Blue Alley

Posted on June 12, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Alan Patrick & M.T. Black
Self Published
5e
Levels 1-4

Blue Alley lies hidden in the heart of Waterdeep. Built by a secretive wizard, it is a magic maze full of tricks, traps, strange monsters, and rich treasure. Countless adventurers have ventured inside to test their bravery and skill, yet few have returned. And now it is your turn…

This seventeen page adventure uses about seven pages to describe seventeen rooms in a Challenge dungeon. You already know what that means, I hope. 

What?! You don’t know what that means? It’s a genre of dungeon in which someone constructs a dungeon to challenge the party, or test them, or some such nonsense. You have to “prove yourself worthy” or some other related thing. They are lazy. A challenge dungeon and a funhouse dungeon are essentially the same thing, except the funhouse dungeon doesn’t try to layer eighteen layers of justification on top of the dungeon in order to explain why things are the way they are. But where a funhouse allows you to suspend disbelief, the explanations in a challenge dungeon just make one groan. It’s a desire to put challenge after challenge in front of the party, without any reasoning behind it, that sets a challenge dungeon apart. There is no ecosystem. There is no neutral ground. There is an adversary that designed something to fuck you over. It’s fucking lame. 

Our dungeon here is an alley in waterdeep. Just an alley. That’s the corridors. The doors represent entries in to buildings. The alley is windowless, the text tells us. And thus we see the laziness. What about the roofline? Or, the buildings around the rooms? I got a crowbar and fuck you if I’m going in through the door if I don’t have to. Those things will get you killed! I don’t mean to harp on this as a minor detail, but, handholds and windows and such, for any tower, would be something of import to note and a decent dungeon of, say, said tower, would have some roof detail and perhaps multiple points of entry and/or rewards for those players thinking outside the box. But not here. You are going to do what the designer told you to do and encounter their dungeon the way that they want you to.

Descriptions are … practically nonexistent?  Which is par for the course in a challenge dungeon. After all, you’re solving a puzzle not having an experience. So we get super functional but non-evocative descriptions like “In the center of this small 10 foot by 10 foot room is a crossbow mounted on a tripod. The string on the crossbow has long since snapped, leaving the single silver bolt unfired. Inscribed on the west wall are the words, “CAN DO” Also, you are over revealing in the text, with the snapped storing and maybe even the silver bolt. We save follow up detail for the players to discover as their character investigate. The back and forth between the players and the DM is one of the most important loops in any RPG. And a decent part of that is eliminated when you overreveal in read-aloud. Beyond that, the description has nothing evocative in it at all. You are not here for an experience. Or immersion. You are here to solve a puzzle. Make your INT check. 

Let’s look at a typical room. “a magic mouth opens at the top of stairs and says “Laughter is the best medicine. MAKE ME LAUGH!” Allow the characters to roleplay a bit, and if you deem their comments or antics humorous the magic mouth looses a stone-shaking uproarious laugh and intones a command word “ And thus we see the horrors. A magic mouth. A command word spoken by it. This is the product of someone who can’t think beyond “someone has to say a command word for something to happen!” 

Did I mention that many of the rooms start with “This area has the following features: “ No? I did now? How about the “fetch the silver key to open the silver door” type retrievals? No? I did now? 

Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along. And this is what you get when I work my way through the list of things I’ve not reviewed yet. Dear god, one day this will be over and I can go back to reviewing things that might be good. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages with no rooms shown. Not a good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/252855/blue-alley?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 31 Comments

Barkeep on the Borderlands

Posted on June 10, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By W. F. Smith
Prismatic Wasteland
OSE
Levels ... ?

The Keep once loomed on the margins of civilization. It is now the center of culture and commerce.

 Each year, the Keep celebrates the Raves of Chaos to commemorate the brave heroes who gave their lives to rid the nearby caves of vile monsters. Their sacrifice cleared the way for the Keep to expand to its current size and scale, the envy of all humankind. The Monarch drained the royal coffers to pay for a powerful antidote, but it never reached their lips. The caravaners say it must have gotten mixed up in the deliveries to the Keep’s many pubs. Despite their illness, the Monarch was able to muster the energy to order the execution of every caravaner, ale draper, ale tunner and ale taster in the Keep.

This sixty page presents twenty bars with the barest of framings for an adventure. The bars are magnificent, in a gonzo sort of way, with tropes galore and a decent homage to The Keep. But the thing is without enough direction to form an adventure with, in any but the barest of definitions of that word.

The Keep is now all grown up. The city is massive now and the lands civilized. You’ve got to think of this like a mashup of Ankh-Morpork with a healthy dose of all of the humanoids inhabiting it. It channels  that magical ren–faire vibe and humanoids vibe without going over the edge in forced happy land where everyone gets along that those settings do famously badly. Instead there is a healthy dose of cynicism here that colours everything. And the setting is pushed in to something akin to gonzo, but fantasy themed. No one is going to bat an eye at a tower with some long hair hanging out and a wheel spinning gold. Not fairy-tale, this is firmly rooted in fantasy. It’s just that everything is in this. 

First, a brief divergence in to character creation. I mention it only because it is mostly just character backgrounds on a table to roll on But very solid one. The Orphaned Heir starts with a mansion and a set of black leather armor. If you can’t do something with that, in a one-shot, then you don’t deserve to play D&D. “My parents are dead!” That’s a hilight, but most of them are quite solid as well. And that’s what you need for one shot backgrounds, something for a player to riff off of without telling them how to play their character.

The Cult of Chaos is now reformed, in to the Church of Chis, or, as the adventure states “Formerly the “Cult of Evil Chaos,” the Church has made efforts to rebrand, pivoting to a less overtly sinister image.” And therein we get a taste of the tone that is prevalent throughout. The adventurers that cleared the caves are called murderers, but, also, with regard to the goblins “But the Goblins rarely make the same mistake more than a few dozen times.” And, they are in fact up to evil. As is the cult. I mean church. The skewering goes both ways, as if the Lazy Lich finally realized that hippies ARE actually mean people. The museum keep is referred to as a repository of revisionist history, but the old woman who runs the candy and gingerbread themed dive bar in the woods IS up to some shit also. There are no good guys in this respun Keep setting, and that’s something I can get completely behind as a setting for an adventure.

The dude in charge has been poisoned. He’s going to die within days. The antidote has been misplaced … in a bar shipment someone thinks. And thus folks are looking for it. It’s moving around to different bars, according to a timeline and a series of unfortunate events. During this the annual Rave on the Borderlands is happening. A drunken festival, arranged by the Church of Chaos once a year, in which laws are relaxed. This comes with themed days, laid out like a typical Caves expedition in order of the humanoids, with Gnoll Caves day being having to defeat someone in a fight to get cooked meat, else it’s raw meat for you! It’s a cute mechanism to add some theming to the days in front of the party. It pushes things JUST far enough to maintain some semblance of order while still being strongly themed. Alongside this is an heir to throne looking for the antidote also (or creating his own) and some elections for parliament happening. And this is set inside the expanded keep, grown well past its walls, to encompass the old town, the forest that cant be cut down, the swamps now home to factories, and so on. Good sub-region theming. Zones in the dungeon, yeah?

The bars are the highlight here. Each has quite a short description that is then enhanced by a patrons table and some things that can happen there. Here’s the description for the first one, Granny’s Cottage: “Over the river and through the woods, there is a quaint dive bar. Its walls are gingerbread, and its windows are crystallized sugar. The crone that runs it is in constant good cheer. Pay no mind to the pitch-black smoke billowing from its chimney.” That’s a great description. Note the last line, which is evocative and leads you to a conclusion but doesn’t detail it. That’s exactly what a good description is made of. Your mind fills things in and it leaves the door open for a variety of outcomes. It’s quite short, but sets the scene well. As for granny, proper: “Granny appears as a beautiful maiden each day at sunrise. By noon, she appears as a plump matron. She is a wrinkled crone by sunset. Beginning each midnight, Granny’s skin grows green and her nose sprouts warts” That’s something you can work with as well. Something solid to use. One of the patrons is “A child who was lost in the woods until Granny found them. Now they can stay up as late as they want and eat lots of candy!” Again, short, evocative, and can lead to a variety of outcomes. A witch, or just a nice old lady? Either is possible. And so it goes, from themed drinks, to what is Granny doing, to the various events/situations within the bar. Who’s up to sample the Poison Applitini cocktail?

There are two sins with this adventure. The first is the events within the bars. They lack the driving force of an actual adventure. FOr example, iN grannys “The Woodcutter whittles on their cabin’s porch. Due to a curse, they cannot leave the woods until the Keep’s walls fall down.” WHich is nice, but it doesn’t lead to anything. It’s just a thing that happens. Something weird. Window dressing. And this is the same for almost everything in the events/situations/sidetrecks in the adventure. They are just a decent wandering monster table, meaning not really related to the adventure as a whole. 

And then there’s the adventure proper. You wander about, from bar to bar, looking for where the antidote is today, hoping to stumble across it. There’s not much to lead you to where you should be. Not in the bars. Not in the little events, or the mini-games like the election or goblin subterfuge. As much as I like “A giant spider offers to host a luncheon. Over tea, they lament that passersby keep chucking garbage into their web.” It doesn’t really lead you anywhere. You gotta have something here for the party to latch on to and follow up on and so. Otherwise it’s just a drunken bar crawl. 

And as a drunken bar crawl it’s fucking fantastic. Some of the best fantasy taverns around for window dressing. A great Dungeon Dozen for bars. Farce. Absurdity. But as an adventure? I think not.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. It’s an assortment of rules (drinking) and the first pages of Granny’s. So, a decent preview, even if you don’t get to see the “Adventure” proper. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/429877/barkeep-on-the-borderlands?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

A Plague of Rats

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By GM Jeremy
TWK Live
OSE
Level 1

In the bustling port city of Vystaanzport, where ships arrive with goods from distant lands, a peculiar disturbance has emerged. Reports speak of rats swarming the docks, threatening the flow of trade and commerce. The city officials, desperate to maintain order, have put out a call for capable individuals to address the vermin infestation. Unbeknownst to the party, this seemingly routine task will be the first thread in a much larger tapestry woven by unseen hands.

This seventeen page adventure presents a seven room dungeon with a four encounters above ground, all related to killing rat swarms. And Giants rats. Ans a rat queen. It is closest in form jotting down notes on a piece of paper, with the expertise of a grade schooler.

It’s single column. There’s no real distinction between when read-aloud starts and when it stops. It just sort of all runs together, and one paragraph break suddenly turns in to DM text again. Not to mention the intro read-aloud text being Looooong, diverting players focus from paying attention. And it’s full of second person narrative, YOU step off the boat. YOU see a so and so. 

This is your first impressions of the adventure. The long read-aloud literally has you stepping off your boat on to the dock and seeing a sign on the tavern door advertising work. Well, after you “sense the urgency in the air.” Dude walks in after you, the harbourmaster, and tells you he’s got a rat problem on the docks and go fix it. This is, all, oh, a page of single column read-aloud to do all of this, all on monologue form. Then the adventure IMMEDIATELY shifts to DM text, with no change in font, or shading, or section heading. This is a portent of things to come. I’m trying not to be too hard on this, since there is a sense of … naivete on the part of the designer. They DID just type up their notes in a single column google doc and slap a nice cover on it. Or that’s how it seems anyway, and there’s something charming about that. But, also, this is not something you want to get mixed up in.

Ok, time to head to to docs! We get a little section that says encounters one through three on the docs is with one rat swarm, two rat swarms, and then two rat swarms. And then we get some read-aloud that is to be used for all three of these encounters. Including a dock worked stumbling backward in surprise. (I’d think I was GroundHog Day’ing if this happened to me in D&D …) There’s not other text here, just a short bit of read-aloud used for all three of the encounters, exactly the same. No DM text. And just that little “Encounter 1 – 1 rat swarm” note before the read aloud. So, yeah. 

You find a chewed sewer grate and go in. And thus starts the seven room sewer adventure. “Descending into the depths of the sewers, a rusty ladder leads down into a dimly lit tunnel. The air is thick with the stench of decay, and the sound of dripping water echoes off the damp walls.” The second sentence isn’t so bad. Maybe a little purple, but it’s heart is in the right place. And the first one is passive, putting the active clause second. Never a good idea. We’re not writing a novel here.  But, then, also, we get descriptions like “At the heart of the sewers lies a foul-smelling cesspit, its depths obscured by darkness and filth.” Maybe too many fantasy novels. Adventure writing is technical writing and has a different set of rules for how to present information. 

Anyway, inside the sewers you will not challenges except fighting rats. Rat swarms. Giants rats. A rat queen. And it looks very much like a 5e conversion, give you fight, like 2 giants rats,  five rats swarms and a rat queen in the final room. Oh, Oh! And you find a journal! It seems like it’s been forever since I’ve seen a crappy crappy journal included in an adventure that explains everything going on. Oh, those were the days … but, also, don’t put that sort of exposition in an adventure it’s better for it to come out through some natural gameplay. 

It’s interesting that this is an OSE adventure, with an OSE-like cover. That would imply the designer has seen a published adventure before writing this one. And, yet, almost everything in this would seem to imply that is NOT the case. The number of very, very basic mistakes here is quite surprising. More coherent than the Bloody Mage, and with no ill intent in their heart … but still not worth checking out, at all, in any way.

This is $1 at DriveThru.The preview is all seventeen pages. So, good on em, mate!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/479601/beneath-the-grey-veil-1-a-plague-of-rats?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 23 Comments

A Traveler’s Guide to the Echelon Forest

Posted on June 5, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By David Lombardo
AwkwardTutrle
Generic/Universal

The Echelon Forest stretches a great distance, making it an awkward obstacle to bypass without crossing through it. Attempts to pave roadways through the woods have always met with failure, sometimes violently, so the crossing is usually reserved for small parties or individuals. It is a strange, isolated place. Alive in more ways than could be usually said for a forest. Within the woods time flows and weather changes at their own pace, and in their own ways. Although largely boreal, It is not restricted to a single clime’s plants and animals. Crossing need not be hazardous, the forest is not malicious, but it is also not entirely safe. Granting the forest its rightful respect is recommended to any who wish to cross quickly and unharmed

This 32 page adventure is not an adventure. An adventure has to have something happen. It is the D&D version of a walking simulator. 

I shall elaborate. I’m not a grumpy old man. I know, I know. But you’re wrong. I have an issue with expectations. I get excited and then am crushed by disappointment. That’s different than being a grumpy old man. My other hobbies tend to be full of old men. And they are grumpy. They hate everything new. They hate that the world has passed them by and that people seem to no longer jump to obey when they open their mouths and have dared to have other opinions. I think the kiddos are great. Life, and change, are a delight. I am, though, somewhat mystified at times. I get, for example, that some people don’t want to play a game and would rather have an experience instead. Engage in an activity, so to speak. It’s not for me and I will be happy to tell you a hundred reasons why I think it sucks shit, but I understand that they can exist and people can like it. And then it gets pushed to the logical extreme and I just am completely lost. I can no longer understand any appeal at all. “We’re all gonna sit here and stare at the blank wall, quietly and awake, for eight hours.” Uh. Ok. And thus we come to today’s adventure: a walking simulator. 

This is a generator for a forest adventure. You do a die drop to create the paths and then roll on some tables to determine which of the points in the booklet to populate where, with the  middle of the forest all being the Heart Tree. I’m going to ignore the die drop portion of this, since it’s just used to determine the map. After that you use the points in the booklet to populate the map. And this is the only reason I’m reviewing this, because there were points. It was not advertised as a generator but rather a way to organize the points provided. 

The first signs of trouble were in the introductory pages. “There are no combat encounters here, and no explicit challenges or puzzles. Just the forest, the strange things within, and the changing weather.” Yup. The designer just told us that there is no content in this adventure. And that checks out. A pair of eagles make their nest in the crook of a large tree. A bearcave,, 50% it’s empty. A lean-to, a simple structure constructed of local materials. Signs of a campfire inside but otherwise uninhabited. Those are three of the points you could encounter. And I’m not really cherry picking nor am I giving a summary of the encounter. Those ARE the descriptions of the encounters. That’s it. That’s all you get. There’s nothing else. No generator for whats there or anything like that. Oh, no, you get a generator for the season and the weather. Hot dry and full of life, says the summer generator. Great. 

As the designer told us, there are no challenges here. Or even any encounters, I would assert. Just an idea for something. No real descriptions. No evocative writing. No interactivity OF .ANY. KIND. Nothing. 

What, then, is an adventure? “an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity.” says the arch-heretic of joy, Websters. Unusual? Maybe? Exciting? That’s not this adventure. Is a walking simulator a game? It shares a medium with games. But, without challenge, is it? (WHich, I note, is the same question often asked of the story game people.)

There is no game here. Not even close. There are no challenges, explicitly. There is no evocative writing or anything to bring the unusual to life. There is barely the unusual, or, rather, barely the outline of the unusual. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/480881/a-traveler-s-guide-to-the-echelon-forest?1892600

Largshire

I also checked out Largshire. This is a village supplement with seventeen locations in about 31 pages. It is massively overwritten, although there is an attempt to include a plot element in each locales as well as a secret. It just came off a boring though. Your village supplement is in another castle, Mario.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/451450/largshire?1892600

Posted in My Life is a Living Fucking Hell, Reviews | 2 Comments

Faces of Clay

Posted on June 3, 2024 by Bryce Lynch

By James S. Austin
Tacitus Publishing
OSE
Level 9

After a house fire tragically took the lives of a young family, their farm found itself left to the devices of the pasture’s fae inhabitants, a band of ruddy brownies. The capricious creatures quickly deduced that absent their human counterparts, the morning deliveries of cream would cease. After a heartfelt moment of loss, they realized that the cow penned in the barn afforded the answer to their problem. Making a new home in the barn’s hayloft, the brownies settled in and learned to utilize the farm’s clay golem. The creature now handles the manual chores and keeps out intruders while they enjoy their sudden good fortune, rubbing their swollen bellies.


This seventeen page adventure has one encounter. A new record in shovelware, I do believe! Yesirree! Seventeen pages! And one whole encounter in that! We’re lucky, I guess, it’s not forty.


There’s an abandoned farmhouse. It’s got a barn. There’s a paragraph of read-aloud that describes the farmhouse, and nothing more. There’s nothing that describes the fame, as a whole. There is, though, separate read-aloud for if you’re looking at the east or west side of the barn. So here’s that. I guess. I mean, it’s not really all that different and contributes nothing to the game. So.


What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to review? You fight one clay golem and, like, eight brownies. Maybe. If you don’t roleplay it out. That’s it. You go in to the barn and see a bunch of clay masks hanging from the ceiling. That’s a nice touch. And if you fight the brownies they could, at some point, let loose some chickens to run around at your feet. Yeah! That’s it.


You can roleplay your way out of this, making friends with the brownies. The golem only gets involved if you fight the brownies. Otherwise, you just listen to a WHOLE lots of read-aloud text, in italics of course.


I’m not fucking around here. There’s nothing in this. A level nine adventure with a clay golem. That’s it. “The first and second-floor ceilings are ribbed with arches to handle the heavier snowfalls during winter.” Woooa! The height of play, that little bit of description! TO keep the winter snowfall off the roof! I mean, it’s not winter, so.


I don’t know what to say here. The barn, outside and in, has over a page of read-aloud. None of which is very pertinent to the encounter. None of which is very evocative. The DM text tells us, like eight different times, that the brownies made/make the clay masks. What do you do here? How do you review this? “It sure does have a lots of skill checks to role play with those brownies!” You walk in, look at a mask scene, the brownies fuck with you, and maybe fight and maybe talk to them. That’s, what, two sentences in another adventure? Maybe three? What am I supposed to review? Every word written? “Well, I don’t know, maybe use the subjunctive clause here …”


One encounter. One. Maybe. Seventeen pages. The effort here is astounding. Theoden, King, what is man to do with such cruel fate? Courage Merry! Courage for our friends!


This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/481752/faces-of-clay-ose?1892600

Belvedere’s Books of Unusual Encounters

I also checked this out. It has 300 little encounter ideas. Each is about a paragraph long, so about two or three per page. The unusual part holds true. One of them has a religious procession chanting and ringing bells, with a ten year old boy being carried around who never ages. He’s a doppelganger who fund a good gig. Or the village where everyone ends every sentence with “Long live Duke Fluxion, long may his kind and benevolent rule guide and protect us all!” No sir, nothing unusual there. Slightly absurdist, or in some cases heightened reality, but not really over the top. I liked it enough to save it as a resource for my game.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/344388/belvedere-s-book-of-unusual-encounters?1892600

Posted in My Life is a Living Fucking Hell, Reviews | 14 Comments

The Curse of the Swamp

Posted on June 1, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
1st Adventures
1e
Levels 3-5

At the heart of the swamp lies the accursed tower, housing the dark artifact. Adventurers brave enough to journey into this cursed domain must confront the unholy alliance between the Sea Hag, the Wight, and the artifact itself. Their mission is to fight the encroaching darkness, unravel the artifact’s secrets, and free the land from its malevolent fate.

This thirty page adventure purports to be 1e, but is clearly solidly in the 5e era. Purple prose, long read-aloud, and a very combat oriented adventure without the horror one would like to see. Mechanistic, without the glee of D&D.

I like the artwork for the hag in the swamp on the cover. Very evocative!

And now, on to the problems!

It’s obvious that this is, at a minimum, using the 5e templates. And it’s loaded with skill checks. I’m not saying it’s a conversion, but, certainly, it’s borrowing heavily from 5e mechanics. And how much can you borrow before you are a 1e adventure in name only?

We’ve got hooks! Presented on a random table. *sigh* and none of them are anything to look at. The standard please help me stuff, very abstract, in about one sentence. Which is too bad. The core setup with an undead elf noble in a ruined tower in the swamp and a hag running around the swamp corrupting things and luring in people to feed the evil in the tower. Which, I think, leads to a good hook. If she’s got a radius then the next eclipse, or something, could widen that for a bit, threatening the town/village/whatever. I like that “tied to the land” thing better and it plays off off the two roles the two main baddies are supposed to have. I say supposed to, because the hag is hanging out in the tower also. Bleach! Another missed opportunity. 

Let’s see here, the synopsis says that the baddies will be “capturing the group of adventurers and throwing them into a nightmarish world of unimaginable dangers.” Well great. It’s one of THOSE adventures. And, I think I can imagine a great deal. 

The purple prose is not going to get much better. At one point a chick “turns towards you, revealing a countenance of beauty and an intense gaze that seems to transcend time.” Meh. This goes hand in hand with some DM advice that goes something like “The ambush is flawlessly executed, leaving the characters trapped and overwhelmed by the sheer force of the monsters. There is no chance of escape, and the adventurers will be captured and taken to The Lair of the Sea Hag, where they will confront the next stage of their perilous journey.”  Perilous text, am I right?! ?! WHyis no one laughing? Oh well. 

Also, that lair of the hag is a small hut in the swamp with no hag in it. You’re tied up with no gear. *sigh* I don’t even know what the point of this is. The opening scene is the ambush, on a coast road, where overwhelming forces capture you and stick you there for you to escape. It’s clearly fucking plot. And not the good plot, but the bad kind of play. No bueno.

Lots of read aloud here. Lots. Lengthy. WIth such phrases as “As you venture in to the atrium …” and “Suddenly, in the distance, you hear the desperate cry of a woman in distress!” I hate this shit. I want the woman crying distress, not the fucking read-aloud TELLING me she is crying in distress. At another point we’re told someone is undead. At another point the read-aloud tells us that the Wight lifts the mask to its face. Or that he lists a black skull mask to his face, a cursed artifact that emanates a palpable malevolence. Nope. Absolutely not. You’re telling people things. You want to SHOW people things.We want them to feel it, visceral. Not be told it.

Oh, and there’s several zombie encounters. At levels 3-5. Go figure. Five is an auto turn? And three is, what, a five or six? 

Nothing to see. Move along, move along. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Enjoy them hooks and that overwhelming ambush where they capture the party … for no reason.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/457631/the-curse-of-the-swamp-1e?1892600

Tanners Crossing

I also checked out Tanners Crossing, in an attempt to get my Wishlist down to zero. It has fifty bland places in a small village, that are described in a boring conversational style that is padded out, as well as a table or random travelers “Frank is looking for a wife”, thieves, wagon contents, and boring rumors. This was not the village supplement of my hopes and dreams.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/385494/tanner-s-crossing?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 10 Comments

The Slithering River

Posted on May 29, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
Sebastian Grabne
Dawnfist Games
Generic/Universal

The adventure takes place in the Viper Vale Delta where a tribe of lizardmen have stolen the sacred Singing Stone from Lushwater Village. Villagers fear the wrath of the river god and urges anyone to recover the stone. Meanwhile, the lizardmen are fighting for their lives against a family of giant toads. How will the characters solve the issues along the Slithering River?

This eighteen page adventure presents a small temple with twelve rooms. Pedestrian but not offensive, I’m bored to tears by it. “Of course it was Bryce; it’s a generic/universal adventure!” Well fuck you Mr Hot Shot sane and stable reader … I thought this one was different. 

The lizardmen steal the Singing Stone from the village. The villagers want their stone back. It turns out that the lizardmen are using it to protect themselves from some giant frogs that have just moved in. (I guess lizardmen are pussies now.) They live in a ruined temple in the jungle. Some chick in town offers to guide you there. But, first, the giant albino croc in the swamps is sick and you need to help it. Or, another dude in the tavern wants you to kill it. Oh, and the towns mill has a ghost in it; Mayor Useless would like you to do something about that.

In this review I am going to do nothing but bitch about this adventure. 

The three miniquests included, with the croc and the mill, are perfunctory. You get one column of bullet points for each that outlines the adventure. For the mill, this amounts to the banshee inside asking the party to bring her the dude in town that jilted her in to suicide and then she kills him when they do and she goes away. And the mayor is ok with this. There are, I think, like six bullets that describe this, with no real detail of an adventure at all. I would hesitate to even call this an outline, more of just an idea. No real depth, or anything approaching that at all. Is the dude a bad person, a good person, there’s a complication? Nothing like that. The croc thing provides a boon if you save the croc; then the treehugger who hired you guides you through the swamp and you could avoid a random encounter or so on the way to the lizardman temple. But that’s really it; there’s no real information to run an adventure in either of the mini’s.

The adventure has its heart in the right place, in general, but falls down in most respects when it gets to the specifics. We note, for example, that the handful of NPC’s are being written in a rather terse format. Our treehugging tracker, for example is described as a happy go lucky tracker who knows the jungle well, with a quirk that there is life in everything, even rocks. Great quirk. And the happy go lucky part also. Perhaps not quite as effective as the “three keywords” descriptions that i revel in, but you can see that the designer kind of knows what to do here, even if they are fumbling a bit.

And the descriptions are trying also. “A stilted village that straddles the Slithering River, its halves connected by a swaying bridge. A symphony of bird calls and rushing water fills the air, while wood smoke fills the nostrils” That’s not a bad start. But, also, that’s ALL there is. There’s nothing really to solidify this village over any of the others. (Callback to that kilted lover, perhaps?) There’s an offhand mention of mosquitoes in the swamp, but that’s it. This is a far cry from the kind of evocative setting that really gives the DM something to work with as they ad-lib in things. 

And, once you reach the temple, we get descriptions that are things like “A large hall with exist in all directions” which both uses a boring word, large, and tells us what the map already tells us. Or “The room appears to be an old storage room.” Again, not really great. Appears to be is just padding and we should e working towards a description in which the players think “ah, an old storage room!” rather than outright telling them this. Another room has graffiti on the wall that says “I’ve solved it! You need different blood in each goblet!” Good job putting a clue elsewhere in the dungeon, but a little too on the nose. 

And it has fallen in to the trap of bullet point mania. ALL of the descriptions come in the form of bullet points. When everything is one thing then nothing stands point, if you get my meaning. Bullet points accentuate information, but shouldn’t really be the primary form of communication. Otherwise, how, again, do you know what to focus on?

The adventure is not as bad as most generical/universals, but that’s a long way from good. While the designer is on the right track in many areas, it still comes off as an effort with a lot problems.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You can see the village, NPC’s, and mini-adventures that I spoke of. A page showing a couple of room keys would have been nice as well.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/477597/the-slithering-river?1892600

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Jungle Tomb of the Mummy Bride

Posted on May 27, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Levi Combs
Planet X Games
5e
Levels 5-7

Tales of the cursed pyramid and the sleeping tomb of the Mummy Bride have long been a traveler’s tale, passed along by wayward explorers and greedy plunderers alike. Deep within the verdant jungles of the south, amidst a Green Hell of impenetrable jungle, savage cannibals and ancient myth, lies the shattered remnants of a once-powerful civilization and the terrible gods who ruled over them. Rumors swirl of untold riches and un-plundered magic for those brave (or foolish!) enough to claim it. Will your players survive… and what will be left of them?

This 87 page adventure presents a three level jungle temple dungeon with about thirty rooms in about nineteen pages. Full of fun tropes, and leaning hard toward combat and looooong encounters.

To understand this adventure you need to understand Cannibalvision. This is the vibe, presented in a page description up front, of B movie exploitation tropes. Perhaps most readily accessible by that opening scene in the first Indiana Jones. The temple. The natives. The snake in the cockpit. “Nudity that would make a 1980’s National Geographic blush”, we are told. Or “When describing the jungle and its “lost in time” inhabitants, remember that everything in this ancient world is bigger than it should be and that goes double for the freakiness factor. Mosquitoes the size of a puppy or ridiculous swarms of giant leeches should be the norm.” There are some hits and misses in this advice. I get the vibe that the designer is trying for though, and it comes through pretty well, in total. You just have to overlook the hamfisted account of the quaint natives. And you, gentle reader, don’t go pulling your fucking holier than thou shit; you can get a vibe across without resorting to the worst of caricatures. That’s the job of the designer. 

The maps here are a bit simplistic. Just a some simple hallway lines ending in rooms without much complexity. The first level has about two thirds of the rooms with the other two being essentially perfunctory maps or just a couple of numbered encounters. A standard temple layout. Which does tend to be some of the worst dungeon map design. They tend to the simplistic.

The adventure does have some great vignettes though, referencing back to the tropes that we’re all familiar with, and done/written in an evocative manner. At one point you encounter a corpse/mummy. It is mumbling something … but can’t talk because its lips are sewn shut. Cutting them free causes him to continually mutter a slight prayer/saying. That great! It’s great imagery and somewhat scar, giving that push your luck mechanism that should always be a part of a dungeon. And the adventure does this sort of thing over and over again. Even better, there’s some design behind this. Pushing your luck here, by cutting open the mouth to hear the chant, allows you to use the prayer in another room to help bypass the danger there. That is EXACTLY what should happen. Or, in another case, a room full of statues, arms crossed in front of their chests. Triggering them causes their hands to uncover the chests, revealing holes, in which crawling hands flood out. Scarabs anyone? That’s a clear appeal to a trope and some great imagery as well.

And in many other ways the adventure falls down. Wanderers are perfunctory, with such descriptions as this one for a giant spider “ This variety of spider does not spin webs, but is very adept at jumping.” Sure. Bt also there’s no real energy to this, or the others. And while the adventure is magnificent in its specificity in some places, it also engages in the abstraction that frustrating to see “The ancient civilization that once prospered here was not completely eradicated. A savage, cannibalistic tribe of hunters remain nearby, offering up forbidden and bloody tribute to the evil gods within and echoing the decadent, terrible habits of their ancestors.” a tribe. An ancient civilization. Name names man! Give me some bloody tribute! Get in there and revel in it! And you don’t even have to use more words, just different words. The Jaffa hate the Shol’va! And it’s full of minor annoyances, such as presenting us with a step pyramid … without any indication of what you find when you climb the steps (the entrance is at the base.) I can’t imagine the playtest groups never climbed to the top.

But, the main crime here is one of verbosity. The entries are long. Three, or four to a page. A simple spear trap takes four paragraphs to describe. Four! Paragraph after paragraph of words for rooms. And much of it padded out with useless words or phrases or some backstory, and usually all of the above. Rooms APPEAR to be things. “Crouching about, gnawing on split, cracked bones and scuttling around on the floor looking for ragged scraps of flesh are 2d6 ghouls” is a great description of ghoul behaviour. But the description after it is backstory and the one before, of the room proper, full of abstractions and history. It makes it a serious pain to dig through.

I believe this, while for 5e, has its roots in DCC. And it shows. A good DCC adventure thrives on experiences and that is what this has. It’s just a chore to work with and frustrating in its inconsistencies.

This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You get to see the first two rooms, which is good, and the abstracted nature of the wanderers and rumours, as well as the Cannibalvision advice.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/259238/jungle-tomb-of-the-mummy-bride?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 11 Comments

The Grey Citadel

Posted on May 25, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nathan Douglas Paul
Frog God Games
S&W
Levels 4-5

In the city of Dun Eamon, demons roam the streets, criminals rule the night and an important local power figure has gone missing. Can your heroes unravel the clues that lead through every social element of the city–from the heights of the Grey Citadel to far below its streets and even into the hearts of its inhabitants? Or are some mysteries better left unsolved?

This one hundred page slop of garbage from the Frogs presents a four level dungeon in about forty pages with … sixty(?) rooms, as well as a short investigation, all in an overly described town/city. It’s a wordy wall of text that focuses on combat. 

Ohs Nos! A wizzo is missing! Looks like there’s a succubus hiding in the caves under the city. And a gang of thieves being controlled by her. And a anti-paladin kinda under her control. And a rival adventuring party. And chickula is a succubus so she’s got some simps. 

[I diverge: Looking at the succubus from a more nuanced perspective, there is an opportunity here for something more interesting. Thralls being played as yes men, eager to please, wanting to get laid, etc. I’m sure we’ve all met the type, either online or that dude you knew who is not around anymore cause he’s up some chicks ass. This could be mined for some really good play. It’s not gonna get anywhere near that here, but, it further solidifies my idea of a monster manual based on that kind of description, the themes of the monster and how to represent it. And no culture warring you fuckwits; I’m talking about the dudes without boundaries exhibiting unhealthy behaviors.] 

Have no fear, as soon as you step foot out of your inn you are summoned by the Lord Soliloquy, who gives you a column long read-aloud monologue describing several small things going on in the city and asking you to investigate. You wander around a massively over described city and have some timed events until you find your way in to the sewers, err, I mean caverns under the city. On level four you find Lilith and stab her. It? Whatever. 

I don’t know what to say here. It’s peak Frogs. Long read-aloud. You can drive to detroit and back before the DM finishes the read-alouds. You know all of those morons who bitch about the players being on their phones? It’s of shit like this. I’m not sitting through a fifteen minutes read-aloud. You get a couple of sentences. That’s it. 

Almost a page of text to describe the sawmill. Which has one dirty old man in it. Fuck me man, that’s a shot paragraph at best. And everything in this is like that. You get word after word and sentence after sentence of description about shit. “the corner of the area opposite the entrance are two bodies (an Ebon Union cutpurse who failed to make it back home safely one night, and a beggar who refused to inform for the Ebon Union” That’s one long section in the middle of a HUGLY long description describing a room. And then, of course, we get a detailed description of everything they carried, including the lint in their pockets. Look man, I appreciate some whimsy in shit like this, something to keep the mood a little light or add some mystery. But I don’t need a fucking victorian laundry list of the rotation of the bedlinens. For the last 23 years.

There’s little in the way of actual useful formatting to break up the text and make it usable. There are PAGES full of condensed stat blocks, for S&W, that take up, I don’t know, a fifth of a page for a stat block. In S&W? Uh huh. It’s all in a small font, in that fucked up font they use. It is Wall of text, absolutely it is.

I wonder, did anyone ever try to run this fucking adventure? Anyone at the Frogs I mean. From this booklet. Not the designer, they are too familiar with the adventure. But some rando. Did anyone ever try? Did they tell anyone that this entire thing is useless POS? It’s hard to read, hard to run, and, I think, not the most fulfilling. Unless you like hacks.

Rooms in the dungeon have names like “JUST A FUN GUY” I’m not an asshat. I enjoy some levity also. But, also, you’ve given up any opportunity to bring more context to the rooms you’re describing. To start things off with a framing that will cement everything that follows, leveraging it in to something else Instead, though, we get equipment porn. And tactics porn. Cause that’s all D&D is. Stabbing. Instead of evocative descriptions and interactivity we instead get “You are

free to come up with colorful curses such as “can eat only insects” or “can speak only in single syllables”. You fucking enjoy that. Enjoy the slop being shoveled down your throat without any thought as to what an adventure actually is and how it achieves it.

It seems clear to me that this is a conversion of a Pathfinder adventure. That’s the vibe. I don’t give a fuck how you play D&D. You wanna play Pathfinder, that’s fine. But I give a great many fucks about my basic D&D game. And this shit ain’t it. In any measure of an adventure.

This is $19 at DriveThru. Nineteen fucking dollars. For a PDF. Which might be ok, but its from the Frogs so you know your gonna get ripped off. They got the cover right, at least. The preview is six pages, the first six, showing you just a couple of overview pages. So, not really useful.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/335344/the-grey-citadel-sw?1892600

Posted in Reviews, ribbet, ribbet | 10 Comments

Night Land

Posted on May 22, 2024 by Bryce Lynch 
By Vasili Kaliman
Singing Flame
OSE
Levels 2-3

Night Land is a realm where the sun has extinguished and its ashes lay strewn across a landscape. One after one, the stars in the universe are entering their ultimate stages of life, and existence is evaporating into memory. Night Land may take place far in the future, or even in the past. It is a dream-like realm existing without plot, which referees can weave to their will.

This 48 page digest pointcrawl uses about eighteen pages to describe about seventeen points in a trippy land. It is a pointless endeavor, with no meaning behind it. To it. Just someone with some ability to invent and describe weirdness, but absolutely no understanding of how to use it or what to do with it.

For those of you hoping for some WIlliam Hope Hodgeson, as I was, you shall not find it here. The sun has gone out here, as have most of the stars, and things are a little trippy, but otherwise there is no similarity beyond the name. It is not even to be found in the long list of Inspirations up front. Awake in the Night no more …

Ok, so, you’re awake in the Night Lands. No sun. Just a pale moon (whatever …) and most of the stars have gone out. You’ve been transported there, all Porky in Wakyland with dipping water birds and other weirdness. Then Dungeonmaster shows up to explain to the party what is going on. Errr, sorry, I mean Inspiratus the Gatekeeper, who crawls out of a pit, explains shit, and then jumps in a different pit. Bottomless, presumably. We’re not off to a great start here. And I’m serious about the Porky thing. Watch the toon but turn the sky greenish black.

I sound like an asshat here, but I’m sorely disappointed. With factions like Sunmourners, the Necro Divas and the Void Engineers you’ve got some great imagery just from the names. (Evidently, Mage the Ascension factions/houses make great factions …) The Sunmourners riding around on swine. The Necro DIvas have a ladder to heaven made out of blond human hair. How the fuck yuo make this shit up? Drugs man, lots of drugs. 

The druge continue through to the descriptions. “Within a clearing, an ASH GOLEM sits feasting on LACERATED HUMANS. Geothermal features such as geysers and hot MUD POOLS are nearby. Other ASH GOLEMS are soaking in one of the pools, chanting tender MELODIES to one another. Numerous SUN SPRITES are fluttering above them, enthralled” or “Only Necro Divas can perform magic here. Divine or arcane words spoken by other casters fall to the ground as vapor, hardening in forms reflecting the meaning. These solid forms can be taken out of the hamlet, after which the spell regresses back into an ethereal substance and activates as normal.” That’s some weird ass shit and some weird ass descriptions. Flash of radiant color sparkle within, great bubbles rise to the surface of things. The designer has a penchant for writing a terse little description and coming up with some bizarre ass shit. 

And then not knowing fuck all about what to do with it.

This comes in many different forms. Let us start with the very nature of a pointcrawl. If you try to stray from the path then the DM is told “The ashes might become too thick to wade through; terrifying beasts might be heard ahead to discourage them; they might reach an escarpment too steep to scale” IE: “I didn’t care to figure this out, just hand wave it.” Or, perhaps, the weird ass use of bolding. You can see it up above, in that ash golem description. MELODIES is bolded. Are they monsters? No. Something with more detail below this description? No. And the fucking thing does this all over the place. There’s one more sentence to that description. It ends with “a convergence point for UNEXPLAINED aerial wonders”   I’m pretty certain this refers to the table, taking up the rest of the page, of “Occurrences in the sky.” Since there’s nothing else I guess this is the same as UNEXPLAINED. What, exactly, was the point of this? And I’m not harping on a misused word, this shit happens all over the place.

Not to mention the misuse of randomness. Everything is a fucking table in this. Yeah, it’s great that the wanderers are doing something ala the wonder of Dave Bowman, but beyond that EVERYTHING that can happen is a table. Why? Why make the encounter at a location random? Will you be revisiting that location time and again and need something new to happen? No? Then why? Why not, instead, take one of those fucking ideas and expand on the six words you used to instead to provide a fully formed encounter. I find this so frustrating; the mediocre, or worse, encounters here are sometimes full of good ideas. But they have no room to breathe. And it all stems from this complete lack of understanding of randomness and the role it plays. If you want an encounter then write a fucking encounter. Why fuck around with making the Tome of Adventure Design instead look like Wackyland? Just write a fucking encounter man. Instead we get little fragments, not formed at all. 

But the major sin is the lack of cohesion. This is, I think, best exemplified by the point The Fog. “Nestled within a valley is a region thickly shrouded in BLUE FOG.While most travelers pass through without incident, many go missing each year, VANISHING without a trace. They emerge several days, months, or years later — without aging — and with no sense that time has elapsed.” You get a little table for people emerging from the fog, or for you entering the fog. That’s it. It’s just pomo, weird for the sake of being weird. It lacks any connection to anything. And, I would assert, almost every encounter in this pointcrawl follows in this fashion, even those among the factions. Nothing matters.

THings end with a visit to a garden party out of Alice and The Hatter, with a figure that has blackmail material on several notable figures. None to be found in this adventure. And never to be visited again. Just like the holy travelers who have found a new form of transportation … with no other words than those being written about it. 

There’s nothing here. It’s an empty void with a patina of colour. 

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is a one page DMS page. That’s worse than fucking useless as fucking preview.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/364204/night-land?1892600

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