The Order of the New Dawn

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Rustic Ink
Self Published
Shadowdark & "OSR"
Levels: 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Wizards Scroll 2

Posted on March 15, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Paul Carden, Mitchell Woods
Ethereal Games
S&W
Level ??

The Delverne Windmill — An adventure about a missing windmill and a monstrous wyrm

The Hermitage of the Seven Stars — An adventure about an errie chapel in an alternate universe where everything goes wrong – to the adventurers

The Wizards Scroll is a zine with a little over a hundred pages in it. Inside are the usual zine articles about ziney things. Tables, locales, levels caps, blah blah blah. And two adventures. We do adventures here.

The Delverne Windmill is about a twelve page adventure, in the usual digest format. It advertises itself as a short investigation and crawl. Let us look deeply within ourselves and ask What Do Those Words Mean To Me? The correct answer, of course, is that old Brycy Bryce wouldn’t mention it if it weren’t a problem.  This sort of disconnect about expectations, a continual theme, is prevalent in several areas in this adventure. The village has some maps. As well as an inn. As well as the hole in the ground where the missing windmill was. But, actually, are they maps? I guess, technically, they fulfill that purpose, at least one anyway, has a scale on it. But the others? These are art pieces. You don’t need a map. There is nothing about the location of A relative to B in the village that requires a map. Or the inn, where nothing really happens. Or the hole in the ground where the windmill used to be. Nothing happens. So why provide a map? 

And, just what is an investigation? That is the first part of the adventure. The investigation. But there isn’t one. I mean, the windmill is gone and there’s a hole in the ground. The investigation, in this context, is talking to some people in the inn, if you want to.  Yup. Heard a noise. Saw some blue lights. And a dude that thinks its a hoax. Is that an investigation? That sounds like a rumor table strung out to a few pages. There is no conspiracy. There is nothing to discover, nothing to help you. Just, a hole in the ground with some blue mist in it. Gotcha.

On to the hole in the ground! The crawl has four rooms. In a line. Your entrance room. The ghoul lair. The Blue crystal room. And then the dragons lair. (No Daphne) The ghoul lair has a some ghouls. Kind of. They aren’t undead so I guess you can’t turn them? But they paralyze? Whatever. You kill some and then keep having wandering encounters with them until you make the forty foot trek in to the blue crystal room. The adventure ends when you pull the millstone from the dragons mouth, where it is stuck. Or kill it, I guess. Then it crawls down a hole and goes away. You get 200gp. Good job.

Theres no real investigation. There’s no real crawl. There are no really evocative descriptions. Interactivity? I guess? You can pull the stone out of the dragons mouth only for it to immediately slink away? So, yes? “? unique interactivity” means less when there are three rooms. Anyway, twelve pages to do this? This is like a one page adventure. 

The Hermitage of the Seven Stars is a bit different though. This has seventeen rooms in a kind of palace. You start on the second floor and, having been transported to the SOMEPLACE ELSE where it resides, you can throw yourself down to the roofs, domes, etc, of the first by nature of the lower gravity. Also, you can die out there so don’t fuck around too much. 

Thinking about this and it implies. There is a consideration of the environment. You are on the second floor. You can get to the roofs, etc of the first by going outside. It does have lower gravity and you can bounce away. And there is that whole oxygen situation to deal with after awhile when you are outside/far enough away. Is it a trap? Is it a puzzle? It’s an environmental condition? You can take advantage of it? It’s entirely more integrated in to the entire adventure than a simple effect is. And a lot of this adventure is written that way. These integrated puzzles/traps/situations. 

The setup is very terse handled. You’re in a chapel in the woods for whatever pretext theDM has. There’s a giant bell and if two people ring it then everyone in the chapel get transported to the palace/”dungeon.” It’s the home/waste hope of a sect and is rumored to have all of the future knowledge of the world in it, and thusly and oracle for the party to explore to get that answer that they’ve always wanted about the words for that wand/person/etc.

The appeal to this one, as I mentioned earlier, is the kind of integrated room things. Room two has a statue in a kind of giant bell jar filled with reddish liquid that bubbles some when a living person gets close to it. And the statue has pearl eyes. You all know how much I like something obvious going on that tempts the party to fuck around. Breaking the glass releases the sonic creature inside. And, also, you can remove the statues hand to find a compartment with a potion bottle inside. Three things, in one small vignette. Another room, a kind of tower, exists in a kind of ethereal state that you can’t interact with … until you find things deeper inside the dungeon to help you. Another room has a furnace, a foundry, with the furnace filled with a kind of translucent jelly. When free it makes a beeline for a magic-user to attack, and, otherwise, crawls outside and throws itself down a pit. We need to imagine Sisyphus happy, I guess. It’s doing a really good on the rooms without them appearing to be obvious puzzle/set piece rooms. 

The descriptions are not top notch at all and could be pumped up quite a bit to make them more evocative. A hard edit to reduce word count and add some bolding (non is really present) and other formatting to call attention to things and enable better scanning would be in order also. Creatures such as “irradiated monk” and “Amoebal warrior” don’t really get a decent description either. And I do love a terse but evocative monster description. I want the party feeling something when they show up and appreciate a little nudge from the designer in that direction so I’m not just left out in the open to come up with something totally on my own … that’s what I think I’m paying for anyway.

I’m inclined to No Regert this one based on the rooms and situations in that second adventure alone. The adventuring challenges are interesting and in places deep. Just know that you have more than little work to do to bring the place to life fully, all on your own.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is eleven pages of the zine, but, as Pay What You Want, you can see the entire thing and judge.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499639/the-wizard-s-scroll-ii?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 15 Comments

Blood for the Mosquito God

Posted on March 12, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Charles Smith
Charles Smith Games
OSE
Levels 1-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Miraculous Mousy Metamorphosis

Posted on March 10, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Paul Hoeffler
The Alchemical Press
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is absolutely nothing to see here. 

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


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

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

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

Masters of the Elements

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Mauricio Rosel, Robert Pech
ND Hobbies
5e
Levels ... 2?

Quest in the Spirit World. A short adventure in which the adventurers must visit the plane of spirits to seek elemental weapons to face a demon. Shadows in the forbidden temple. In this ninja-alike adventure, a group of adventurers must rescue a boy, using stealth and subterfuge. Seven Temples. The adventurers will traverse each of the seven temples in a frantic race against a dragon to reach the summit and confront it.

This 24 page booklet presents three adventures in an asian setting. The one I was interested in had a decent idea, but didn’t really execute it in a decent manner. It’s too abstracted to run correctly, being an outline expanded to several pages.

This thing popped up in the OSR section. I had no interest in “A short adventure in which the adventurers must visit the plane of spirits to seek elemental weapons to face a demon.” Short. Spirit world. That’s not gonna be good. Then there was “The adventurers will traverse each of the seven temples in a frantic race against a dragon to reach the summit and confront it.”  Frantic race against time? Let me guess, there are guardians who want to test me in order to pass? No thanks.  [ED: yes: “This temple is guarded by a Couatl, who has sworn not to let anyone unworthy pass. To prove their worth”]  How about “In this ninja-alike adventure, a group of adventurers must rescue a boy, using stealth and subterfuge.” Fuck yeah! I love stealth and subterfuge! 

Turns out though, upon cracking said booklet, the jokes on me. All of the adventures have that vague mashed up asian setting. And, it’s not OSR, it’s 5e, they just slapped it in to the OSR section to drum up a few more sales. And, you’re the baddies, I’m pretty sure. The gods created a ninja order to behead and slit throats of the samurai rulers. .GOV has finally won the shadow war, wiping out the ninja and taking the last ninja, a boy I guess, as prisoner. The god of wind recruits you to go break the boy out of the fortress hes being held in. You get to make all stealth checks automatically if you are at half speed  and he gives out four ninja items: a smoke bomb, 2 shuriken, a set of climbing claws and something else I can’t be bothered to remember. 

Ignoring all of my pretextual bullshit, the heart of this is going to be the stealth/subterfuge. You need Ways in. You need guard schedules and patrol routes and all of that stuff. And it LOOKS like you get that. There is a map. The map does have little notations on it for the guards. It shows the viewing angles of the dudes in the watchtowers. It has a little dashed line for the guards to walk on patrol. There’s even a pretty obvious “sewer entrance” and a little note about a merchant shipment coming to sneak in on. 

The merchant is, though, a good example. You’re outside, casing the joint. Maybe you’ve come up with a plan. And then a merchant shows up that you can pile in to the back of his wagon. That is an impromptu action. You might plan, in town. You might arrange for it, or you might figure out when the wagon shows up. But, as a random event it clashes with the otherwise stealth/subterfuge nature of the adventure. If a guard is alerted then you should kill the guard and/or have an opportunity to silence him, etc. If he AUTO-ALTERS the compound then that’s no fun. It clashes with what otherwise the vibe is. (I’m not saying that auto-alert happens here, it’s just an example of clashing vibes.) We have these buildings in fortress compound, but no real floormaps or detailed keys for them. The entire operation is really getting and finding the appropriate building, amongst three or four, that the prisoner is on. (The samurai are overwhelming opponents, so a general alert means game over, though the party could, if they cooperate, take down one.) “The party must avoid being discovered at all costs. If they are discovered, Jirou will be executed as soon as the alarm is given” This is the condition that the party is trying to avoid. And if we’re ok with that, as an outcome, then we could run this as given. 

But the data presented isn’t really enough to run that. It’s not arranged in such a way to really give an opportunity for a stealth mission to happen. You just have to kind of be hand-wavey because of the amount, or lack, of specificity given in the area of this. I guess I am just unhappy with the lack of floorplans and issues for the party to handle. You just have to, very simply, say that someone is not looking so you can sneak past them. It doesn’t feel like the information presented is “designed” for this, though it is present in some way. 

Bah! I’m having a hard time here. There is little to no subterfuge opportunities in the adventure, especially supported through the text. The stealth aspects feel not well supported, as if it is handwaved a bit too much for me … which doesn’t seem right given the lookout views, the guard patrol paths, etc. It just doesn’t seem to match the more nuanced and explicit needs of support that a stealth infiltration, an explicit stealth infiltration, would seem to call for.

I’m at a loss. I’m not satisfied, but having a very hard time to articulate it. I’ve come back to this three times now and I still cant. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview shows you a few pages of the first four room dungeon. WHich is enough to get an idea of that specific adventure and the general writing style. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/482305/dungeon-snap-masters-of-the-elements?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 1 Comment

The Unfortunate Brotherhood

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Pitiless as Bronze Productions
Self Published
OSR
Level 1

While on pilgrimage to the winter faire at Saint Lewiston, the outcasts become entangled in the fates of a decaying monastic order and an otherworldly creature that might be their salvation, or the last rusty iron nail in their coffin. Now with inter-player paranoia and inquisitors!

This 36 page adventure is laid out in seven scenes revolving around the discovery of a wounded angel and that discoveries intersection with The Inquisition. An interesting concept that tries to do a sandbox in a scene based format. And wordy for what it is.

THis is based off a hex encounter in the Mythic North hex crawl for Outcast Silver Raiders. That encounter is a dude that has an angel under a tarp in his wagon. It mashes that up with some information about The Inquisition of the Black Bishop also found in the hex crawl. Thus, this adventure is doing what all hex crawl refs do: taking something tha party just stumbled across and riffing on it with something else that the party has stumbled across.

The pretext here is that the party is on the road travelling to someplace else. First, they meet a group of villagers, fellow travellers, who are injured. Turns out they got hit by bandits. Also turns out that they are feeling a village that the Inquisition just hit. We have, here, hints of a couple of upcoming encounters. And, sure enough, the very next encounter is with some bandits attacking a small group of monks. Saving them can give you a leg up when you hit encounter three, the Monastery of Sabriel. They are devoted the the angel Sabriel, who has not graced them with blessings in quite some time. Blah blah blah. Whatever. Next up we meet a cheery peasant on the road with a wagon and a tarp in the back … and an angel under it, in a very weakened state. This is the last normal encounter. From here you get to decide what to do. Take the angel? Help the dude to sell it? Free it? Kill it? The adventure could go several different places, literally. Next up the party meets a scout for the Inquisition, and then in the final encounter the Inquisition proper. They could meet the party on the road, or at the monastery, or in a town, or … you get the idea. Whatever the party decided to do, with the angel, they will then meet the scout and then the main Inquisition group. The DM needs to riff in these two encounters with the choices the party made earlier on what to do.

If we consider the opening scenes the hook, the pretext, then the closing scenes, with the angel and the Inquisition, aer the payoff. And it is here that the adventure shows its cracks. It is trying to represent a kind of natural flow and progression through the use of its scene based formatting. But the manner in which it does this is clumsy. It is, essentially, trying to say that the party should encounter the angel, and encounter the scout and encounter the main force. But, also, it doesn’t know what the party has decided to do prior to this. So while the opening scenes are rather static, you meet this person at this place doing this thing, the final ones must be more free flowing and open to being riffed on. This means the adventure, in the “scenes” must resort to something akin to “if the party is here then the baddies do this thing and if they are doing this then they are doing this” and so on. During this, in spite of the page count” we lose the specificity that brings an adventure life. 

I think perhaps that this shows the promise of a more traditional way to write a sandboxy adventure. Viewing a lot of this as hooks, we focus on motivations and goals, quirks and relationships. Toss in a few problems to get the party moving around. We then have a much more open ended adventure with the DM using the resources provided to respond to the party, perhaps with the benefit of a timelines of escalations. The DM responds to the parties actions by the counter actions of the various parties, be they the inquisition or a disgruntled peasant or monks or whatever. 

I’m not morally opposed to scene based adventures. They tend to not be my thing, in general, but I recognize that many folks play this way. The issue here is the mixing of the scene based format with what is, inherently, a more open ended set of potentials from the party and reactions from the other NPC’s. Confusing is not the word for it, but the if/thens grow tedious in a world where a more opened ended format would have suited it better. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, near the end. It doesn’t really give you much of an idea of what you’ll be buying, so, bad preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/510894/the-unfortunate-brotherhood-outcast-silver-raiders?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 7 Comments

Halls of the Hell Hunter

Posted on March 3, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Xapur
Self Published
OSE
Level: NONE

A long time ago, a legendary hunter lived in the forest near a small village. He was ruthless and cruel, and delighted in tracking and killing dangerous foes and monsters. No, you have to find a missing son. Will you dare explore the Halls of the Hell Hunter?

This six page adventure uses about two pages to describe eighteen rooms in a tomb. It relies on abstracted descriptions and a minimalism style. This causes it to come off as a rather generic and unmemorable adventure with little to recommend. 

On the plus side, the entries are terse. No hunting for information here …

This is an EASL adventure, so I get to be an asshat here, making assumptions about someone whose english is far far better than any of the other languages I speak. But, also, the adventure borders on being illegible., Looking at the cover, the text on it is in white, with a black outline, on a blue background. It just looks blurry to me. And continuing inside, I’m not sure what it is, the kerning maybe? In any event it, also, looks somewhat blurry to me. Like the letters are bleeding in to each other. And then the map. We’re trying to do some fancy shit there with the grid and so on. But again it comes off small and hard to read. And the key numbers are in a light blue font with a light stroke weight. You’ll be hunting to find them on the map. Legibility is, perhaps, the very first thing on the adventure checklist. In order to run the adventure you have to actually be able to READ the adventure. I guess people think that the font they select is going to look cool. I don’t know. Maybe? But also it has to be readable and in far too many cases I see a font choice result in legibility issues and I seldom if ever think that the unusual font choice is cool, outside of a handout. I’m sure folks will argue that you can have an aesthetically pleasing thing to look at and be legible. And I’m sure that’s a correct statement. Just as I’m sure that if you’re picking a cool font you have deluded yourself in to thinking that its perfectly legible. 

On to the background and intro! The setup here is that a legendary hunter lived in a forest near a small village. Hmmm, sound familiar? Yes, the marketing blurb is the intro. It’s repeated, of course, but go read it again. It is abstracted, yes? Exactly like one would expect in a marketing blurb. Except the actual background is just as abstracted.  There is ZERO specificity here, even of the piss poor variety found in most adventures. “A mother for the village needs help: her young son has disappeared in the forest, searching for the famous tomb. The party has a mission: find the kid…”  That’s your specificity. There is NOTHING here more specific than that in all of the background or intro. Hmmm, no, “legendary hunter” was killed by a green dragon. It’s irrelevant, but, also, I guess it is specific. 

Lets hit the room keys, shall we? “The body of a young male human lies on the ground. He has been killed by a stone arrow. A mother will cry.” Well, props, I guess, for putting the pretext in the first room of the dungeon. But, how about: “A room dedicated to Dralena, the goddess of the hunt. The walls are decorated with decrepit tapestries of rural scenes and wild animals (stags, boars, foxes…).” This is not sterling writing. I’m not even sure what style to call it. Minimalistic, I guess. 

There’s an almost obsessive lack of detail of detail here. “In the altar, a hidden cache contains a magical hunter’s dagger.” What kind of magic dagger/ What does it do? No idea. And no stats of ANY kind are present AT ALL. Not even Ye Old Skill Check DC 16. “Weakened stalactites can fall from the ceiling, especially if there is noise in the vicinity.” 

These are all concepts. Its what you might jot down in the middle of the night, or on the drive to work, to remind you of an idea to expand upon further. But they are not expanded upon. The abstracted idea, the conceptual, barely that, is all that is described.

Specificity is the soul of the narrative. Don’t drone on in detail, but instead carefully select the important bits to be  specific about. That’s what brings lifes to an adventure. 

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and shows you the map and some room keys, so, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/512435/halls-of-the-hell-hunter?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 13 Comments

The Attack on Arden

Posted on March 1, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Velociyrx
Self Published
5e?
Level 0

The citizens of Arden don’t know it when they get up the morning that the adventure starts, but they are about to have a very, very bad day.  One that will push them to their limits, and maybe a bit beyond, even. One that will put them on the path to becoming heroes.  If they can rise to the challenge.  If they can survive. Are you ready for your first day of school at the Hero Academy?  The curriculum is hard and unforgiving, but the rewards…well, the rewards can be sublime. May fortune find you, and smile!

This 41 page funnel adventure details the attack on a village by a group of 400 invaders. It is one of the worst adventures I have ever seen. Rambling, devoid of structure, and with little to do. What can I say, it was in the OSR section.

I am at a loss. I don’t know what to say. I’m not allowed to be a shit. I’m not allowed to fucking hate life and all that lives. Can I rant and rave and cuss and throw a fit? No. I have to be supportive. I have to say things like Falls short of their vision and crap like that. Somehow, we are expected to have a giant steaming pile of shit shoved down our throats and say Thank You Please More! You can’t actually not like anything, you can’t have fucking standards. And thus ut always was and alway will be. 

Hermes Trismegistus as an old level one wizard of mine who was 98 and taught in a magic school.And  he killed three giant rats over his career with a magic missile in the schools basement  hence his name. And he blew out this kids throat once with a magic missile and got no end of shit for killing a kid even though the kids eyes were glowing black and he was JUST about to start unleashing hellfire. You remember all of those long, old, boring, let me tell you about my character stories that you have had to sit through politely until you can find an excuse to be somewhere else, like cleaning out the pig styes? This is that, except in DM “Let me tell you about my home game” form. It drones on and one and it interjects pages of This Is What Happened In My Game, in detail!, at various points in the text. Pages that have little to no use, even as examples, in the game you might be running from this adventure text. 

I don’t know how to describe this. 400 dudes attack the town of 200 people. They knock down the two guard towers first thing. At some point some PC gets two arrows fired at them. At another point two attackers show up for the party to fight. Then you can roll up to six times to make forays in to town to save people and gather supplies. These are just Stealth Checks, with no other roleplaying or situations. Oh, Oh, there is this: “Mrs. Miller appears out of the roiling smoke to one of the search parties. She is bloody and crying. Her two youngest children are missing and Mr. Miller died looking for them.” That is the closest, and the ONLY place, in this adventure where there is any specificity to a situation. Seriously. That’s it. The abstracted stealth checks are the adventure. There is NOTHING else. The fucking Miller shit is what the adventure should be. Situations. Difficult decisions. The designer prompting the DM to scenes and situations and greatness. 

But not here. Forty pages to get a couple of encounters. Somehow it has both no details and an overabundance of them at the same time, but nothing gameable. It’s as if I write an adventur ein the style of this blog, all stream of consciousness with long rambling sections, little formatting, and what formatting I do throw in I ignore and mix in other shit. 

A page of italics r4ead-aloud to start the adventure. A LONG and involved process of character creation, that attaches the players to their characters through a long rich fully developed backstory. It’s a fucking funnel man! A funnel is designed to NOT do that, You make some dudes and GO, you’re not attached. You get attached through their deeds. 

“This is very open ended and when this adventure begins, I have no way of knowing

where your players have placed their characters” The entire adventure is like this. “Meanwhile, if any of your characters have situated themselves around Miller’s Pond, they’ll be pursued.” Why would I be around millers pond? There’s nothing special about this place.  “If several of the characters started in or near the tavern, their action economy should overwhelm these two, which will give the characters an important win, plus 2 Gambesons, 2 Spears, and 2 daggers for the effort. That’s potentially huge.”

“This…this right here is how heroes are ultimately made. Not born, made.” Jesus h fucking Christ. Fantasy Heartbreaker anyone? You have to suffer through page after page of this smugness. Of this mastabatory fantasy of their home game world. I pulled section after section of text from this to quote, but it’s just too much.

There is no interactivity to speak of. What little there is is abstracted to a die roll. There is no specificity; the miller pond thing is BY FAR the only specific situation in this. It is long, conversational, rambling, overly invested in itself. Bloodymage, at least, didn’t drone on for forty pages. Information is mixed in willy nilly, with little structure to find things. It talks AT the DM instead of supporting them in their game. It’s the difference between Ulysses and an operation manual. I’m not doing a Finnigans Wake thing here, I need details to operate the thing. 

I really can’t say enough bad things about this. It does … nothing? But it manages to do it in such a smug Holier Than Thou way. I really cannot stand this. It’s an outline of an outline, that is then abstracted. While still somehow dumping TONS of detail that has absolutely no bearing on anything while telling you how great it is. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/511510/a1-the-attack-on-arden?1892600

Posted in No, seriously, the worst EVAR?, Reviews | 21 Comments

The Lions of Tell-Arn

Posted on February 26, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nikoline
Self Published
OSR
"Low to Mid Levels"

West of Kurhan, south of Makkalet, the burial-mound of Tell-Arn rises like a mountain over the fells. For a thousand years the Hyrkossi interred their kings, chiefs, and hetmen in its depths. But for fifty winters none have dared; the Lion of Tell-Arn slays any brave enough to enter. Now it ranges wider, beyond the tell, and threatens the village of Lambsblood nested in its shadow. The chiefs know why; they know a reckoning has come.

This 44 page adventure uses about twentyish pages to describe a two level burial complex with about fifty rooms in it. There is no “ancient tomb” syndrome here; the place is alive with a riot of things going on and interactivity, while keeping the encounters focused on game play. It is deceptively complex and intricate, ala the best of the original era third party supplements. 

Yeah, that’s right. I said it. Thracia. This isn’t Thracia. But man, it may be one of the closest things I’ve seen that gives off a Thracia vibe. It feels intricate and subtle. A weirdly mixed degree of hazards and interactivity. That odd OD&D feeling of not quite ever knowing what is going on, as a player, and yet having a lot laid out in front of you. “Why is there a greek temple here behind this waterfall, in the middle of Laos?” 

We’ve got these towns and village sout on the steppe. Vaguely tribal, herdsmen. There’s a larger town/city to the north and south, a few days away, and Lambsblood, the little village you are in. Nearby by is Tell-Arn, a burial place for the kings of old. And, now, stalking about, is The Lion, killing freely. There is a little history section in this (isn’t there always?) but it does a decent job of laying down a framing in a length that is not too onerous. It sets the stage for a three or so dead (ish) warlords of varying ages in the Tell, as well as The Ancients (err, “Middlemen”) and so on. What this results in the faction play kind of thing where the party could use use the inhabitants various quirks to exploit others. Thus we get a little sheet for each level that says things like “? The Victors of Makkalet observe the living, attack the Black Host, ignore the ancient dead, flee wights.” or “Baboons eat centipedes, climb on the statues, flee the roc, lions, and the undead.” 

Ok, so, a kind of burial mound with a hole in the side. And, in the grand tradition of decent adventures, there’s something on top. In this case, two rocs. Uh huh. And, sometimes, on the wanderers table, they dive in to the dirt and rip huge chunks out as if they are trying to get inside, leaving new holes open to the sky (at least on the first level.) Man oh man! I love the entire top. Nest, eggs, barren tree, a silver mask hanging in it. Yeah, a silver mask. Vaguely avian. And it causes confusion in the rocs and they mostly leave you alone. Nd fear in the lions inside the complex, and so on. A vaguely “this is a roc” kind of a reaction without going full on overboard with it. It’s great! This kind of situation, with a giant mostly barren mesa top, two big threats on it. Some obvious treasure … this is all great. It tempts you. It dares you. Go ahead fuckwit, push your luck. It’s not an explicit set piece but yet it is expansive enough to BREATHE and allow the party to plot and scheme. 

And this place is FULL of high HD creatures. And low hit die creatures. Like, a pesudo-lich, and then also the cultural hero of he tribesmen that doesn’t really know they are dead, and a fucking hydra. And, I don’t know, half a dozen others? Do not go gently dear adventurers! Use that guile and wit and those feet to work around folks and even, perhaps, make alliances. 

The formatting is decent, bullets, bolding of “the most important thing in the room” and whitespace to help organize topics. This, combined with the number of elements to most rooms, puts us at four per page. It’s quite he dense work with very little padding, again noting the degree of interactivity that a lot of the rooms have. Multiple things per room. 

Looking at this random room, “A doorway of rough stone. Two massive iron skulls are placed in niches either side of the threshold. If wights or the Lion are near, they begin chattering.” Window dressing, but pretty good window dressing. Certainly sets a vibe! I’m not enamored with the if/then, but that’s just knee-jerking since its not really used like an if/then. Still, though … Anyway, continuing on the next room “An articulated skeletal warrior, sat astride a skeletal horse. Raised on a bier. Wields a gold-hooped spear (BITER); both figures are held together with gold wire (50c rider, 100c horse).” Decent little scene. Maybe a little light on the adjectives and mood, but it still does a nice job. Moving to the first bullet: “? If a light is shone within, the shadows of 6 unseen figures are cast on the walls. These are 6 ghosts of faithful companions to a chief killed at Makka.” That’s a pretty freaky effect! Shadows kind of used as shadows … without being the real shadows of something! Anyway, further bullets explain that if you can speak to them in their language  they announce they are the protectors of blah blah blah and it becomes a safe rest site that they defend, while another tells us that if you wear the GOLDEN MASK then they kneel to the wearer and can be commanded, in part of the complex anyway. Nifty! It all works together, it all makes sense. There are some logical consequences to the creatures being there. And this adventure does that over and over again. There are reasons for things and you can take advantage of that. It doesn’t drop in fucking backstory to explain why they are there and just say THEY ATTACK! It doesn’t drop in backstory and then let you win them over. No, it concentrates on the Win Them Over without droning on or engaging in padding. 

Speaking of, let me drop these here “… a dead tomb-robber lies slumped against it [ed: a wall with doorway], head caved in; its arm is crushed between the south wall” Head caved in! Yeah! Arms stuck under a wall?! Yeah! Or, how about “… a tomb-robber sits cradling his head, rocking back and forth; his stomach has been torn open and his fat-slick guts spill out onto his knees” Game over man! This is a wight about to pop up. Wonderful handling of the undead. Wonderful introduction of real life shit to bring home the situation. These have a visceral feel to them …. Imagine what would happen if the language were pumped up just a bit more? 

Lots going on here, secret doors to bust through, things to fuck with, things to talk to, situations to maneuver around and perhaps ake advantage of, secrets to discover and exploit. A nice variety. All supported by a pretty decent map with room for an adventure to breathe in.

So, there are some things wrong also. I mentioned the language could be a bit punchier. And some of the rooms can really drag on a bit. This is the hidden depth of some adventures, but when you take it too far it starts to drag. This, combined with the specifics of the formatting, can do a bit of a wall of text, but in bullet and indent form. I suspect it has something to do with the justification (as in typesetting), but I’m not sure. 

It gets a little cumbersome also in the more NPC things. They are described as having who they are, what they know, what they don’t know, what they want, what they dont want, and what they can do. This sounds good, but it works out to be a bit cumbersome as you dig through it. There has to be a better way, perhaps by bolding a few keywords in each section or something. The adventure also leaves out a few things. WHile I was happy to see the treasure for scraping off the bronze, in the above example, with values, there are other parts where things seem to be missed. The entrance to the complex is flanked by two crumbling statues. Which is the last we hear of the statues. It’s obvious the party will investigate them. A couple of more words would have solved that, either in the initial description or in a follow up. IE/: you don’t have to follow up with another section on some throw-away statues, but, also, the initial description should then e enough. “Herdsmen soldier statues” or some such. Just enough for theZDM to further riff on.

Nice consequences at the end. For some of the Middlemen artifacts/magic items: “and make no secret of it, they are sought after, envied, and cursed from Kurhan to the south. Merchant-houses and wizards seek to steal their prize, and wars are fought for a single blade of Middleman steel.” Yupperoo buckeroo! You get a ring of wishes then people gonna want it, even the mostly kind-hearted ones. 

I like this. Decent map for play. Good complex with a lot going on without it feeling unnatural. Varied opponent levels, including the Lion-monster, to put some pressures on imaginative and fast play. Great treasure and magic items, varied, that don’t feel like book items but fit in naturally. I really kind of like this and want to run it! All from a first time designer who got inspiration from that Skerples starter adventure. If you grow up with good examples you produce good examples? I don’t know man, but I’ll take this one, for sure.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. A fucking dollar? Absolutely. The preview is thirteen pages, more than enough to get a look at several of the keys. Good preview. I would encourage you check out at least the preview to get an idea of what is going on. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/510134/the-lions-of-tell-arn-part-i?1892600

Posted in Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 16 Comments

Everybody Rots

Posted on February 24, 2025 by Bryce Lynch 
By Scott Southard
Self Published
5e
Levels 2-9

Boozy, smokey, fatalistic, cheap, lonely, bloody, melodramatic, effervescent, nodding off, oneiric, seedy, urban, muddy, Ink-stained, shrouded, fetid, a sour gut, a shadow, a lie behind a lie, and one wrong move from ending up another corpse in another alley on another list at the bottom of a stack of scrolls on the lawman’s desk, fighting for his life against another hangover. Everybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure, populated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out. It can be used as a standalone adventure or plugged into an existing campaign.

This fifty page city adventures/setting has a couple of good turns of phrase, but it is so overwhelming up its own ass that its hard to make out what is ging on here. Figuratively and literally, as it turns out since the layout is an abomination and the text a confusing mess of postmodernism.

The email the email, what what the email, the email the email, what what the email. Hard to type with those boxing gloves on, eh? “Dear Bryce, I love you and want to have millions and millions of your babies” Ok, it’s starting off right. “I wrote a 5e adventure on itch” Oh. Ok. joy. “Everybody Rots is a fantasy western noir adventure” oh my god. No! NOOO!!!!  “populated with a city full of life. Maybe too much life. Characters with emotions, behaviors, and motivations that dictate the way the action shakes out.” Well, ok, I admit. That sucked me in. That’s the line that got me and got you your “5e western fantasy noir on itch” adventure review. 

This is supposed to be a kind of city/town setting, for the party to do things in between adventures. And then also it has a few adventures in it, a kind of overarching plot to keep things together and give some semblance of continuity. But it fails in very nearly every way. It does, however, sometimes deliver on its promise of delivering things that seem real. These are some of the best parts of the book, setting and adventures. Some dealers are moving a drug shipment to a nearby town to expand operations and some druggies find out. They dig a trench across the road, cover it, and then hide out to hit the shipment. And ill get fucking slaughtered, but if the party intercedes for some reason and they survive they swear they are taking the money leaving this shithole of a city. And there’s a 10% chance that they do actually do that. This rings true in such a depressing way and I’m sure many of you can relate. When the adventure is doing things like this its doing a good job. But they are far too infrequent. Not that everyone has to be dripping with this shit, but the motivations for the various people, and they way they interact with others, is far too staid. There is, at times, some throwaway shit that is a chuckle. You find a murder weapon covered in blood in an alley, as a rando event. Or a big thunderclap that makes kids and dogs run around scared. A parrot in a cage squawking DONT MAKE ME DO IT over and over again. There’s nothing more to these, they are just rando things to find/happen. 

And that is one of the major problems. It’s just weird for the sake of being weird. The parrot, the murder weapon (how non-specific!) … they just dont do anything. It’s just window dressing. There’s not springboard there. “Stuck in the lord mayors wife” or something. Thats a situation. And the town should have situations not possessions.  “A group of 4 or 5 goblins and elves are furiously making out. Pants are at ankles and dresses are pulled above waists. Hands are everywhere and the slurps and moans are burned into your brain” This comes off as trying to be clever and witty instead of being clever and witty. And why do I care?Ohhh! It’s a booby! How risque! There’s nothing to any of this.

And the adventures included, and even the overall plotline, just isn’t there. A little girls cat is missing and you need to go in to a basement to find it. And there are giant rats there! Seriously. Rats in a basement. Yeah, sure, mutant rats. Whatever. It’s rats in the basement. For an 11YO. I just knifed an orphan girl and cut out her kidney to sell for drugs, but, sure, I guess it’s time to go find a little kids cat. In a basement with giant rats. There’s a fucking disconnect here. Help a hooker? Sure. Help the old woman that gives us stale bread? Sure. Even maybe the kid lures marks to an alley for us to roll and then we help her. But THIS?! There’s a disconnect here between the vibe the designer wants to portray and the content that the designer is providing. And I’m not even gonna touch the “giant rats in a basement” trope. 

This disconnect runs through it. Arasaka corporation, the drug pushers, don’t come off as Arasaka. The cult of decay faction doesn’t come off like a cult of decay. Even the newly arrived cops are not really copping well. All of the situations and vignettes that would turn this in to good shit isn’t present. In spite of their being reams of information about them … that isn’t really gameable. Theres a focus here on How Clever Am I instead of gameable stuff. Too much randomness for its own sake instead of communicating the vibe through the thighs on the table as appropriate. The city, for all its descriptions and little weirdness, seems lifeless. A sin beyond compare for a town supplement. ABD, it’s a pretty idiosyncratic lace, being on the literal edge of the world (whats that place in Discworld?) You’ll need to fit that in.

And then theres the text. The physical text and layout and font and colors chosen. Ths thing is a fucking nightmare. White text on black background. Weird drippy overlays. Weird font and angles. I don’t see how you can get any mor illegible than this without it actually being illegible. I mean, can you technically read it? Yes, in the same way you can read something that is written backwards. Information retrieval. Headaches from it. It’s just Willlldddd that this was the decision made to aid gameplay. By making it hard to use. Your book can look cool and edgy and still be easy to use and legible. It is one of the worst put together books, for usability, I have ever seen … while still having, I guess, words that you can actually read if you try just a little. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. The same pages on itch are NOT indicative of the actual pages.

There’s not enough actual situations. There’s not enough people with real motivations. The main town plot has not enough specificity in building tension. It’s illegible. Which is all too bad cause I like a good town supplement and the promise of a seedy one that more mimicked how real life is was quite intriguing. 

https://scottsouthard.itch.io/everybody-rots

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 3 Comments