access to a map and instructions to build a gate, and off they go!

The complex has two tombs detailed and five others briefly outlined in case the DM wishes to expand the adventure. The first detailed tomb is The Mithraeum of Elissa, for 4-6 characters of levels 10-12, with at least a +2 weapon in the party. The second is The Crypt of the Slime Mage, for 4-6 characters of levels 13-15, with at least a +3 weapon in the party. Both are similar enough that I believe I can discuss them at the same time; The Mithraeum has a few more undead and the Crypt has more slime-type creatures.

Both tombs are essentially linear dungeons with some puzzles thrown in to the rooms with a boss fight at the end. This is pretty much an inherent problem to all tomb-raider adventures. If the tomb is intact then there’s nothing in it but constructs and undead, and if you’re building a tomb complex then why have a choice in which way to go? There’s no wandering monsters, and there’s no teleporting, blinking, pass-walling within the complex. As I’ve stated before, I don’t like this. I know why it’s done: to keep the party from skipping over some challenge that the DM has put together. I still don’t like it; it takes away, by DM fiat, what the party has worked hard to achieve. If the wizard can scry the tomb and wants to teleport to the end, so be it! Thus the inherent problem with high-level tomb raider adventurers.

How do you feel about Save or Die? I generally don’t have an issue with it. After all, if the party sees a bunch of statues frozen in fright, cowering, or posed to strike, then any decent party will dig out their blindfolds & mirrors for the Stone Gaze monster about to come through. Not though that in that Save or Die monster attack there was some warning given: the statues. That’s how Save or Die situations are supposed to work: an insightful party will pick up on clues that the DM drops, probably quite a bit more subtle than the statue example, and will take steps. In this way the Save or Die is fair. “Standing from the doorway your torches can make out a part of the room. It seems rather barren except for the rubble on the floor.” This prompts questions from the party about the rubble, which leads to questions about the ceilings and walls, which leads the party to believe that the ceiling is going to lower down on them … IF the party picks up on the rubble. I’ll never forget the time I was taking a rare playing opportunity and died by a polymorphed medusa. No warning there was medusa about, and she wasn’t evil ENOUGH that my detect evil spell worked on her. Uh huh. That’s a bad Save or Die.

This module has A LOT of Save or Die in it. Generally the party walks in to a room, get’s 10′ in, the door behind them slams shut and then wizard locks behind them. Then they get to save or die a few times. Of the 11 rooms in the Mithraeum, 7 have doors which will slam shut behind the party and then Wizard lock. It’s a mighty lock also; you need two Knock spells or two dispel magic’s plus a combined strength of 40 to get the doors open, both the first time, when you enter the rooms, and to leave the rooms. The Save or Die in this tomb is limited to a couple of encounters with vorpal-wielding creatures, and a pit to hell in the center of a small room with a strong suction power. You need to make 8 strength checks at -2. If you miss two then you are automatically gated to the abyss when you touch the edge of the pit. i wasn’t too happy with this encounter, or with the rather lengthy (a longish paragraph) description of a mural depicting the Mithratic tauroctony ritual, especially since it was useless flavor text and had no impact at all on anything in the adventure.

The second tomb has 14 keyed encounters and it in this one that the Save vs Die issues really come to light. There are five or six rooms with the “door slams shut and wizard locks” details, and of course all of the doors require the double Knock/Dispel Magic to get through and the dungeon has the same prohibition against teleports/blinks/pass-wall, etc. There are at least 9 Save or Die traps/effects in this tomb, all with some kind of negative modifier to the save, -2 to -4 typically. There’s an additional trap which allows no save, a Power Word Kill. One or two of these have some kind of warning, IE: Yellow Mold or pushing a button, however it’s still not enough in my opinion to justify the Save or Die.

Clearly, I had some issues with the module. This is not the type of module I’m pre-disposed to liking, however my dislike goes beyond that. The large number of Save or Die situations are combined with several more high-damage traps that seem to channel Grimtooth, but in a serious way. The Slime portion of the adventure does not channel Walking Wet, even if there is a room that could come straight out of the Mushroom illustration by Sutherland in B1.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/92281/Advanced-Adventures-18-The-Forsaken-Sepulcher?affiliate_id=1892600

This is a two-level tomb/dungeon that reminds me quite a bit of Tomb of Horrors. In fact, I’m going to go reread the Tomb to see how it measures up to this product. It seems that a great sage has discovered the final resting place of Anadi. Anadi was a great and powerful mage from long ago, who was the inventor of many of the spells used today. Surely great reward awaits those who plunder her tomb!

The dungeon tomb complex is a mostly design with a couple of branches on the upper level which do not meet-up. While I usually prefer much more complex maps, this design is fine in this context since it’s tomb complex and, like most, is  a puzzle rather than a living breathing dungeon. It starts off well: the stairs down and in are blocked halfway down by a wall of force. The party will have to come up with a way on their own to breach the wall in order to get access to the dungeon. It’s followed up by a room which nauseates characters and a hidden room complex with a monster that only attacks people hauling treasure OUT of the dungeon. That’s a nice touch; too often the return trip is hand-waved away. It also contains the first bit of screwage: a secret door which can not normally be detected. Clearly it has to be that way to offer some justification for the hidden room complex and “treasure monster”, otherwise the party will just slaughter the creature along with everything else. It smacks of bad design though and I would have preferred it be handled another way.

Following that is a “push the buttons and die” puzzle. The party has the option of, essentially, pushing a set of buttons with no hint of what they will do. Ok, so they won’t die and the effects are not TOO seriously bad (polymorph for a few turns, take some damage, enable a monster in another areas, etc) but it still smacks me as rather arbitrary. There are 10 button combinations, none of which are required or do anything good. I guess the lesson is: don’t screw with things in tombs unless you have to. There’s another magically hidden secret door that’s can’t be found through normal means right after the buttons, which leads to a potential stone to mud deathtrap once the spell is dispelled in five rounds.The next room also has a potential deathtrap: essentially it’s a box that, when opened, has a sphere of annihilation that sucks in whoever opened the box. There’s another difficult encounter right after in the next room, in which the party has to do 50hp of damage over an entire 20×20 area all in one round. I’m not even sure that’s possible?

The second level of the dungeon causes all spells cast by the party to misfire 20% of the time, and has several more of the “secret doors which can not be detected by normal means.”  With some monsters in them that come out and attack the PC’s. Uncool. The map is mostly linear with a couple of teleport areas (two) that the group uses to get to a new linear section of the dungeon. There’s a locked/deadend room with an illusionist polymorphed in to a cockatrice. He has the mindset of a cockatrice but retains enough cunning to employ his abilities to the utmost. This strikes me as wrong for two reasons. First, he’s got the mind of a cockatrice but can retain his illusionary spells? Second, it’s a living creature (at least I’ve always thought of them as needing to ear/drink) living in a locked room. It seems to me just like another justification to have a cockatrice with invisibility, confusion, and mirror image, in which case it should just be a new monster. One of the rooms the party can teleport to, a trapped/jail area, prevents all attempts to teleport/blink/etc out. Again,  I don’t like this.

The dungeon seems much more like an excuse/justification for screwing with the PC’s then a good crawl. I don’t want to screw with the PC’s. The wizard worked hard, presumably, to earn his frigging teleport. He should be able to use it. Anything else strikes me as ‘magical economy’ nonsense and/or screwing with the PC’s. It COULD be viewed as a killer dungeon, in much the same way as Tomb or Horrors was. I wonder how Robilar and his orc minions would do? Hence the reference to Tomb above; I don’t recall that module having as much screwage however perhaps I’m wrong. This product seems to take too much control from the players. Maybe it would work with pre-gens at a meet-up as a one-shot if you announce in advance it’s a deadly puzzle dungeon?

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/93194/Advanced-Adventures-20-The-Riddle-of-Anadi?affiliate_id=1892600

This is a tournament module for a game at GenCon 2011. Like most tournament modules, it’s a set up, has a few fights, quite a few puzzles/tricks, and a scoring system. It’s also one of the better tournament modules I’ve seen.

The setup is cute. While sailing back from some faraway land the parties ship becomes becalmed. After a day or so black ash starts to fall from the sky. The ships two native guides begin working themselves up, then repeatedly stab themselves in their chests with their own daggers and throw themselves over the side of the ship to drown/bleed. How’s that for a “I know something you don’t know.”? The party falls asleep, and the adventure begins …

They awaken on their ship which is now in a giant arena, miles and miles wide with the floor covered in a fine black obsidian sand. The walls are a thousand feet up and no flying abilities/spells work. In the arena is a giant marble statue of a lion and an even large marble statue of a man, while the stands are filled with other, more normals, marble statues. The statue of the man has a doorway in it’s heel. Adventure awaits!

It turns out that Syncrates is a god of entertainment. His statue dungeon acts as a proving ground; any group that can get through it and bring the giant statue to life if probably going to provide a good show for his godling guests. If the party can make it through the dungeon and figure out how to animate/control the statue then the statue and the lion comes to life and the lion attacks the statue the party is in control of. A pretty nice climactic battle to the adventure, I’d say, and a set up that seems quite a bit less absurd than most ‘proving ground’ dungeons.

The statue has 15 rooms with about 9 or so having a combat encounter, depending on the actions of the party. Two are empty, and most of the rest of the 13 or so have some kind of puzzle, even if they do also have a combat encounter. The puzzles are good ones, not too hard and not trivial, and obviously present. Look, a pentagram! Do you break the plane? Pools of liquids on the floor and some kind of contraption. Nothing to see here, move along … The worst that can be said is that the party may have to do a little backtracking to pick up a few things from other rooms they didn’t know they would need. One encounter sticks out for me: the party see what seems to be an illusion of themselves having a discussion, which breaks out in to an argument, and then a fight, which ends with the wizard fireballing the room and killing everyone. If this doesn’t ring true to the DM/players then you’ve got a total bunch of n00bs at the table. I can’t count the number of times this has happened. Both the argument and the fireball, although they usually are not related. There’s no wandering monster table, since this is a tournament module. There are a half-dozen or so new monsters which is almost welcome and certainly appropriate for a tournament module.

Despite the fact that it’s a little bit puzzle heavy and a gimmicky set up, it could work as a mini-level in a megadungeon or through the original set up scene if you wanted to use it without having a tournament. It does require a rather large group to run as written; at least five of the party have to ‘solve’ the riddle of the statue in order to animate it. as the module is written. It comes with pre-gens, so it would be great as a one-shot between other games or at a meet-up, especially if you’re fine with a player running more than one character. Overall, I’d say this is a fine example of an OSR product. A few mandatory combats, a few that can be avoided, a few that the PC’s errors can cause, and a few puzzles to figure out that are not maddening but are interesting.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/94663/Advanced-Adventures-21-The-Obsidian-Sands-of-Syncrates?affiliate_id=1892600

This is a longer than normal module with several parts. The module is set in the Three Points region. It’s a small collection of three villages with their surrounding fields. The villages share a common background, having been founded by three brothers. Each of the villages has it’s own character. Harmony is a village that lauds the arts and music. Stone’s Throw specializes in commerce more than the other two. Thorbold has a strong village militia and surrounding wall and believes in law & order. Each of the villages is described, and their individual characters come through well. About a half dozen individual locations are described in each village, along with their proprietor and their owners personality. Some of the villagers have small tasks that need to be done that can help serve to embed the characters in the villagers life. This runs the risk of devolving in to a series of fetch quests however if it’s handled well by the DM then it can really bring the villages to life. The leading personalities are described, as well as their involvement in the situation that leads to the core of the adventure. It seems a few years ago the village leaders got together and decided to clear a forest to make more room for their numerous sheep & goats. First, of course, the needed to hire some mercenaries to clear out the druids in the forest. What’s with these people in fantasy worlds? “Gee, we need more pasture so let’s go piss off a large group of magic-users.” How about diversifying your economies guys? Huh? How about that? As far as the villagers know, they got away with their violence scott free. There’s a pretty good wandering monster table, which in Brycelandia means that the creatures are given reason for wandering around. I like that.

A traveling circus comes to town and the villagers convince them to put on a few shows. During the last show a large group of goblinoids attack and massacre a bunch of people. The party is enlisted to find & stop the humanoids. This probably leads to an investigation of the circus, which is a little problematic for the performers, since they are actually a front for a smuggling operations and are carrying poisons and cursed magic items to sell to an evil clan in order to overthrow a local lord. So … the performers are not too amenable to having their tents searched. This almost certainly leads to the party killing some clowns and other performers before they find a hole in the ground in one of the tents. Down, Down to Goblintown!

The hole leads to a three level dungeon complex that was once home to a small village of evil gnomes. This leads to a town like atmosphere in the dungeon, with wide corridors that serve as streets & avenues. The complex has three levels and each level is occupied by a different faction of humanoids, who, as is standard, hate each other and won’t come to each others aid. HOWEVER, the humanoids on each level do have individual factions, so it’s possible for the party to work the humanoids to get information on the levels and current state of affairs. This kind of detail is gold; it really serves to turn the creatures in to real living and breathing inhabitants rather than just a set of stats waiting to be killed. In addition, each level has an “order of battle”; if a fight breaks out and help is summoned then you can follow the chart to determine when more monsters show up and who they are. I love seeing this sort of intelligent additions to modules; again, it contributes to a more realistic environment. Stooopid PC’s are gonna get their asses kicked. The various personalities on the levels, and many of the rank and file, have their own personalities detailed which allow for much more varied play … THIS is what I expect from a published product. In addition there are several tricks & traps and other sorts of dangerous situations that don’t just involve humanoids.

The dungeon levels eventually lead to an abandoned tree-top village that once housed elves. About a thousand years ago they hung an innocent man and he cam back as an undead menace. They hung the wrong guy because of an Insanity Witch that was lurking about. These two folks still lurk about the forest floor, and their backstory is very well done. The village is now inhabited by the druids who were run out of their forest, along with some guards and their animal companions. The druids have a couple of factions also, which can make for some interesting play. An order of battle is not presented which is noteworthy, for both this section and circus section, since it was presented for the dungeon levels. The party can kill the druids or try to patch things up with the villagers in order to resolve the adventure hook.

This is a good solid product, which makes it a stellar product given the large amount of dreck in the RPG adventure module market. It does have a couple of issues. First, there is no map of the villages or of the circus compound, which I would have liked. The minor quests in the villages have some pretty big payoffs: “Go deliver this routine letter and I’ll pay you 50gp” sorts of issues. The backstory of the hanged man and insanity witch are good, but how they interact with the current inhabitants, the druids, is mostly passed over with just one or two references. I’d think the druids andtheir animal friends would have more knowledge of what was going on and be more worried. It also clearly started life as a 3.5/Pathfinder product, since there are references to masterwork weapons, healing kits, and the like. I consider every edition of D&D interchangeable (except for The Abomination), so it’s not such a big deal. It’s a good adventure and should be a lot of fun for a thinking party, and a good slog for the hack n’ slash crowd.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/86967/Strange-Bedfellows–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

This is the third of the Frog God Games Hex Crawl series. It’s their take on the Wilderlands style play that Judges Guild introduced back in the mid to late 70’s. For those of you new to this style of play, the product introduces a wilderness region that is presented on a hex map. The wilderness map in this product is about 36 hexes wide and about 23 hexes long, with each hex being 6 miles wide. The party travels through the hexes and has wandering monster encounters. A certain number of hexes, about 10%, are described in more detail in the module and have some sort of mini-adventure or something else unusual associated with them. The DM can use the region as a home base, locate his own dungeons & adventures in the area and use the booklet encounters for local color, or just mine the product for adventure ideas. The original Wilderlands products just had a sentence or two that described each hex, while this line of products has short paragraphs of 8-10 sentences, usually followed by a stat block, for each hex.

This time around the module describes the land beyond the Black Water. the mysterious inland sea called the Black Water was first encountered in HC2, the Winter Woods. The natives lived in fear and dread of it’s shores. Now to get to see what it was all about. Beyond the Black Water lies the Land of the Dead. As the product explains, it’s both of the mortal world and beyond the mortal world. It’s shrouded in twilight, with the moon rising and setting like the sun does in the normal world. The souls of the dead wash up on it’s shores as spirits made whole and trapped in lifeless bodies. They make their way north, and are harvested by the various denizens on this land. These include the nine Petty Deaths that roam the land and compete with each other (Factions! I love Factions!), the bizarre robed humans in their black ark ships rowed by crews of the dead, and the various and sundry folk who make their home in this land, but all of whom pay homage to one of the deaths or another. The half page of adventure introduction in this book really goes a long way or conjuring up a world both real and bordering on the fantastic.

The southern edge of the map depicts the black water, with moors on the edge, with a narrow band of steppe’s bordering it, and then a wooded area following, ending in the northern edge being covered by the badlands, giving the effect of five separate bands of terrain. There’s a rumor chart for talking to folk, and another or the bordering on boring wandering monster charts. Perhaps this is necessary though, in order to the give the hex encounters the sense of wonder thy deserve? You need a normal with which to frame the Fantastic? We also get nine new monsters with new unique powers for the party to figure out, and non-standard magic items. For example, magic shields with intelligence & ego’s which force their desires, or try to anyway, on the wielders. Magic swords that absorb the essence of incorporeal creatures and can repel them when the swords are struck together. Those are MAgiC ITEmS! No generic “+1 shortsword” in this module, but magic the way it was meant to be: mysterious, bad ass, and a little dangerous! The various hex encounters follow suit: a sense of the fantastic, unique rules, and a touch of the bizarre. For example, there’s a Marlith skeleton in the ground. Digging her out, perhaps to get at the magic swords she seems to carry, will do a Fifth Element style flesh recreation on her … and she’s gonna want her swords back. Or how about the hex with the floating death alter, containing a group of satyrs and a death priestess nymph? She had things painted on her palms that do bizarre magic, ala Pan’s Labyrinth.

The complaints are the same as the first two in the series. The printed maps are too dark. I suspect that the PDF version is full color and the colors are not transitioning well to a greyscale printed map. The result is hat the map is hard to read, to the point that the terrain markers and hex numbers are almost illegible. I really wish also that the hexes had some notation that further detail was in the booklet; something like a black dot in the hex or some such.

This is another fine product from John Stater. He seems to have the market cornered on Wilderness hex crawls, with seven more planned in this series and 9nine or so in his Land of Nod series. Good stuff! These are among the best resources I’ve seen for RPG play. They rank right up there with ASE1 and the Gygax, Kuntz, Jaquay material that I have.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/93866/Hex-Crawl-Chronicles-3-Beyond-Black-Water–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

This is the second in Frog Gods Hex Crawl Chronicles series. As in the first, this is a Wilderness adventure in the vein of Judges Guild Wilderlands line. The centerpiece of the product is a map, about 26 hexes long and 44 hexes wide, each hex being 6 miles across. Scattered about this wilderness area are human settlements, demi-human camps, monster lairs, strange towers, mysterious things, and a touch of the fantastic. There are about a thousand hexes on the map and about one in ten have something out of the ordinary associated with them. The idea of the product is that the party will “hex-crawl” and adventure through the wilderness finding adventure as they go along, be it through wandering monsters or the pre-planned encounters described in the book. Sometimes deadly adventure: like many old school products, this one has a wide variety of challenge levels in it. The wise party will know when to run away and when to seek help.

This time out the adventure locale is the Winter Woods. The western portion is mountainous, while the eastern is composed of the Black Water, a sea/ocean. In between lies wooded and hilly terrain, with a few rivers. The effect is four distinct bands of terrain running form west to east. In to this we add a few elements. First are two races of men. One is indigenous to the region and fairly primitive while the other, the dark-skinned Northmen, were set on colonizing the region until their empire fell apart. Guess they shouldn’t have built their chief city on the edge of the madness-inducing Black Water. A strong theme running through this region is the Queen of the WInter Winds. This is a kind of snow queen who will one day awaken and bring with her … Well, there’s lot’s of rumors of what she will bring. Invasions of snow creatures from the far north? The gradual cold death of the world? That’s up to the DM to decide. There are plenty of hex encounters in the region that deal in one way or another with the Queen, either directly with her & her minions or with creatures & tales related to her. We get a small rumor table and a wandering table that could have come straight out of the 1E DMG … and as much as I love the 1E DMG, that’s not a compliment. It’s relatively staid and lacks the personality the rest of the product brings to the table. The Wilderlands hex descriptions were really just a sentence or two however the hex descriptions in this product range to the 8-10 sentence paragraph length, followed by s short stat block. I found the lack of detail in Wilderlands to leave my mind racing and wondering what was going on, which I loved. The charm of Tom Bombadil is lost after you read his unabridged biography. The extra detail in this version does steal away some of the wonder that Wilderlands provided, however not so much as to leave us with “generic kobold with rusty shortsword. 3hp” that is so common in modern games. The detail is enough to get you going but leaves a lot left for the DM to work with.

The land has a more fairy-like feel to it than a typical D&D game. Elves are more fey-like, dwarves have grey skin, twinkling amber eyes, and hair like spanish moss. There’s an encounter with a group of pixie-dragons; miniature dragons with butterfly wings that are frolicking in a seeming endless field of coneflowers. Those are the sorts of encounters that can add the wonder & excitement of the unknown back in to your game, and THAT is exactly what I’m looking for in a product.  This product brings the Old School vibe hard. Lot’s and lot’s of special encounter details are present. Things like an idol that, when touched, drains blood from the user, and a level, like a vampire and in return a hoarse whispering echoes in the characters head, warning of an impending doom. Or, maybe, an old ships compass found embedded in the forest floor that is broken … it always points towards DEATH! Or how about the hex that, on moonless nights, has 13 wraiths that look like decrepit old people who wear wraths of black roses and have iron nails for teeth that waylay travelers … and they drain magic levels instead of character levels. This is the sort of originality and sense of wonder that the mainstream game somehow lost along the way in it’s various editions, and I’m very happy that it’s surfacing again.

My complaints are much the same as with the first in the series. The map in this printed product is better than the one in the first, but it’s still very dark and difficult to read. I suspect it is color in PDF and that’s not translating well to the B&W print copy I have. I would love to see things organized a bit better, either with the various settlements grouped in the beginning, or the various encounters actually denoted on the map with a back dot or some such. This are just quibbles though. The booklet is a fine product either to be used as an adventure locale or mined for the fantastic encounters that can be placed in to a DM’s existing game.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/92424/Hex-Crawl-Chronicles-2-The-Winter-Woods–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

Near the dawn of the D&D game there were a set of supplements put out by Judges’s Guild under the Wilderlands name. These were a new thing: a large hex map of the wilderness with many many details on the various hexes. The descriptions only ran a sentence or so. For example “Partially buried in the sandy seabed, a ships figurehead of a sea nymph holding a scimitar.” These went on for page after page. There were also tables listing all of the villages in the region, the castles & strongholds, creature lairs, and an assortment of rules for caravans, ruin generation, and so on. Kind of a cross between the island adventure in Isle of Dread and those “101 adventure plots” books. The density of the books were staggering; there must have been a thousand hexes detailed in some of those booklets. All of them with just enough detail to tease the imagination, but describing a real physical sector around the City State of the Invincible Overlord. At some point the idea behind the product died out and imitations from other companies seem non-existant.

Until now. Valley of the Hawks is clearly built from the same primordial model that Wilderlands used. Where the initial Wilderlands booklet described about 5 sectors, this product describes but one, and does so in way that provides more detail and is slightly easier to dig through. The sector described is about 25 hexes long and about 40 hexes wide, each hex being 6 miles across. The valley is a borderlands locations, out on the frontier. Ruins from past civilizations lie scattered about, along with some human settlements from a couple of different cultures, and some demi-human settlements. The elves, in particular, are interesting in that they belong to that faerie sentiment of old, being slightly mystical creatures or fog in dazzling raiment. There is a short section on caravans and a good rumor table, and a slightly staid wandering monster table. This is followed by the meat of the product, the hex descriptions.

We get about 60 hexes detailed/described, out of the 1000 or so on map. These range from human settlements, to ruins and monster encounters, to the weird & bizarre details that could have come straight out of the Wilderlands. The Wilderlands details were short, a sentence or two for most hexes and just a table for villages and lairs. These descriptions are longer, a short paragraph of 7-8 sentences followed by a stat blocks for the creatures encountered. Obviously things are fleshed out a bit more for the DM, however that sense of winder that came with Wilderlands is still mostly intact. Besides the community descriptions and monster lairs we also get a good selection of the strage. Things like stone circles which can give visions form the gods, statues & pools which can do strange things, and so on. One of my favorite encounters is with an undead creature who stalks a river and lures creatures to their drowned doom, just as she/the creature was in life. Wilderlands had a “fantastic” feel to it, like the bizarre mish-mash of 70’s fantasy movies & cartoons. The land from the cartoon Wizards or Wiz-World form Warlord. This product has a more grounded feel to it, and the additional encounter detail detracts even further from that “fantastic” feeling. That’s not to say it’s bad, but it is more grounded in the traditional tropes of modern-day fantasy although the fantastic is still lurking there, just under the surface of the encounters. Plus, the product has a Temple of the Snake Men. How can you not love something with a Snake Man temple in it?

The organization of the product is a bit of a problem. Everything is scattered through the booklet with the encounters detailed in order. I perhaps would have preferred that the book be organized with the villages/civilized encounters listed in one section and the other encounters following, or perhaps further divided up the map in to additional quadrants in order to group the encounters by region. Compounding the organization issue is the map. The printed copy of the book has a map which is hard to read, being too dark, and it appears that the adventure locales are not marked on the map in any way, just the various terrain type. Again, I probably would have preferred something like a village marker, or even just a black dot in the hex to denote that it’s the site of more information in the book. As it is, I’ll have to go through the map myself and make all of those notations … if I can find a decent copy of the map that’s not too dark.

This is a good product. The valley could serve as a kind of home-base for a nice sandbox campaign, with the DM scattering other works throughout the area and expanding on the encounter synopsis given. It can also be used as one of the better Adventure Seeds products and mined for interesting encounters that the DM can work in to his own campaign. I myself am unlikely to ever sell my copy; it will earn that rare privilege of going up on the bookshelf along Wilderlands and my other stellar works from Gygax, Kuntz, and Jaquay.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/92415/Hex-Crawl-Chronicles-1-Valley-of-the-Hawks–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

This adventure takes place in a hollow mountain, in a realm of giant petrified mushrooms with a complex carved in to the top of the most mammoth. The groups adversary is The Tree That Sees, one of the young gods first creations, now abandoned & embittered. These are the roots of a GREAT adventure, however the editing & layout of this module (the First Printing) does a good job of making it almost impossible to enjoy.

Through the hooks & adventure start the party learns that some formerly peaceful nomads are now on the war path and conducting raids and capturing hostages … who are not seen again. This takes place in first three columns of text in the module. Short, sweet, and to the point. I love terseness in a background; I don’t need fives of the designers magnum opus in world history. Give me the lowdown, the basics of a hook, and get me going by leaving me with my options open. There is some significant boxed text in the opening encounter/introduction, which I did not like. Again, give it to me tersely and me get on with it. I will note that this is, perhaps, the last clear thing in the module.

Next we need to assume that there’s an overland forest adventure prior to arriving at the hollow mountain. That must be the case since the next section is ‘The Forest.’ Inside the forest lies the hollow mountain. It’s about 12 miles NE of the nomads camp. The nomads camp is a couple of hundred yards from the opening encounter/introduction. That’s it. No map at all. I hope the PC’s know that the hollow mountain is their destination, because no one has mentioned it yet. There’s a wandering monster table, but it’s unclear if it will ever get used. The instructions are to check every 4 hours with a 1 in 4 chance of a wanderer. Note that the hollow mountain is only 12 miles away from the nomad camp. I’m pretty sure _I_ can walk 8 miles in 4 hours, so it’s not clear to me that a party will ever get to make a wanderer check. There being no map and no forest encounter locations then there is no way to really have an outdoor adventure other than to maybe roll once and then declare that the party is at the mountain.

The next section is about the Giant Mushroom Cap. By slogging through the text multiple times I was able to figure out that the hollow mountain is hollow and contains a single large cavern full of petrified mushrooms and that the nomads live in the cap of the largest one. ‘Slog’ is not quite right; That information is contained in the first sentence, but is the ONLY description of the hollow mountain, either of the exterior or the interior. I had to go back and hunt & search to make sure that was the only description. It was. There are no encounters inside the hollow mountain except for the mushroom cap. The description of the mushroom cap notes that some of the water areas are partially submerged, show in light blue on the map. The map is actually in black & white. I _think_ the shading on the rooms keyed #19 & #26 on the map is darker than the others, but I can’t be sure. Good luck.

The mushroom is a mostly linear dungeon. There are at least four factions in the dungeon, competing for the love of the Evil bad Guy, and they won’t come to each others aid, however it’s not clear from the map where they reside. You’ll have to dig through the text and maybe highlight the different monster types in different colors and then note on the map where they live so the appropriate people come to each others aid. Oh, yeah, about the map … it’s keyed wrong. There are supposed to be about 26 keyed encounters on the map however it looks like the descriptions for five of the room were cut out, but the numbering continued. It doesn’t appear to be five rooms in a row; the room labeled “18” on the map appears to be #16 in the encounters, and the room go up to #26 on the map but only #21 in the book. It is NOT the case that five were cut out in a row, it seems to be somewhat random. The last room on this level houses the most powerful & evil of the Tree’s servants, the dragon Mavetofel. No stats are given anywhere in the booklet that I can find.

The next section is level2: The Temple of Roots. It appears to be located in a gigantic cave above the mushroom accessible only through the use of flight. No other location information. This most closely resembles a small six room funhouse dungeon. Well, there are six rooms numbered on the map, but only five in the text. It’s a proving/testing ground of old, with a couple of the tress cultists thrown in. That will eventually lead to Level 3: The Grove that Should Not Be, where the party will find The Tree That Sees. THAT is a pretty cool/bizarre/weird encounter with a creature born when the world was young. I thought it was a pretty cool creature,; lots of random effects and eyebeams from a creature straight out of weird fantasy. Finally, Level E is the Tomb of the High Priest, a two room map. Note, ‘E’, where the previous levels were 1, 2, 3. I _think_ this is a room/level that is an offshoot from the funhouse/testing ground level, but I can’t be sure. It says “Like all Lizardfolk chambers” and ” accessible through a small well-hidden trapdoor in the southern pole.”

I’m mostly at a loss about this module. It has some great ideas but someone, somewhere, screwed up. It _could_ be taken as a kind of “GM’s notes” kind of thing. By that I mean, it resembles a bit how I used to construct my own adventures. Just some ideas and a few sentences, maybe one per area, to make sure I remembers the feel and ideas I wanted to get across. Then someone may have come along and greatly expanded on certain sentences, while trying to tie the others in. Or, maybe they left out a few pages in the printers. The editing is bad enough that I can’t really tell one way or another. In any event, The Mushroom Cap concept is a nice one, and one I may steal for my own game, but the dungeon presented in it is very linear and mostly just a slog-fest of fighting. I spent so much time being confused by the writing and map that I _feel_ I may have missed something, however I’m pretty sure that’s not the case; what’s I’m missing isn’t there to begin with.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112790/Saturday-Night-Special-1-The-Hollow-Mountain–Swords-and-Wizardry-Edition?affiliate_id=1892600

SKULL MOUNTAIN – Dreamed of by thousands.

SKULL MOUNTAIN – A Holmes masterpiece of evocative art.

SKULL MOUNTAIN – …?

If you know what Skull Mountain is, from the Holmes set, and know nothing about this product then I suggest you stop reading and keep it that way.

Skull Mountain refers to the sample dungeon cross-section in the Holmes blue box D&D set. That piece of artwork in Holmes is a masterpiece of invoking the imagination. Volcano’s, lakes, caverns, multiple levels, and of course a mountain face carved to look like a skull. Therein lies the modules major issue. The old farts, myself included, have been dreaming of this ting since they were 10-12 years old. Like Episode 1, it’s doubtful that any product could live up to something percolating in a young boys imagination for 30 years. Related, Tom Bombadil looses something when he gets stats and a history. And then you don’t have that part of you anymore since the sense of wonder is taken away. That’s perhaps a bit too maudlin, however I am worried that my sense of nostalgia will get in the way of a review, so keep that in mind.

Two things are evident about the module. First, Jeff has changed the map ever so slightly to allow for a few more stairway/travel options, which is a very good thing. You probably won’t notice this unless you compare the versions side by side. Second, he’s put an incredible amount of thinking in to this. The dungeon that’s described certainly matches the original map, from the island, tower, and domes (3) in the final level to he position of the giant cavern formations on levels 5 & 6. He must have gone over the thing with a magnifying glass. He also has probably put an incredible amount of work in to a backstory, and denizens, which fit the map. The backstory makes sense, as do the occupants.

What we have here is the lair of an ancient black dragon, and as such it is probably the best example of a real dragons lair. These things are supposed to be old, very intelligent, and use spells; generally they are not portrayed that way. Our friend, Mr. Black, finds a cave complex in a mountain that bears a passing resemblance to a skull. He uses his powers to pretend to be The God of the Mountain, cowing a group of bandits in to worshiping him. That tends to be a Naga schtick, but he gets away with it. Over time his cult grows and expands the cavern system, as well as tidying up the rock outcropping so it really does look like a skull now. Eventually a volcano eruption causes some issues in the dungeon complex as well as with the cult. The Survivors on the outside loose their cultural identity and become bandits again, with some clever name evolution by Jeff. The same eruption brings some lizardmen to the dragons attention, and he plays god to them. Eventually he regains a group of cultist followers derived from a splinter group of the bandits. This perfectly explains the layout and names on the Holmes map, as we ll and providing fodder for the creatures and areas encounters in the adventure. The adventure hook is that the bandit/cultists have kidnapped the son of a guard leader in a nearby town that was pressuring them too much. The PC’s are sent in to get him.

Now, for all you prospective rulers out there, let me give you some free advice. If you live near a mountain with a giant skull carved in to it, with a cave system underneath, you might want to deploy a lookout or two and/or make sure your patrols in the area are strong and numerous. Yes, it’s going to cost more, however I believe my own attitudes would be typical of your common citizenry and I would be more than willing to pay a little more to make sure nothing ill happens in that area. It’s just good insurance.

The two major groups in the adventure are the bandit/cultists and the lizardment/cultists. The vast majority of the encounters will be with one of those two groups. Every level of this complex is used by intelligent people so there are no/very few encounters with anything other than the cultists or lizardmen. This means few to no encounters with vermin, which greatly saddens me. In addition the levels proper are quite small. I will admit a bit of disappointment when seeing the level maps however I’m pretty sure that’s ‘Expectations’ talking. Each level is quite small; the largest level on has about five rooms The domes on the bottom have 12 or  so rooms in one of them, but that’s the exception. There ARE multiple ways to get between levels, which is generally a very good thing, however the levels are so small that this doesn’t make sense; you generally won’t avoid an area by taking the back way since there’s not enough room to explore/sneak.

The trick & trap quotient is a little off also. There is a maze full of classic traps, pits, arrows, deadfalls, etc, which is used as a training ground for the priests, and some locked/poisoned chests, however I’, generally looking for more. The trick quotient is less then I’d like also; only a few are around although they tend to make sense in the context of the background. Wanderers are another problem; there generally are none until you get to the caverns own below. Then again, everyone is so close together up above that they should hear any combat going on and show up. There’s only one new monsters that interesting at all, the others being an advanced form of lizardman; advanced in the HD/AC/damage sense. There are a couple of encounters in the module that feel like they are out of 4.0: a dramatic set up n a fantastic location. Otherwise things are pretty straightforward, and I suspect there will be lots of fighting because of the lack of factions and Generic Bad Guy syndrome. There are about 36 encounters/rooms over the first nine levels and about 34 in the tower & domes at the bottom.

The layout resembles that of a lair dungeon. It’s quite small with a couple if interesting features, provided mostly by Holmes. Not a lot of variety, which probably makes sense given it’s size. Everything that is present makes sense in a way that few modules do. I will complain the text and column layout is probably TOO large for me, and while I don’t mind buying the monsters & traps in the text, it would have been nice to bold them to draw attention to them more quickly. This is one of the best dragons lairs I’ve seen described … however I can’t bring myself to think of it as THE Skull Mountain … however unfair that is. Then again, it’s unclear if anyone else’s Skull Mountain can ever match the one your built up yourself over 30 years.

This is available on DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/83885/Skull-Mountain?affiliate_id=1892600