By Allen Farr
WinterBlights Challenge
OSR
Level ? Why the fuck would you think you deserve to know the level before you dumped some money in to the designers pocket?
Contact has been lost with the remote mountain town of Thurby Hill. Rumours say the town lies deserted and the Baroness and her retinue have fled. In reality, something sinister stalks the town and now resides in Thurby Manor. Will this foray into the wilderness be your last? Will you, like the townsfolk, get caught in the crossfire and find yourself petrified – quite literally?
This twelve page adventure features a manor/caves with about 25 rooms. You will rejoice in how generic it is, with the usual 5e plotline. Oh, wait, it’s OSR. “At least it’s not total garbage.” is the best I can come up with.
Did you read that little marketing hook?! “Will this foray in to the wilderness be your last?” Oh, please, let it be so!
So, no one has heard from this town in awhile and you’re sent (by someone I guess, it’s never made clear who) to go check it out. On the way there you see some dudes with a broken down wagon chucking a broken statue in to the river. They’ve been hired to take some statues from the town temple to a wizards tower nearby. You will never hear about the mage and his tower again, so, I hope the party doesn’t go there. You get to town. There are people there. While everything is not fine, it’s also not the case that they should not be out of contact with the rest of the world. Ok, I guess we’re ignoring that. Anyway, you go off to the local manor home, explore it to find more statues, and then in the basement find some basilisk and an evil alchemist. It’s good to see the evil alchemist trope return. Maybe it never left? It’s perhaps one of the easiest reason ever to make your baddie do something, the anti-science bent of the modern world creeping in to the D&D adventures. Anyway, it seems theBaroness let dudes out of prison to go kill basilisk in the forest. Then she did the same with the workhouses. That caused dudes family to get stones and now he’s pissed and taking it out on the former criminals who got all Wagnered out of prison. Why? Who knows.
There’s not really anything to this adventure. You wander around the manor seeing statues then make it to the basement and kill a few basiliks before killing the dude. Along the way there is a simple trap or two. “A potion vial drops on some goblin statues and turns them back to flesh!” Uh huh.Perfect. An adventure that is rooted in cause and effect and needs to explain magic. Perfect. Just perfect. Seriously, almost every room is devoid of anything interesting. Including description. “There may be a few coins sewn in to a cloak or two” or “there may be undead, to be determined by the DM,” That’s not the job of the designer. Telling the DM to do it. That’s not the job of the designer. It’s the designers job to do the work. But that, it seems, is lost on the designer.
At best, the adventure is not HORRIBLE. The room descriptions, while boring and vague, are not overly long. I mean, they don’t actually provide an evocative description, or have any interactivity beyond a fight or two, but, hey, at least they are not long and hard to scan. Walk from room to room and stab a thing or two and then the adventure is over. Yeah!
And, thus, this adventure is not total garbage. The verbosity has been kept in check. The premise is shit. There are unresolved things left everywhere for the DM to figure out, from the mage to the treasure (and the stunning lack of it in an OSR adventure). There is absolutely nothing to recommend this adventure to a DM. But, also, it doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. So, you know, for anyone else this would be four stars. For me, though, I just don’t care about it. At all.
This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. You get to see the set up, the village (what here is of it) and the outside of the manor along with some of the first room. So, decent preview. Maybe another room page would be in order.
By Frank Mills, Greg Lambert
Dueling Dragon Adventures
OSR
Levels 1-3
In the shadowed vale of Hazelmoor, Where the twisted trees and silence snore, There lies a secret, dim and deep, Of folk gone wrong and the oaths they keep. From man to man go tales of old, Of a wild god, untamed, and bold, And those who dared its name to scold, Burnt to ash, or so it’s told. So woe to thee, if thee draws near, To hear their chants and feel their fear, And witness as the beast draws near, In circles black; your soul they shear!
This twenty page adventure is an exercise in frustration. For the DM trying to run it. It’s got a bit of wicker man-ish shit in it, but not done well at all. It’ long paragraph cinematic focused garbage
The Harpers have lost contact with a dude in a town. You’re sent in to find out what has happened. Ok, so, it’s not the Harpers, with the Watchers, but its the Harpers The dude, the local innkeep, stopped sending letters to them a couple of months ago. Except when you get to the town he’s been gone for about a week, says the dude in the inn. Except somewhere else, when you find a bloody letter, he’s been gone for a a couple of days. The adventure contradicts itself several times. Likewise there’s this witchfinder on the hunt for witches and wizards to hang, burn etc. He got to town a week ago. Or maybe a couple of days ago according to another note. Except, also, when you are in the mayors house the witchfinder bursts through the door to announce himself and that hes here to burn witches. So, I guess he just got here? There’s a mute girl in this adventure, except shes not mute, she whispers to black goats. Except she also talks to you later. So, I guess shes not mute. The adventure love nothing so much as to not have its facts straight, which is going to frustrate the players to no end, but, whatever.
Whats is supposed to happen here is tat youtube to town, find the dude missing, go look at the wicker man they are constructing in the town square, follow the mute girl, look at the dudes house, get attacked by cultists, get their key and somehow learn you should go in to the forest where the key lights up and leads you to a small dungeon. WHen you come out it is suddenly night and you are surrounded by villagers. Back in town you see the witchkeeper about to be sacrificed, are attacked by villagers, and then the giant burning effigy comes to life and attacks. Maybe you untie the unpleasant witchfinder and get to work killing folk? The End.
This has got a couple of things working for it. First, the witchfinder dude is totally unpleasant and cruel. And, yet, dude IS right. The entire town ARE cultists bringing back an evil (or at best “cruelty of nature” neutral) and they really do need some murdering and rooting out of evil. Second, the adventure has a town wandering table that has at least a half dozen or so nicely creepy things in it. From a swarm of rats who turn out to be eating a human hand to the Witchfinder dude standing in the middle of the street in the rain, just staring at the inn at night, asi if just waiting for something to come out of it. There ARE some groovy things going on in that table. The table is far too big to support the adventure, given its size (three evenings of play my ass, this is couple of hours of play at best …)
The hook here is that your patron senses/fears great evil may be at hand, because innkeep dude missed sending him a letter and a barrel of ale, and you’re sent to investigate. Very 1960’s EVIIIIILLLLLL dramatic. It would have been far better if you’re sent to look in to, like, eight agents who didn’t send a letter this month. Someone fell off a horse. Someone went to see his mom, a letter got lost/stolen … a bunch of little mundane things. And THEN a Oh Yeah The Entire Town Is Evil thing.
Let’s see … no level range on the cover. Also, inside, we learn that there can be no magic users or animal people in the party. Great! Good to know AFTER You buy the adventure, I guess.
Let’s see … when you find the innkeep he dies in one round. Perfect drama, I guess. You need t get a key from the rando cultists attack. It’s covered in dist. Except its been hanging around a cultists neck. So, you know. Makes no sense.
It’s all written out in long paragraph form, like a CoC adventure. Even the little dungeon is just explained in text. It’s fucking nonsense. It’s all mixed and mashed up, I guess in “plot” order. It’s as if you were having a game tonight and needed an adventure and write down a few ideas on an index card “mute girl talks to black goat and disappears in to mist.” And, then, you expanded that in to twenty pages without really adding anything of meaning to it. It’s just long form garbage with no formatting to turn it in to the sort of reference document you need when running a game.
I did mention the end fight with 4d6 cultist villagers and a giant 8HD burning effigy, right? At level one?
With no formatting and an emphasis of forcing cinematic scenes, this is a garbage adventure
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.The preview is six pages. You just gotta intuit that this IS the adventure … everything is like those first six pages.
Nickolas Zachary Brown
Five Cataclysms
Five Cataclysms
Mid Levels
Welcome to the Gallery of Wondrous Sundries, dear Adventurers! Here you’ll find all manner of things that’ll leave you positively astounded! Items and creatures and…things from your world and many others, cursed and enchanted and bewitched and rigged for all manner of fascinating and dark purposes! Beware the Lower Galleries, for invaders have put it in a state of chaos; exhibits run amok! So have a wondrous day future exhib- er, dear visitors!
This 47 page adventure presents a museum dungeon level with about 150 rooms. It’s a funhouse-ish level, with a linear/branching design and vegetable people. Yes, you read that right. Less than I am looking for, unfortunately.
This is the museum level. Every megadungeon needs a museum level, it seems, and this is the one for the five cataclysms megadungeon. I’m usually down for some Five Cataclysms shit, but, this IS a museum level and I think I almost always loathe those. Too passive, in general, I think, as a concept. Anyway, this is the museum level. It’s divided in to two sections. The upper half is the standard museum level with robot guards, jellyfish cleaners, things to not touch, and a spectral beetle curator. The second half, behind one choke point, you’re given permission to loot as long as you kill the invaders. They are the culinars; dudes that all look like food. Yeah. Tomato berserkers and baby carrots. Those are actual entries from the wanderer table.
I don’t know what the fuck to say about this. The food people thing? The usual passivity of a museum level? I mean, you go in to room after room and see an exhibit. You can immediately get attacked by it or you can look at it and decide if you want to fuck with it or not, with little indication of if you SHOULD fuck with it or not. Room after room of this. I suppose it’s the lack of variety in the play that really gets to me. If every room is a Grimtooth then … why? Why bother?
A typical room description might be “ Upon a lectern rests a human-leather tome and beside it rests an inkwell, a quill, and a razor. The inkwell is empty, but stained with old blood.” So, pretty to the point. Not very evocative. The point is interacting with the object in the room, not the vibe. THis is, in fact, one of the better rooms. The book is written in blood, with many blank pages. FIlling the inkwell with blood causes the pages to be filled in more and more. The story of a barbarian tribe that, as you refill the inkwell, stat to overrun the world. Which actually happens in the real world. Except you probably wont know that until you exit the dungeon. Decisions only matter if you know you making the decision. Although, I guess, you can intuit whats going to happen; it is, after all, a book written in blood from an inkwell of blood you have to personally refill. Anyway, that’s the vibe of the descriptions and what a decent room interactivity looks like.
And that’s a pretty positive example. Another room has a “blue metal device”, whatever that is. No description. Ever. Great. But if you destroy it then you can take the blue spoon that ethereally therered to it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing some pop culture reference? How do you destroy a blue metal device?
Of the more serious entries we get this wandering monster: “A Statue of Death, Finger Outstretched Hostile; Glides through the gallery, attempting to poke its victim with its outstretched finger. Will retreat once a kill is secured. He has, of course, Finger of Death.
So, somewhat jokey. A little more than I prefer in my adventures. Or, perhaps, a different type of humor than I prefer in my adventures. Room descriptions that are less evocative and more … fun house? In other words, here’s a thing, do you want to fuck with it? The map doesn’t really support anything other than museum play. There’s just not enough going on here. It needs more. Factions. Sub-zones. Some things to take advantage of, in the greater context outside of a single room. I guess I’m saying that it’s a very STATIC level. And static levels are not very fun levels.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is broke. I can has sadz?
The Buried Settlement of Khandar Thung is a First Edition adventure designed for a group of 3-6 first level players. Characters can advance to level 3 if they successfully complete the adventure. Embark on an epic quest in the enigmatic village of Riverfront Dale, a place plagued by mysterious disappearances. Venture into treacherous landscapes, face ancient magic, and delve deep beneath the mountain to unveil the secrets of a long-lost buried settlement. Will you reveal the truth and save the village?
This “Thirty page” adventure features two dungeons with about 35 rooms total. It’s a VTT only adventure, requiring Roll20 to even look at. An attempt to go to new places, technically, it fails at every turn.
We are not luddites at the 3.048 meterpole. Pushing the frontiers of adventure design, trying new things, finding better ways are embraced here. I mean, it’s gotta be better than the same old second edition formula, right? Time marches on, friend, and we need to get with the meta! In 2023 it just seems like the polite thing to do is include a map and/or art handouts that can be easily uploaded and shown to your players on some VTT platform. I mean, in person is absolutely the best experience but I recognize that virtual is here to stay and thus we should do some kind of bare minimum to bring value to that platform also.
How about, though, the VTT exclusive adventures? The ones that exist no where else but on VTT? You don’t get a download, just an import in to Roll20. That’s … interesting. 1st Adventures here has one of those for us to try, for 1e. I am a bit perplexed on the No Downloads thing, since that would make it far, far easier for the DM to get an overview of the adventure and do a read-through, but, sure, I’m open minded. Which will only lead you down path in D&D adventures … this is shit.
There are four scenes, I guess. Little girl yelling for help in the forest. Then find a witch in the forest. Then go in to the caves. Then go from the caves in to the lost city. There’s supposed to be this town also. There’s a photo of it and it’s fucking hyperlinked all the fuck over the place. There is no detail of it though. We’re supposed to learn that a lot of people go missing, but, we get nothing but an artist rendition of a village. Perfect. If you can’t handle this much then your selected format isn’t worth the virtually free bits it’s composed of.
The map and DM text is on the same “page’ in the adventure. I don’t think this works well for screen shares, but whatever. The very first read-aloud in the adventure is “You walk through a green and lush valley.” Yup., It’s all in second person POV. This, alone, should be enough to condemn an adventure to hell for eternity.
Oh, wait, wait … the adventure is supposed to get you to level three. All six of you. What is that, at least 24,000gp in loot, if we assume 20,000gp per? The first caves have about 1300. Hmmm … me thinks we’re not going to hit level three in this one, kiddos.
Ok, so, full color maps that are terrible for the DM to read. They don’t even look that great, being muddled and full of useless detail. One of my favorite parts is the fonts used. The background is black. The text is white. The higlighted color is purple. SO you get a purple font on a black background. This is nigh impossible to read. Why not just make the highlight color charcoal instead?
Encounter one is “Emerge from the forest, you see a girl running towards you in desperation. She has a pale face and her eyes reflect fear and worry. “Please, help me!” she says with a trembling voice. “My older brother, Ashle, has disappeared. I don’t know what to do, please, help me.” — Yup, ‘emerge’ from the forest. And the the next lines, for the DM text say “ they can decide whether they want to help her or not. If they decide to help her.” This is what we get. This is what your money buys you. The DM text letting us know that the players can have their characters help the girl. Or not.
The witch of the forest? She’s a druid. And the fucking garbage text REFERS to her as a druid. In read-aloud. This is TERRIBLE. We DO. NOT. do this. She’s a fucking witch. She looks like a witch. Describe her lik she’s an old hag. Don’t fucking ruin the fucking mystery by telling the fucking party that shes a druid. And ESPECIALLY not in the read-aluod. Fucking christ.
Which tracks with the rest of the read-aloud, which over-reveals room details left and right, destroying the back and forth between the players and the DM that makes up the heart of D&D.
Whatever.
It wants to hyperlink. We get 300 hyperlinks to that artist rendition of the village. In the most ridiculous places. Like, when you free prisoners in the caves it hyperlinks to the photo because the village name is mentioned. Just a simple search and replace, I’m sure. And, the creatures, which are hyperlinked to stats? Well, some are. And some are not. And those that are get 5e char sheets and some weird ass textual stat block that is clearly programmatic.
THis is just fucking garbage. Fight after fight with almost no interactivity beyond that. Garbage read-aloud. No real formatting. It’s just fucking terrible. So much so that I feel the need to point out that all VTT adventures can’t possibly be as bad as this, can they?
1e my ass.
This is $7 at DriveThru. No preview, since you can’t own it unless you have a Roll20 account.
By Olav Nygard, Johan Nordinge
Cyclopean Games
Blood & Bronze
Level 1
Enter the Slave Pits, where the wretched are sent to perish. You have stepped away from the light of life-giving Shamash; your trespasses have forced the divine eye of the heavens to dismiss you into the shadows, for if you ever met his gaze again his flaming wrath would surely strike you down. But one day, maybe, you can win your freedom back: by hard work, by cunning or by blood in the Sun’s court.
This 48 page mesopotamia themed adventure features a dungeon with four levels and about 110 rooms. Think of it more as a small region or town and not a dungeon … but with dungeon-like elements. It might be groovy as a three-shot or so or someone looking for something different. Which is a weird way of me saying it’s interesting but a little unworkable?
We’re in some kind of mesopotamia land. You get Shamash and Akkadian references, but it also seems a little dark sunish outside with some ancient civ stuff also lurking around. Okey doke, got it? You’ve been chucked in to the slave pits. You live in a big central cave underground with the other slaves and get taken to work in a tunnel each morning by some guards. Who are the only people with any lights. Oh, also you’re wearing a collar that explodes when any sunlight touches it. Ok, intro is over … what do you do next?
I’m gonna have to jump around a bit for this review to make any sense. The adventure is described in four levels. The upper two are the main levels. This is where the big slave cave, tunnels out to the sunlight, guard posts, work sites and so on. Let’s call this a kind of “town.” And then, down below, are two more levels. This has a tomb in it and is more dungeon-like, at least in the way we think of traditional dungeons.
But, before the keys start, there are a coupe of pages of notes, including a How To Run This section. It suggests the adventure keys be used in four separate ways, along with some atmospheric notes and themes to go with each section. First, have the party get dumped in. Darkness, despair, exploding head slave collars, etc. Then introduce the slave camp. You finding your way in the “big city”, exploring the slave camp, being sent to work … and finding a light so you can explore the tunnels. Then you’re in the tunnels and exploring, like a more traditional dungeon, and looking for a way out. This is going to be a combination of something like “exploring the kings palace”, since there are guard posts around, and exploring a dungeon, since its dark, unknown, and does in fact have some dungeon levels and puzzles in it. Along the way, both in the slave camp and in the keys, you’ll find a decent number of puzzles (giant heads!) and NPC’s to treat with. And most of them are looking to play Let’s Make A Deal. In fact, the adventure might seem a little slower than most because of this. You both are and are not in a dungeon, and this is one of the better products that communicates that kind of vibe. (Although, I don’t think there are a lot of products that are, appropriately, going for that vibe.) You’ve got a kind of slower “town” pace, with talking to folk, with some Work Your SLave Shift stuff going on in between, while you plan and plot. For once, one of these “escape as prisoners” things really does have enough room to breathe and let the players grow and explore. Most of these sorts of things handle the escape in the very first room; it’s really just an excuse to strip the characters of their gear. But this puts them in an environment large enough, and complex enough, for them to plan and work their little schemes. Sneaking off to explore. Trying to get food and supplies. Making deals with unsavoury folk. And this is all great. If you think of this like a kind of “escape the slum” town adventure then you’ve got the right mindset. Kind of. I mean, you are still slaves.
Our room descriptions are decent, for the most part. Nothing great but solid enough to support the adventure at hand. Things like: “Empty. Damp walls gleaming with moisture. A rotten rope and some splintered logs on the stony and debris-covered floor hint at the original structure.”
There’s really quite a bit going on here and a lot of good encounters/situations to help support the basic premise of the play. The mesopotamia theme is gonna be rough to work in, and continue on with. It’s meant to be the first game, so, starting with nothing, in the slave pits, is not exactly a gimp. And, in fact, the degree of agency the players have over their characters situations is really quite interesting. A little more on guard bribes, or general slave uprisings, or the like might be in order, since it’s VERY light in this regard. But, if you see the players as loners and/or the general populace clearly not in to going all spartacus, then you’ve got a solid little adventure for continued play. Every resource found is a treasure … with real treasures being used to bribe people for more of the basics. And it does this all without going too far down the path of torture porn. Just enough to bring the setting home and makes those simple supplies worthwhile while not so much as to make it a grind or eye rolling.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The eighteen page preview shows you the intro sections, a few keys, and the very good map of level one. You should be able to infer things from there.
10 years ago, a catastrophic earthquake struck a stoic keep on the borderlands of human civilization. Three days later, the keep was attacked from within. How, no one knows. The few survivors say that daemon men from under the ground breached from within the fortress itself, and butchered all who stood against them, leaving the heroic Castellan and his guard unable to mount an effective defense. A decade later, the eldest brother of the Castellan is to be named a Baron, and has sent out a decree; Anyone who can bring him his fallen brother’s sword in one month’s time will receive 200 Silver, and a hectare of land in his Barony.
This eight page dungeon presents two levels of a certain ruined Keep in a Borderlands location. Great evocative writing, good formatting, and enough interactivity at level one to not make me mad. It also gets purple in places and could use a little more focus when it comes to the monster descriptions.
This is a duel version adventure, for OSE and Shadowdark. And while duel stated would normally indicate something bad, and while I have been on a poor run with Shadowdark, it is also true that the better Shadowdark adventures DO in fact channel a decent OSR vibe. This is also the first adventure by a new designer. And it’s got three stars on DriveThru. New rule: five star drivethru products and three star products are actually pretty ok. Seriously, whoever gave this tree stars is a fuck. Sure, in some perfect world then this might be a perfectly average adventure. But that’s a world in which 95% of shit don’t suck.
So, ye olde keep is hit by an earthquake and then some grimlocks tunnel up from below and wipe everyone out. Not grimlocks, in name, but they are grimlocks. Primitive humans, they eat your adrenal glands. What’s that western movie, the one with the grimlock cannibals? Bone Hatchet or something like that? Yeah, that’s what we’ve got here. Some sub-human cannibals.
And let me tell you, dude brings the vibe for that. “The sound of a rabbit screaming a
death curdle. The Ruk beyond break off its legs at the small joints and drink it’s terrified blood.” Ouchies! This sort of thing is done a couple of times. It does a decent job of communicating the vibe without explicitly appealing to gire. It also, I think, would motivate the players. And player motivation is THE BEST way to get the people at the table engaged. In one room we’ve got a bandit, quietly weeping, hanging from a pillar in chains: “Significant amount of face (including eyes) and chunks of legs and hands eaten. Wants only to die. Begs. Name is Marsor. Asks that Hana in Last Tree be told that he loved her dearly but never said. If Hana is with the expedition she will weep heartily for him, say sweet goodbyes, and end him herself. “ Yeah, it’s kind of tropey. But, tropes exist because they are good when done well, and I think this is done well. It’s visceral, again without, IMO, being gory. There’s this appeal to human emotion also, real human things, which helps ground it. That’s some grim fucking shit right there, even without your (potential) hireling doing her thing. Fuck those dudes! Time to homo sapien those shits! Note also, that this is not drug out in a paragraph or two. It gets in, stabs you in the liver and gets out again. That’s how you fucking do it!
There are spots where the writing is quite good. Look, we’re not talking Paris Review, but, also, this is a fucking D&D adventure, so almost anyuthing not cringy will work. There’s a little village, the new last outpost of civilization, included. The village of Last Tree. It has the last living real oak tree before things turn to scrub oaks. The village overview ends with “the tree died last year.” Sweeeett!
The inn gets the following description. I’m also including the first potential hireling:: “Hot meals, warm ale, cool stone floor, ice cold bar wench. A beautiful stone fireplace; not used. Cheap board (3 GP) and drink (3 SP), expensive food (3 GP). Thugs for Hire (Bandit stats): Half a share of treasure. Tinal -Neutral-Tattooed, slaps back, in deep gambling debt. RP: Untrustworthy Jason Mamoa.” Terse. Good description. For both the inn and the NPC. Gives us a vibe and lets the DM run with it. That’s what the fuck a good description should do. Nary a wasted word. And just about every single description in this adventure is done that way. Written to give a good vibe in a minimal amount of words. Formatting contributes pretty well to this. Bolding, bullets, whitespace all combine for something that is pretty easy to read. Not quite rock star levels but still really really good without falling in to the OSE minimalism format.
A few notes. There is an overland portion that is rather week. Kind of like a six hex hex crawl. It’s doing nothing. And, it has a rift that could be confused for the valley in B2. The Unfathomable Crevasse. It’s directly between the ruins and the town, so it invites exploration … with none really given or much of a description. The entire overland is much like that and is not effective.
The text gets quite purple in places. The fortress to the north looms dejectedly. Or, a wall that looms above the ruins of the keep, silent, fuming, mourning despair. Uh huh. I’m down for some looming but not the mourning and fuming and dejectedly shit is a little much. I get it, we’re trying to inject that despair and forlorn vibe. But that ain’t it.
There’s also an issue with the monsters. We’ve got a wight, some “spirits” and the Rak baddies. The wight, the former Castellan, could use a good solid description. He’s gonna maybe be a central part of the adventure. (Note, he’s not really focused on in the adventure, but, his presence is there and he can be used to advantage or encountered as a baddie … good focus there without going on and on.) Same for the Rak. Bring those evocative descriptions to them. And, there’s a decent number of “spirits” in the adventure. Some are just apparitions, but some, it seems, are hostile. Telling which is which is not always easy. And, I assume that “spirit” is a creature in the OSE manual? This could be done much better.
Finally, you’re there to get the Castellans old sword. A symbol of power for the new baron. You’re returning it to a priest.wise woman in the town, the representative of the baron. When you get back to town with the sword and go see her she MIGHT be a little off. Cause she’s an imposter now, her body buried under the floorboards. “This person is an impostor, a Cultist of Ramlaat, whose influence grows in the region.” Noice! Good complication when returning to town for something that most folk would just write off as a pretext.
Really good effort here. I might point to some order of battle issues, the overland, a little sparseness in the interactivity as reason to go No Regerts. Soe may be due to the size, or lack thereof, of the adventure. But, really, quite good.
By Jeff Simpson
Buddyscott Entertainment
B/X
Levels 4-6
The Steaming Sea, full of exotic adventure beckons! Ancient temples overflow with treasure, curses surface from the depths of time. Serve the most wealthy of all Sultans and win his favour by journeying on a Golden Voyage!
This 49 page island crawl has about 25 populated hexes and a few mini-dungeons as well as the main event: twentish rooms on two levels populated by an evil wizard whos captured the sultans daughter. It’s minimally keyed with a lot of fetch quests.
I wish I had a copy of Isle of Dread to compare this to. Instead of steaming jungles you are sailing the seas. You see, the sultans kid has been taken and you’re out sailing trying to find the island shes on. You wander about until you find the right one. Predictably … it’s on the far edge of the map. 🙂 Anyway, along the way you meet a host of people who all kind of want you to do something. “Hey man, go sprinkle some perfume on the idol in the nearby temple and I’ll give you this purple key.” Ok, not quite that bad; it’s actually a magic horn. But, there’s a lot of that going on. Sometimes you get something like “you see a giant birds nest on a mountain peak” and then a couple of hexes of description of the island while you try to get to it. Cause, I guess, that’s where you keep a princess?
As that implies, a lot of this adventure appears somewhat disconnected from itself. You go some place, it’s unlikely that an evil wizard with skeletons lives there with a kidnapped chick, and you move on to the next place. The locations don’t really lead one to another, except in a few isolated cases. This does mimic the basic plot of, say, The Odyssey, but that is literature and this is a D&D adventure. Approaching it more like a hex crawl with a “oh yeah, if you find the princess then that would be cool also” would be a little more in line with what the adventure has going on. That’s not the hook, but that’s what the adventure is.
I’m not exactly enamored with this. It’s not a terrible thing, but, also, it doesn’t really have much going for it. The descriptions are minimal. “A desiccated corpse stands perfectly still against the north wall.” or “This chapel to Set is kept by a spectre that takes the shape of a sha.” or “Storage: A storage room contains several boxes of bath salts” These tend to tell us what hte room is but not HOW the rooms is. Bedroom: This room is a bedroom. It has a bed. There is a minotaur.” That’s only a slight exaggeration of the adventure. Maybe add “it is crying” and you’ll have the completed room and/or hex. We don’t really have the situations that make up a good crawl, dungeon or hex, and certainly don’t have the descriptions that might make the locations come alive for the DM.
The adventure opens with that “It’s up to the DM to bring the adventure to life” Gygax quote. My boundless optimism corrupted to cynicism knows no bounds. This is the realm of making excuses. We all have access to the monster tables. “Just roll on them and make an adventure!” does not an adventure make. And if we can accept that is not enough then we have accepted that some degree of effort is required … and thus our discussion can take us there. The purpose of the designer is to put things together for the DM to make their lives easier. At the table running it, from a pedestrian view, but, also, to inspire them to run it. To bring the rooms and encounters to life. To do things that get the players engaged in the adventure THROUGH the DM. This is the value we seem in a published adventure. This MUST be the value we seek, for everything else is already present in the random tables in the basic handbooks.
If you’re an adventure writer you gotta figure this shit out man. I know you want a Fantastic Voyage, ala The Oddyssey. And that means you need some scope … which I think always means size. But that’s a lot of work and a lot of pages. You gotta really buckle down and figure out how to pack that scope in your page count and in to your number of encounters. How to make them more than minimal and capture the dynamism that all good adventures bring to the table.
For remember: everything every published in the history of the world is now available to be run in the system of your choice. How does one compete with this? The effort is non-trivial.
By Ben Thompson
99c Adventures
OSR ... and 5e ...
Level 3
Deep in the unforgiving bayous of Chaumont, a weathered journal found among the bones of a long-forgotten officer hints at solving a tantalizing, decades-old mystery — the final fate of the notorious Bloodsail Rovers. The lost treasure of these cruel pirates was rumored to be immense… but perhaps some ghosts are best left undisturbed. Twenty years ago, a vicious group of pirates known as the Bloodsail Rovers terrorized the coasts and inlets of the Kingdom of Chaumont. Under the command of the fearsome Captain Jacques de la Rouge Beausoleil, these pirates earned their fame with the daring capture of the royal galleon Navarette, which at the time was carrying a huge payload of gold and gems from the Frontierlands… as well as a mysterious artifact imbued with powerful dark magic. The Bloodsail Rovers disappeared from history not long after capturing the Navarette, and were never heard from again. No coins from the galleon’s treasure hold were ever recovered, leading to wild speculations ranging from deadly sea monster attacks to buried treasure hoards on remote desert islands. Perhaps there was no Navarette at all, and the entire thing was just an old fisherman’s tale, made up to fill childrens’ imaginations with dreams of fantastical wealth. Our heroes are about to discover the truth.
His 62 page adventure features a ruined swamp fort with nineteen rooms. Long italics, overwritten DM text. First person narrative. Mary Sue. It’s all in here, waiting for you. To mourn the death of modern world. Down progress and up the wild tyrannies of barbarism!
Ohs Nos! Pirates! Better go get em! Or, maybe, you find a coin from a long lost pirate treasure. Anyway, you travel through the swamp to a little town. Inside you pick up Mary Sue and go to an abandoned fort five days away. Grrr! Bugbear pirates! Better kill em! Ohs Nos! Then a pirate skeleton comes to life and attacks! Yeah! Adventure!
This resembles the late 1e and 2e era, with massive amounts of DMs text and a loose plot line to hang shit off of. As you travel towards the swamp town you see a rowboat sailoverhead, full of skeletons. Turns out there’s a necromancer and a swamp giant fighting in the swamp up ahead, on the way to the town. I guess he lives, like, 80 feet from the town? There’s no scale on the map. Anyway, whatever, there are eight or so encounters on the way to the town, the majority somehow related to this necromancer/giant fight. No doubt because “a rowboat in the sky full of skeletons!” would be cool.
Inside the town you get attacked by the local tough. Your group of level threes is attacked by the local tough. Your group of level threes. It is at this point that the text reminds the DM to remind the players that killing people in the streets is illegal in this town. Uh huh. In a dark alley. Behind the inn. With that being the only real building in town. Uh huh. Don’t worry though, the Mary Sue show sup to save you. A LONG text block describes the bard in the inn and how everyone masturbates over him. He’s a level six illusionist. A level six. Hanging out in the inn. SInging like a bard. Saving your ass. And ready to join your party! So, yeah, the Mary Sue is coming along! How fun for all the players!
The text, both the read-aloud AND the DM text, are in first person. “You pick your way through the swamp …” or “He’s the leader of the group that’s going to try and beat you up in section 2-2 …” or “He tells you that the guild …” This is so fucking basic, in terms of adventure writing, that it is beyond me how it still shows up in 2023. Oh, the read-aloud. The LONG read-aloud. That no one will pay attention to. That is in italics, so it’s hard to fucking read. That’s full of “it appears to be” padded out shit. And that goes for the DM text also. Full of appears to be. And long. LOoooooonnngggggg. Like, two pages for a simple encounter long. “What appears to be a lone man … You mean, a lone man?
You want some XP? How about 750gp worth of it. That’s your loot.
This thing is just garbage, front to back. 63 pages for twenty encounters in the dungeon. Fucking christ. It amazes me that people do this shit. Put together a whole adventure. Manage to get it all down on paper. Make it look like one of those fancy pants formats and even stick some fucking art in it. But there is no attempt to actually figure out how to do it well. How to avoid the most common mistakes. It’s the same shit now for forty fucking years. Pople thinking this is how you do it.
This is $1 at DriveThru. You get to see the first seven pages, which includes the first few wilderness encounters on the way to the town. So, you do get to see the quality of the writing. Good preview.
By Andrew Walter
Forgotten Oubliette of Forgetfulness
OSR
Levels 2-3
Run the Gantlet of Farradok! Imprisoned by a sadistic fire giant and stripped of their weapons and equipment, the adventuring party must escape from the fiery labyrinths beneath his court – but it won’t be easy. His three evil champions and retinue of hobgoblins have also joined the game…
This 43 page adventure presents a dungeon with two levels and about forty rooms. It’s one of thos e”you’ve been captured and stripped of your shit and have to escape” dungeons, with the usual puzzles, traps, and forced combats. And no treasure. Or decent formatting. Or evocative descriptions of any type. Enjoy!
Have I already done the camping thing? Whatever … if I come to you and say we’re going camping this weekend, what do you think of? Are we backpacking in? Are we parking the RV in the middle of a football field lot and watching grandkids bike with 600 members of the family? Hanging out with a bunch of college kids around a fire getting drunk? Driving off down a forest road to a secluded spot to pitch a tent? Once of those definitions is valid for a lot of different people. Three’s no right answer, just as there’s no one true way to play and enjoy D&D. Which is a mighty suspicious way to open a D&D adventure review …
Good thing I control the narrative then, isn’t it? I mean, I’m the one buying this garbage and taking the time out to look at it and then write about it. And, fortunately for my sanity, I have standards and know which fucking definition is “correct.” The adventure, in the introduction, proudly proclaims that it “rejects imagined product and design ‘standards’” Wunderbar! I’m down for this shit! Smash the patriarchy! It’s 2023! Let’s push the boundaries of what we can do, examine the base assumptions we make about D&D adventures, modernize it while keeping the core of what makes them the magic that they are! We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard! Oh, wait .. it’s used here as an excuse to not try at all …
You’ve been captured by a fire giant and his 120 hobgoblin minions. You’re stripped of your weapons, armor, and gear and dropped down in the dungeon to escape. There are three champions that chase you, all Running Man without Richard Dawson or the RUnning Man Home Game. A bunch of forced combats at level two, how nice! And, the adventure also notes, with perhaps some pride, that there is little to no treasure … the reward is getting out alive. Forced combats and no treasure for leveling … I wonder if we are really playing OD&D? It is not an OD&D experience, that’s for sure. The bad old days of killer DM’s and killer dungeons. Worry not though, you get to the roll on the “Hobgoblin Punishment table, so, also, you can start with 2/3hp! Or any of a host of other further gimps. DId I mention that the dungeon is slammed full of 2HD creatures? And 3HD creatures? And a smattering of 5HD creatures? And you without gear, weapons, or armor, tsk tsk tsk …
You are charged with “Find the blue key to escape!” Seriously. Find the blue key. Once you do find it and get back to the exit gate you get to answer a riddle and each time you answer wrong someone else gets turned to stone. Did I mention the LARGE number of insta-death shit in this? The fickle hand of fate is in full force in this one!
The adventure is El Senor Grimtooth forward. Witness: “As soon as the Blue Key is placed in the lock, a magical force yanks it out before it can be turned and flings it into the hole in the ceiling. The door by which the party entered slams shut and locks, and the holes in the walls begin filling the room with scalding water.” Doors slamming shut are always the sign of quality. There’s no real puzzle here. You just get to figure out how to open the locked doors.
And thus it goes. Wander from room to room. Face a Grimtooth puzzle/trap. Engage in a forced combat. Have a wanderer roll every turn.
Evocative descriptions are essentially nonexistent, being maybe a word or two of description at most. “Warm foetid water flows at a swift pace” That’s it. The formatting is VERY double-spaced. There is A LOT of white space between sections of text. So much so that it is hard to follow. (I have this fucking fight at work at all the time; the devs LUV putting in WIDE line breaks, and don’t seem to notice the cognitive dissonance this causes by breaking a grouping effect. Prob because they are clueless to the information that is being grouped.) Weird bolding of shit is everywhere. I’m sure there must be some reason to it, but I can’t tell. Room numbers? Monsters? Secret doors? Equipment? I don’t know what else.
Anyway, yet another deathtrap dungeon, this one a challenge, with an escape the dungeon without shit motif.
This is $2.50 at DriveThru. You get the entire thing as a preview, so, very good preview! Well done! At least there’s a foundation to build on …
This is a 68 page zine, issue number eleven in the Echoes from Fomalhaut series. It contains three principal items: the tomb of a dead elf lord, a massive hex crawl, and an abbey of law ripe for plundering. All three are fine examples of adventures, but not hitting the high peaks of expectations. I’m going to briefly cover the hex crawl and abbey and then look at the elven tomb a little more. Lovers of The Judges Guild will be very happy with this, and, frankly, it has everything a good zone should.
The hex crawl makes up about thirty of the digest pages, covering mostly some larger islands. It feels like there may be 75 to a hundred of the hexes populated, so, it’s quite dense. The hexes are generally fine examples of well done situations. A village, subject to sea raiders, preyed upon by a ogre who claims his nature is claimed, and a vampire nearby … I wonder if thats the ghost-like spirit that leads them to safety during times of trouble? Gotta keep the wolves away from the sheep, after all. “1 SMED: Cages with charred skeletons and stakes decorate the burned ruins of a pirate stronghold. 6 wraiths haunt the place, offering their final treasure map to any who would first carry out their vengeance against their slayers in Poicette. “ This is a good example of a hex. A little bit of description in the way of charred skeletons and stakes. This leads to the six wraiths, standing in their dread countenance, burned, decaying? And their silent charge to right their wrong. That’s what a good description does … it leads you to more than the words on the page. And the brief descriptions here, ranging from a few sentences to a paragraph to almost a page in some instances, offer that kind of description again and again. A brief idea, a situation, that can be expanded upon and, most importantly, inspires the DM to expand on it. THis is the kind of thing that makes you want to run it … which is what ALL adventures should do.
The abbey is a fine example of a lawful dungeon. We all know evil is ripe for murder hobo home invasions. And druids are assholes always worthy of being butchered for their fucked up plans and views. Most parties would side with law. But, in a world in which you’re just trying to grow enough turnips for the winter and not get eaten by wolves … well, Law can be just as bad as Chaos. And, remember, all that wealth in the Keep in B2? Hex crawling has always felt a little more morally ambiguous anyway. We’ve got the town outside of the abbey, with a healthy criminal element. And then the above board abbey descriptions. And then The Winter Tunnels underneath … a secret way in and more dungeoncrawly than the abbey proper. Lots of great descriptions in this and things to put together. A room with records tells us of a Brother who went missing in the Dragon Cave baths. Which perhaps causes the party to investigate those areas further. Which leads down down to goblin town. Err, I mean, the mineral caves proper, and their giant lizards. The town and abbey aboveground get as much effort as the tunnels, but, I might have appreciated a little more of an overview of the town. It’s there, but a little lite, IMO. Also, I find these parts tough to run the way I like to run them as this is written. I need a little more of an overview to get the vibe and get the juices running. It’s present, in the keys, but you have to kind of put it together a little more than I think you should have to. But, still, this is an excellent excellent little place. Perfect for that hex crawl.
Elven Grave – Levels 5-7
In ages past, there were none as great as the elven lords, and none as strong as their hosts. Some 600 years ago, Narion, Son of the Pure Fire was the last reflection of this greatness, and his alliance with the race of men the last great undertaking of elvenkind. United against the arctic empire of Sark, the Twelve Kingdoms were saved at a great price; but Narion lay among the dead, and dead were most of his warriors also, a loss from which the elven kingdoms never recovered. The body of the lord was laid to rest somewhere in the mountains in a beautiful marble tomb, and carefully hidden with magic. Only elven songs recorded the way so pilgrims might visit in remembrance of the great gift Narion and his kin gave in sacrifice. But that was long ago, and the pilgrims have stopped coming, while a few copies of the elven songbooks have found the way to the archives and libraries of men, where they await the discovery of treasure-seekers. What shall happen to the Elven Grave is not in question – the only uncertainty is “Who gets there first.”
This is, unsurprisingly, a little elven tomb. It’s got about twenty rooms and takes about five pages to describe. The map is a decent little affair with some variety to it, the sort of which you don’t usually see in something of this size.
This is not a bad adventure and is better than the dreck regularly produced for the OSR. But, it’s also not a surprisingly good adventure. In some ways a victim of his own success … “I’m sorry Mr Nabokov, your new work is just not as good as Lolita …” I think, though, that several issues drive me in this direction. There is this lack of melancholy in this. Not that, perhaps, we need to hit it overly hard, but the concept of a high elven lord, fallen in battle, and now lying a tomb, once in splendor and now waterlogged, is not hit very hard. Adding to this is a bit of plundering by barbarians. THis should be a fine concept to add some more Barbarians at the Gates issues. And while these elements are present, the adventure doesn’t really drive them home much more than putting the words to the page. This is, I suspect , somewhat related to the Always On tomb descriptions. We get this up front “… cream-white marble and alabaster with frequent floral ornamentation. However, seeping groundwater and the decay of centuries have marred the tomb’s beauty with dirt, fallen stones, cracks, and unstable construction. The walls are darkened with damp grime, and the floor is covered with a slurry of mud and small debris” That’s not bad, by itself, but you need to keep turning back to it for inspiration. This keeps the individual entries short, but then also the tomb loses some charm. A problem yet to be solved in the OSR, I think.
But, also, great ideas in this. The entrance, next to a glacier lake: “someone who looks on the lake surface from the correct angle can see a splendid marble archway on the opposite shore, and steep white marble stairs disappearing in the darkness”. That should be more than suitable for an entrance to the mythic underworld! We get suitable hints, by way of inscriptions on the wall, on how to solve a couple of puzzles and such. And, as a high point, a room with a pool of water. Shadows swirl within, staying there unless you touch the water. Also, there’s fire trap in the room … perhaps leading to someone plunging in to the water to cool off? And setting off the shadow, almost like a double trap. The shadows are supposed to be the remains of the drowned … which perhaps could have used a little more, a word or two more to bring the drowned shadows to life more, so to speak.
Descriptions range from “Scratching noises come from within the chained sarcophagus, which
contains a mummy.” to the more elaborate “ 3. The pavilion-grave of Olorme: Cool air in this vaulted 30’ crypt. The grave of OLORME (Rune Name) rests under a canopy. The source of the cold is a colony of brown mould (1 Hp/turn outside the canopy and 1d8 Hp/r if freed, grows rapidly from heat) covering the sarcophagus in the manner of thick fabric.” Those are, I think, typical examples. Perhaps a little too minimalistic. You can see, in the brown mold example, a more typical Melan writing where he inserts the mechanics in to the description to form a situation. The formatting, here, gets a little wonky and detracts a bit, specifically in this example but in a few other places as well. A little too busy.
A decent tomb adventure and better than most!
This is $6.50 at DriveThru. The ten page preview will show you most of the elven tomb. That hex crawl is great!
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