tenfootpole.org

By Stone Fable
Stone Fable LTD
5e
Level Fucking 3

As you enter the town, you notice the hurried movement and averted eyes of the people passing you on the street, as if they are anxious to get away from something. When you turn into the main village square you see that a man is approaching anyone that passes him, pleading with them about something you are too far away to hear the details of. The other townspeople avoid his gaze and shrug him off with apologetic gestures, leaving him to sink to his knees, completely alone in the light drizzling rain except for a singular magpie which watches him from their perch on the town sign. As you watch, you see this man turn and notice you all. With a sudden sense of purpose he picks himself up and hurries towards you, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. himself up and hurries towards you, clasping his hands together as if in prayer. “Please, you have to help me. He’s not come home and the woods aren’t safe.” This man is Jay Andre.

This 125 page adventure uses about forty pages to present a linear plot over four sessions. It falls down in almost every way possible, including the standard “two encounters per session” trap. The list of what is wrong here is endless. All the handouts in the world, which this is heavy on, won’t save you if the adventure is an exercise in illogic and tedium.

And we can start with the fucking level range. It’s not on the cover. It’s not on the back. It’s not on the product description. It’s buried on page twelve. Page twelve. How the fuck do you handle something like this? Just throw money against the wall and hope you are buying the level range you need? It’s like people have never bought an adventure before. And that level range? It’s in two paragraphs of text that takes up about a third of a page. For a fucking level range! The padding and exposition is strong with this one!

But I should back up a bit. You wander in to town and there’s a dude in the streets that needs help. You wander in to the forest and find his partners dead body after two fights. Then you’re sent in to burn down a tree that is the source of the towns evil. Then the friendly druid tells you what is going on in session three. Session four has you fighting some townfolk for some reason and then going to mutant lake to stop the big bad, returning to town a hero. It turns out that AI, yes, that AI, was behind it the entire time.. You’re gonna have the standard two encounters in sessions. 

Hang on, hang on. I know I’m all over the place in this review, but, check out this art piece! I like it! It’s in the marketing and I like it so much that I bought this garbage adventure based off of it. I think it does a great job of complimenting the adventure, helping to communicate the vibe and tone. The Horror of a hybrid creature made up of woodland animals. It’s also, by far, the only art piece in the adventure that does this. So I guess the lesson is to have one good art piece and put it in the marketing! “Starring Bruce Willis!” 

You have to wade through a lot of text until you get to adventure synopsis. Nothing on the front cover, nothing on the back cover, nothing in the marketing. Again, it starts on page twelve. (And, just for the record, there are not eleven blank pages in front of it. The first SEVEN pages are are total blank page, content, credit nonsense, with the “Words to a DM” on page eight. Then you’ve got four pages of garbage advice to DM on how to DM crap, and, then, on page twelve, you finally get a level range and an adventure summary. And, then, the Synopsys is really just a preamble, followed by a brief summary of the four “episodes.” These are column long summaries which essentially say “have to combats.” There’s a challenge for you: condense this adventure down in to three pages, with each episode being a column long. Ha! 

You like italics? You like fucked up fonts? You’re in luck! Page or page and a haf long text blocks in some fucked up italics like font. Did you even TRY to read the text you put in your own adventure? Did you hand it to someone else and watch them struggle? And yet you STILL put it in the adventure? Mind you, this isn’t players handouts. I’m all for burning the tea-soaked italics note before we bandit to the players. But not the DM. The DM is running the fucking adventure. We make things easy for the DM. And i want to be clear, I’m just, to this point, bitching about the absurd decision to use italics for this. I have not yet begun to bitch about the fact that these can be a page long , or a page and a half long. A fuckign exposition dump. Nobody wants to listen to your fucking exposition dump. They want to play D&D. No, D&D does not mean excitement every moment. But what it does mean is an interaction, a back and for the between the players and the DM and each other. And listening to the DM drone on and on, even if they could readthe fucking font, for a page and a half is not the definition of back and forth interactivity. Time to wordle! Then you’ve lost me; I’m moving on to the Bee after that. And not stopping till I queen. It’s better than being bored to death. Oh, wait, the game has restarted because the read aloud is finally done? Oh, another one? People are not on their phones at the fucking table because the adventure is engaging. 

We start with the party rolling in to a small village in a clearing in the woods. There’s a distraught person in the streets begging for help. Their husband has gone missing. People walk by and ignore them. The local militia is no help. They are busy serving and protecting. This is not the way people operate. You help your neighbors. Even in the big city. Even the homeless in the abandoned house next door are gonna look out for you. Yeh, some petty shit happen, but nothing serious. And those are transients. This is the local grain merchant that the adventure tells us is trusted, respected, and a pillar of the community. No shit, words to that effect. And they are being ignored by the people passing them in the street while they break down in the middle of it. It doesn’t matter that you wrote a page about it. It’s unrealistic. A page for a handwave pretext or a sentence for a handwave pretext, it’s still a shitty pretext. At least if it’s a sentence we don’t have to wade through it. There’s another situation with a tree in the forest that needs to be burnt down. There’s a bunch of kindling already stacked around it ready to light. A huge amount. But the militia, who did it, heard a sound and got scared and didn’t light it. Seriously? If you don’t light the bonfire then the militia captain sends out a squad to light it. Yup. It’s pointless. It turns out that the militia MAY be up to something, but, still, it begs the question why, with good motives or bad, they spent so much time collecting wood. It’s absurd. And the grain merchant, the person breaking down in the street, they didn’t even try to go looking for their husband? None of these people deserve the fucking parties help. The best adventures treat people like real people, with real feelings and real flaws. This is nothing more than a long drawn out basic and formulaic hack job of a pretext.

And then there are the audio logs. Yes, audio logs. Yes, this is fantasy. There are “recording stones.” This smacks of sphere of annihilation garbage disposals. It’s the only appeal to this garbage magical society bs. Anyway, diaries are the worst form of exposition. I don’t care if you get to listen to an included mp3. It’s lazy shit. It means that you could not convey the information another way and you had to diary/audio log it. The fucking recording stones are just laying around, waiting for the party to listen to the backstory. “On any roll, the players find a recording stone lying on the floor by the foot of the work bench, as if dropped in a hurry. This stone is Trevor Andre’s Audio Log 1.” Fun. What if you don’t take the hook and help the person in the street? “This magpie will fly overhead and drop a recording stone in front of the players, which contains Trevor Andre’s Audio Log 1” So, sure, the party has to want to play D&D tonight, so they need to bite. But, also, perhaps we can be a little less hamhanded about it? Integrate diary contents in to an adventure, through actions and environment, don’t fucking exposition dump, be it in read-aloud, diaries, audio logs, or any other mechanism. “The party wakes to a magpie tapping on the window, holding an audio log in its beak.” I hate my life.

Did I mention the read-aloud is all second person and leans towards the purple side? “… he farmland and as you near the damp, cool woods you feel the bite of insects as they try and make a meal of your blood.” Joy.This isn’t good writing. Good writing makes the players feel a certain way, tha they are being feased upon. Good writing doesn’t use second person. These are both absolute sins when it comes to read-aloud. Keep it short, no more than a few sentences. Communicate a vibe, but don’t TELL the party what they are feeling or doing. And make it fucking legible!

Useful info to bookmark/have open:
– Kermit Krimes Character (p.70)
– Sigrid Ironspirit Character (p.67)
– Sergeant Percival Bevis Ironforger Character (p.72)
– Captain Jossur Character (p.74)

My initial thought, when seeing this, was to complain that the characters were not right next to each other. You know, put all of the relevant NPC’s right next to each other in the text so you don’t have to go flipping back and forth. It’s not that you have to flip, it’s tat you have other characters in the middle of these. But I was wrong. They are next to each other. It’s just that each NPC is three fucking pages long. I swear. This fucking shit. You don’t need a three page long NPC. We don’t need to know trivia about them, involved backstories that have nothing to do with the adventure. We just need to know the shit necessary to run the adventure. A vibe, a quirk or to, a want or need or motivation. Then move the fuck on. More isn’t better. More is worse. It makes it impossible to locate what you DO need. “Rich, detailed NPC’s” is HUGE

 Red flag when it comes to adventures. You’ve got a fucking DM to lean on. Give the DM what they need to understand the NPC and let them riff on it. Fuck me, the DM is going to anyway. Maybe, if the effort was put in to the adventure proper instead of rich, detailed NPCs then the adventure proper would be better? 

The sergeant of the militia mocks the party to the point that the party should really burn the entire place down. The enigmatic druid the party meets early returns and explains the plot to everyone; she knew what was going on the entire time. Where did the missing husband enter the woods, so the party can track them down? No clue. The woods are huge. Which way did he go? Meh, not important to the “story.”

Why even bother? Why even bother running a fucking game if you’re just going to handwave every part of the adventure that he party might interact with? “Ah, the party might hae to make a decision here! I shouldn’t let them …” The entire fucking point, even in a plot adventure, is for the party to interact with people and environment around them. Abstracting “where did the missing plot hook go?”, the INITIAL fucking hook, is just a totally bizarre decision. What could possibly be going on here?

Irony is not lost on me. The OSR, older D&D styles. The very soul of the meme of killing the monsters and taking their stuff. A Game, that you can win, by living to the next level. Let me tell you what is going on here: This is a shitty formulaic combat adventure. Oh, it’s gussied up with a lot of words and multimedia shit, but that’s what it is. The standard two combats. A pretext of a hook that the party barely interacts with. A plot that you don’t need to really interact with.  COMBAT! Or maybe a ROLL FOR INITIATIVE! Is embedded in the fucking read-aloud! If you go someplace new then there a read aloud that assumes its just a straight up fight. Like you knocked on the door and out came the monster. Wanna use your wits? This is combat as sport bucko. This is, rather transparently, nothing more than a fancy way to roll some dice to stab things. There is no interactivity, aside from the combats. Nothing special is here. It’s fucking garbage. Shallow garbage. And, lest you think that combat will interrupt things … “If the fight is going badly for the party and characters are dying, there is a deus ex machina that can be used to end the fight.” A bunch of magpies show up and kill themselves divebombing the monster. No escape, even in sweet sweet death. This truly is a hellish experience. 

“Additionally, this is where the players find the Boarskin Cloak item. See page 96 in the appendix for full details. If you are running a more rules light or streamlined game, perhaps this item pops into existence fully formed, or if your game is more gritty/realistic, perhaps the players would have to harvest some boarskin and craft* the item during a short rest*” Uh huh. Pop in t existence. Or, craft is during a short rest! Uh huh. For a magic item. In an hour. I guess its better than the fucking thing popping in to existence. There is no pretext here. 

“If asked why he didn’t look into the missing man, he’ll say it’s a manpower issue, that his man, he’ll say it’s a manpower issue, that his hands are full just patrolling the town and hands are full just patrolling the town and keeping the monsters* at bay.
*Used under the Open Gaming License v1.0a and/or System Reference Document 5.1” Yup, they footnoted a use of the term “monster” and referred back to the OGL license for it. Perfection personified.

Remember all that padding? How about an Optional Encounter? “Optional Encounter: This section is optional, and not required to progress the main questline. It is intended as  world-building and to add depth to the town of Thornborough. As such, while we recommend you include it, the players do not have to interact with it if uninterested, and nor does this situation need to be resolved by the players.” Yup. You managed to type Optional Encounter and then define what an optional encounter is. Good job!

At the start of the last act, the party comes back to town. The inn is on fire. The missing husband person, the initial session one hook? They stand accused of starting it, there’s a mob, and the militia is gonna hang’em right then and there. Ok, so, it turns out the milita is bad and the militia guard captain is the source of all evil or something like that. But why burn the inn? Why accuse the grain merchant and hang them? I don’t get it. And I don’t get A LOT of what happens in this adventure, including caring. 

Oh, hey, ai is behind everything. Yeah. There’s some kind of machine god under the mountain or something. At some point you fight robots. And the animal hybrids are somehow the result of this god. I don’t get it. Spare parts or something? Mutants? All of those are mentioned. They are all organic hybrids though and the machines now want organic parts, I guess? It’s not clear. And the magpies are the agents of the nature god, in opposition. Again, it’s all just pretextual. Yeah yeah, nature good and science bad. Got it. I assume the designers are English; this seems like their ingrained nostalgia for agrarian misery. Science and technology are the new Evil Cultists eh? The magpie thing is interesting, as the agent for a god, but everything else about the entire religious/robot angle is just trash. 

A lot of words, a nice layout and many multimedia handouts do not an adventure make. This doesn’t even get to the Colored lights standard. It’s just the usual formulaic shit. Prefectural and padded out beyond belief. Gussied up with some multimedia shit. First, write a decent adventure. THEN you can apply the lipstick. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. Preview? FUCK YOU! Just fork your twenty fucking dollars over to the designers. They deserve it, they dumped in the soundtrack and audio logs. Why should you get a chance to see what you’re buying before they claim their tax? “Perfect for GM’s and players seeking deep immersion.” Yeah. No.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/504394/one-for-sorrow-whispers-in-the-mist?1892600

By Joseph Bloch
BRW Games
1e
Levels 1-12

But a few scant leagues from the walls of the bustling town of Greyheim lay the crumbling ruins known as the Castle of the Mad Archmage, Jophob Schlech, long shunned by the local townsfolk. Decades ago, a series of vast treasure hoards were discovered in the twisting mazes beneath the castle proper, along with hungry beasts and deadly traps aplenty. Legends were made in that time; the names of those early explorers will live on for centuries. Eventually, though, the dungeons lost their luster as the treasures became smaller and harder to win, the traps were dismantled, and the monsters slain; eventually only the desperate or jaded dared enter the dungeons beneath the castle. Recently, however, reports have surfaced of renewed stockpiles of wealth in the dank passages and chambers beneath the hillock upon which the stillruined castle rests. Regions once deemed devoid of monstrous habitation have been reported to teem with renewed activity. Traps both magical and mundane have once more brought explorers to their doom. Changes both subtle and gross have been noted in the very layout of the passages and chambers, rendering old maps and knowledge dangerously unreliable if not outright useless. Something is definitely afoot, and most honest folk in the nearby city find the prospect an unnerving one indeed. To the bold and daring, however, only one message needs to be heard. The castle and its dungeons are once more ripe for exploration, and new legends are ready to be made beneath The Castle of the Mad Archmage!

This 322 page adventure presents a megadungeon with about fourteen levels and at least a thousand rooms. A true example of the genre, it does a decent job mimicking what a classic era megadungeon may have looked like, combining large extensive level maps with a writing style and encounter mix that feels like it’s out 79-81. It’s also vaguely disconnected from itself, feeling more like a series of random rooms, in spite of having factions and zones and level themes. 

Bloch and BRW is interesting. I have, up to this point, not reviewed any of the various of Mad Archmage available. What I know Bloch from is some EXCELLENT marketing which seems to draw me in time and again to his products via the covers and the DriveThru pages. And then crushing disappointment as I see yet another what appears to be a low effort offering that makes little sense. The Castle of the Mad Archmage though is a little different. This version, I assume, is the one that hit kickstarter for something like $50k. The maps are exactly what one expect if you said large Gygaxian megadungeon level, perhaps without the “lines for walls” from the famous snippet. But, several hundred rooms per level and a complexity to them that is absolutely present. And encounters straight out of the classic era Gygax, without, though, the guiding vision of a level that results in these feeling disconnected from themselves and perhaps a little staid and/or generic. It’s a colossal effort, just not one that I would ever feel the desire to run because of the … aimlessness?

The adventure has a lot of elements straight out of early play. You will recall, in the G series, a brief sentence in the intro noting that if the party looks around they can find a cave, etc to home base out of, a camp to rest and rover in as they raid the dungeon. We can see in this one a small appeal to that as well. There are several small farmsteads in the area that the party could base out of. (This is in addition to several other areas in the surrounding lands, a fairy forest, etc, to add some play options as the party mucks about in the region through the extended and repeated forays in to the dungeon that a megadungeon would imply.) I note, as well, that these have something going on also, or at least something colorful to add. After all, if you’re going to base out of Farmer Browns farm then having a little bit to spice up play there, during your repeated visits, is a great addition. One farm houses two brothers and their families … who hate each other and will get angry if the party interact with the other half of the family. Ongoing fun! And then another has an old patriarch … and a son who just wishes the old man would die already so he can take over. “Paulus’s eldest son is Doran, who resents his father’s seemingly stubborn refusal to depart this world.” That’s a pretty simple sentence that is overloaded with opportunities for play. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for in a homebase description: just a line, almost a throwaway, that can be used to riff off of. You get the idea immediately and can leverage the situation to spice some things up while the party rests. 

There are also a decent number of bandits and “caretakers” present in the dungeon and the environs. They will charge you to go in and down the stairs to the next levels. Or, others will hiit you on the way out, looking for easy marks loaded down with treasure, wounded and unable to dump fireballs at them. These are, again, classic examples from older play that have been included and bring in that more dynamic element of play. We so often see the journey to the dungeon, or back home, just hand waved, but these appeals to the older play add an extra elements to help bring alive what could be routine in a megadungeon: getting in and going out again.

Other classic elements are present as well. Notably, we see a large number of levels, fourteen. And a decent number of them sport those large and complex maps that we get glimpses of in Barrier Peaks or Mordenkainen. A hundred, a hundred and fifty rooms to a level Loops, complex mapping, small zones and interconnections. We get a side view of the entire dungeon and a diagram showing the various connections to the surface. (Although, I note that WHERE on the surface is not noted, a serious lapse.) This is all quite excellent and something seldom seen in dungeons. There is room to breathe here. The denizens can have zones or control, and there can be buffer zones between them. This is exactly what you want in large expansive dungeon levels. 

And it comes replete with The Greyhawk Construction Company. Err, the Greyheim Construction Company, I mean. Orcs and ogres in safety vests building the dungeon in a kind of pocket dimension. Orange cones. Blueprints. This was another classic element of play, a meta way for the DM to say “hey, that part of the dungeon? I haven’t finished mapping and stating it yet. Maybe ring again later?” Not quite a funhouse element, you’re not really interacting with them, ala “trap reset kobolds”, but more of a eta reference and acknowledgement to how the game, and its dungeons, developed. Although, I think two pages are devoted to it here … In any event, there are a lot of classical elements here that were oft present in earlier games and, in particular, megadungeon games. 

The various encounters could have been written and/or pulled from some of the earliest published adventures. They range from the minimal to the slightly more than minimal. There’s a mix of combat and what we might call Specials. The Fountain of Snakes stands out as one of thoseSpecial type encounters: “FOUNTAIN OF SNAKES. A fountain with a shallow basin dominates the middle of this room. A small, barred window looks into area #128, where two orc guards are always posted. The fountain itself is shaped like four intertwining snakes. Every round that someone is in this room, a snake will issue forth from this enchanted fountain, with  snakes coming out of a different mouth of the statue:” That’s a decent little special, and as a bonus it includes that small barred window. This sort of “see something from somewhere else” is something that Thracia did to great effect. Specials are one of the favorite things, when handled right. You need not too many of them and they need to written in a rather neutral way, a thing in the dungeon that the party could be impacted by or could leverage to their own ends if managed correctly. 

44. LAUGHING SKULL. If this room is entered, a human skull rises from the floor laughing hysterically for 1 minute. It then floats gently to the floor. The room is otherwise empty. The skull will lose its enchantment if removed from this room.

45. EMPTY ROOM. Table and 4 chairs.

46. SPIDER! A huge spider (AC(D) 6; AC(A) 14; MV 180’/min.; HD 2+2; 11 h.p. each; #AT 1; DAM 1-6; SA poison, leap 30’) dwells here, in the corpse of an unlucky elf from whence it will leap to attack. The elf’s corpse has 85 g.p.

That little run of rooms stood out to me. We see there as special, in the skull, an empty room, and then a creature encounter. This little selection stood out to me because I think it exemplifies the kind of things you’ll find in this megadungeon. The “special” there is nothing much, just something bizarre in the dungeon. And if we’re going to criticize the Dwimmermount chess players then this gets criticized as well. There are a fair number of these sorts of “empty specials” in the Mad Archmage. It’s just something weird pulled out and put in the dungeon. I suppose there’s the possibility of the party using it, but it’s just there and doesn’t seem t contribute much. There’s an entry in the ruins aboveground of a ghostly echo of horse hooves in the stable. To no end, but, you can exorcise it to get rid of it, the text tells us. But it’s nothing. It doesn’t really set a mood. It doesn’t have an impact on the party, It just feels too … disconnected from the rest of the adventure. Just as most of the specials do here. 

The empty room here is fine. Especially in a larger work you need some space. A buffer zone for monsters. A place for the party to spin their wheels or rest in. Every room stuffed full just doesn’t make sense in some of the larger dungeons. 

And the creature encounter here stands out. The spider is IN the corpse. I think perhaps I would have liked a bloated elf body or some such, something to add color to the description, but placing the creature in the body, and a spider at that, elevates this from a boring old “there’s a spider on the ceiling encounter.” Again, I think this little run of rooms is a good example of what you can find here, both good and bad. A little bland in the descriptions, overall terse, a little random and aimless, and perhaps the selected format could have been done a little differently given the way the spiders stat block, fully inline, detracts from the overall comprehension of the room when scanning it. 

And then there are the more straightforward funhouse rooms. “DUCK! There is a large (4’ tall at the head) bright yellow statue of a duck in the middle of this room. 1 minute after the room is entered, buzz saw blades will slice through the place at a height of 4’ 2”.” Or, perhaps the honeytrap room where a bunch of honey falls on someone. This is all classic funhouse dungeon. Something weird, meta, out of time, showing up in the dungeon. An explicit acknowledgement that we are all playing a game and the designer and DM can and will include anything. Tonally out of place in a more classic adventuring environment, but, we’re talking megadungeon here. You gonna need some things in there to mix things up. You’ve been in this dungeon for 196 gaming sessions and little fun in that environment is probably ok. And it makes more sense to me than, say, the isolated laughing skull or the horse hoof exorcism. 

I have compared this si the older adventures but there is something missing. It just doesn’t feel connected to itself the way older adventures do. G1 felt like a unified whole. The dinner party. The sleeping guards, the lothario, the orc servants both loyal and in revolt.  There was this overall theme that ran through it. Even in something MUCH larger, like S3, it all felt connected to itself. You could follow along. Things in one place meant something somewhere else. And it just doesn’t FEEL that way here. Yes, there are some factions on each level, and they have a zone of control, and there’s some space and some conflict. And levels have some overall theming. The barracks levels. The storage level. The arena level. But there’s not LIFE to much, if any, of it. I don’t mean creatures, there are plenty. Or weird shit going on. There’s that also. It just doesn’t feel like there’s a hiding hand here. Not quite random, but also not working together to paint a broader picture of the dungeon. I don’t really know how to describe this.  It has something to do, perhaps, with a combination of the tone and the vibe? Let us assume we were turning an Ikea in to a dungeon. Each of the little vignettes is their own room. (Rooms within rooms within rooms!) So, the theme here is Ikea rooms, and each of the rooms makes a direct appeal to that. But one is empty. And another is a fairy tea party. And another that ghastly abomination known as Tuscan Kitchen. Space aliens are in a room with kindergarten chairs and some suburban mom is picking out a plant in another, unaware of anything. They are all rooms, what are you complaining about? Is there some overriding theme that runs throughout? Ultimately, the theme is that the mad archmage, a stand in for the DM, is on the bottom level and jokes with you, gives you gifts, and then sends you to the other side off world. Why, the party asks, is this all here? ? “Well, how else would I have met you folks?! [the party]” I know that the adventure path and plot thing have scared us all, but this opposite effect is a little too meta for me. There is no theme. There is no interconnection. There is nothing going on that binds the adventure, or the levels together. There is barely very much to tie the levels to themselves, as standalones.  Ultimately this is just a big funhouse dungeon. The Duck encounter, with a tad more theming than, say, a bunch of isolated rooms floating in a void, each with a wildly different genre going on. Stonehell, with its level interconnections, level summaries, and interconnections was, for all of its minimalism, a hundred times better when it came to giving the things life and in making it feel like each component was a part of a whole. And, for all the funhouse nature of the rooms, there just doesn’t seem to be any joy present in the adventure. It feels quite a bit more like drudgery than joy or wonder. If we took the spirit of Grimtooth, without the sly winks, then perhaps that? I’m not suggesting there are deathtraps or rube goldbergs or anything like that. But a certain isolation combined with a routine … blandness and smallmindedness?

I can, also, mention the padding present. This is Bloch special. There is the long section at the start that tells you how to read a block and that AC means Armor Class, among other how to roleplay introductory text. I wonder what the set is of people who purchased this and don’t know what an RPG is? And then of course the entries are padded out. “Home to the Rory family, a pair of brothers and their families, with a total of eight people living here. Adam  (human F0; 7 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) and his wife Melissa (human F0; 4 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) and their twin teenage boys, Paulus and Renulf (human F0; 6 h.p. each; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL NG) live in one of the farmhouses on the land. John (human F0; 6 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL CG) and his wife Regina (human F0; 4 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL CG) live in the other house with their widowed daughter Trudy (human F0; 3 h.p.; AC(D) 10; AC(A) 10; AL LG) and her infant son Rex.” Not only do the inline stat blocks make the entry hard to read, they are all just zero level AC10 humans with nothing special going on. This calls to mind the trap of layout/publishing guidelines. They exist to add clarity, not to be followed rigidly in to the abyss. If the guidelines say to bold monster names, and you do so and it looks like that is MORE confusing, then don’t do that. Most of the padding comes up front, in the region and the text before the dungeon starts, so at least the keys are relatively free of that, 

“BLACKSMITH’S SHOP. This sagging cottage, built against the sturdy stone of the inner keep, was once the blacksmith’s shop. The long-disused forge is evident, but where the anvil and tools would be expected are only rusty stains (a rust monster had found the place years ago and gorged itself). The thatched roof is mostly intact.

ARMORY. This smallish room was used to store arrows for the use of archers who might use the balistraria in the adjacent hallway. The spiral staircase behind the secret door leads to area #108 on Level 1 Core: The Storage Rooms, while the secret passage leading through the wall ends in a one-way secret door that can only be opened from the inside. Its existence was one of the castle’s most closely guarded secrets. Today it holds empty barrels which contain a few broken arrows or forgotten arrowheads.”

Those two entries are excellent examples of how to not write entries. The Blacksmiths “was once’ and we get the rust monster backstory, that isn’t going to ever come up in play. The armory smacks of that Dungeon room, the worst one ever written. After a paragraph or two describing it ended with something like “but today the room is empty.” Focus your writing on the now, focus it on the party interacting with the room. Sure, you can throw in a random line of backstory or something to punch up the writing. Who doesn’t like those snide little DM aside comments that designers sometimes throw in? But, mostly, focus the writing on the interactivity you are enabling in the room for the party to explore, not a booklet from a small county historical society museum on the various uses of the living room in John Holmes palm beach home between 1962 and 1983. 

There are other rando bits. A decent number of weird saves, 8HD level monsters on level 2, which is kindof nice, A disturbing number of rooms fall in to the format “XNUMBER MONSTERTYPE are here.” Meh. it is what it is, I guess.

It is hard to regard this as more than a curiosity. The dedication to the early encounter style is interesting, but not so much that the lack of a feeling of interconnectedness, (or purpose?) … the aimlessness of the levels, even though there are factions and themes. It feels like a hollow effort to explore

This is $25 at DriveThru. There is no preview. SUCKER!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/462133/ma1-castle-of-the-mad-archmage-the-core-levels?1892600

By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 9-12

During the War of the Heavens, it is said that an acrchangel of Janu deseneded from the skies like a great meteor, striking the known world with a sacred war hammer, laying the devils and demons low. The very earth trembled at the blow, cracking the surface and pushing up the mountains. The land of Stygina was created, as the continent was shattered and the Frostholm Sea was formed. And it is said that this mighty weapon is still buried in the ice in the frozen north..

This 198 page booklet presents The Frozen North, full of generic vikings (with one cultural exception) and uses about sixteen pages to describe a dungeon with 24 rooms containing an angels warhammer. And angel. Its entries are full of padded backstory explaining the why and histories of everything, and ultimately the various encounters are just stabbing of the generic variety. Imagine writing 198 pages of generic padding and then including “Roll on table H for the dragons hoard.”

I know I’m supposed to be taking more time with these longer adventures, but this booklet has the vast majority of its space taken up by generic cultural shit and generic viking encampments that lack any color. The whole purpose here seems to be going to get a magic warhammer, part of a longer/larger campaign arc with this adventure just being the latest in the series. But the warhammer thing only takes up the last bit of the book, thirty pages with the main attraction, the dungeon, being about sixteen or so? It’s hard to evaluate 130 pages of generic viking stuff. And I don’t mean Harn levels of culture; it’s just boring old stuff that any old DM could come up with if I just said “Vikings in the north.” 

I frequently call this The Kitchen issue, although it should be renamed the Fantasy Inn issue given the frequency of it making an appearance there. E all know what a kitchen looks like. I’m sure that we could all even describe a fantasy kitchen, or, perhaps, a medieval kitchen in a manor. Including Mrs Patmore. It’s been burned the fuck in to you by every piece of media you have ever consumed. Cartoons, books, tv, movies, everything ever produced by the BBC.  Every telenueve. You, and everyone else on the fucking planet, knows what that damn kitchen looks like in the manor house. So why the fuck did the designer just spend two paragraphs telling you what a medeivel kitchen looks like? Oh, look, two more paragraphs on what a little roadside inn looks like with another two on the jolly little rotund barkeep. Fireplace,soft light through the windows, smoke from the chimney, a murmur from outside, maybe a jaunty tune here and there, farmers a couple of merchants. Simple but hearty fare. Blah blah blah. Got it. The Prancing Pony. Just like every other of the 10,000 fantasy inn descriptions i’ve read, watched, and consumed over my life. 

The designer needs to communicate The Prancing Pony very succinctly and then proceed to tell us how THIS Prancing Pony differs from every other Prancing Pony. Cozy Inn. Seedy Inn. Serves slop. Maybe, instead of describing the inn, you could instead tell us about the smuggling ring that hangs out there? How the innkeeps family is weirdly leaning in to in to the Church of the New God? It doesn’t have to be bizarre, but including a subplot here is much better than wasting our time with Just Another Inn. If you have to have one then just tell us it’s a normal old inn called The Prancing Pony, or The Green Dragon, or whatever. A quirk or two is great. 

Likewise, the viking realm in this adventure. These are just vikings. Not Harn vikings, or realistic one, just plain old fantasy vikings. There is nothing special going on here. Nothing about the inns or settlements that makes them special. (Well, except for that mass human sacrifice thing …) And yet the adventure goes on and on about viking land. And not the vikings riding mastodons SO METAL of the only fantasy map you’ll ever need. Just generic vikings. No Grondusmoots and other local customs that might come up in the adventure or be central to a certain point. Just gener-o-vikings. It’s a fantasy village. But everyone is dressed like a viking,.A hundred and some pages of this. Even, for a gazetteer, this is a bit much for the local color, or lack thereof, that you get. The closest you get is a small wandering event table to spice up your short stay in the city. With an example below …

There is an exception to the generic stuff. The vikings up here have a ritual. Well, a holiday like festival. “In the past, as many as 10,000 slaves, prisoners, and various livestock have been sacrificed during the weeklong Festival of Aesa.” Hmmm. In the past, right? Well, no. They are still doing it and the party arrives during it. It’s part of the adventure. While you’re watching the head priestess slaughter slaves and prisoners, ritually, she reads the parties minds and that’s how we kick off an audience with the king. Lest you think you can escape with some abstraction here, there are a few random city encounters that bring it home. A slave child finds you and tells you that her owner is about to have her brother sacrificed and begs for you to do something.

Look man, I’ve had a shitty day at work. I’m here for the beer and pretzels and friends and a few laughs maybe. I do NOT fucking need a slave child. I don’t her pleading with me to do something. And I especially don’t need the ritual murder of a bunch of people in with the group that I’m supposed to be interacting with as if they were any other generic villager.

“The only words that can describe it is barbaric evil. But this is a gross misunderstanding of the Styginian belief system, as a whole. The Styginians are not evil as, for instance, the orcs of the Rok-Skull tribes. Orcs are inherently evil. The Styginian people are simply honoring their Gods in the manner that their Gods demand.” Big big fan of alignment being cosmically evil. It lets us hand wave a lot of things. But, dude, this is some Zone of Interest shit. Tht’s fucking evil, not a cultural quirk. This is supposed to be fun? I don’t see any need to collaborate to get a warhammer to stop an archdevil. We’ll find another way. Let’s skip this adventure. I don’t know what the fuck people are thinking including shit like this. That one with the halfling plantation owners. The one with the baddies all being obviously mentally ill. Yeah yeah, midwesterner. Whatever. This is not fun. I’m pretty sure I would launch an attack, get killed, leave, and then have a talk with the DM about what “fun” means. The fucking game is not a simulation of the barbarity of history. It’s a fucking game for christs sake. I’m not the biggest fan of trigger warnings, but including this kind of shit deserves it. I take it back, if you reach MY level of trigger warning then maybe DONT PUT THE FUCKING SHIT IN THE GAME!! Its not even fucking necessary for the adventure. There’s no call back. There’s no weight to it or significance. It’s basically just local color, like, they all wear tweed hats or some shit. Except its here and the designer has decided to spring it on the party as the hook/lead in to the hunt for the warhammer. You know what we do? We make the people mass sacrificing children EVIL, and we use them as the bad guys and we don’t force the party to collaborate with them. And we especially don’t make them participate, implicitly or explicitly. I D3 were on our way to kill their god and it’s all abstracted; THAT seems like a worthy reason for passing through. Yeah, we want to know our baddies are evil. But these people are not the baddies in the adventure and are just presented like a cultural norm. I’m really not happy about this. I’m going to continue the review of this garbage only because you can leave EVERYTHING out about it and still do the adventure with your plain old mercantile, murderous, raiding vikings. 

“For the Styginian people, this is mostly considered true, though they will not openly state such a thing. Only by immersing one’s self in the Styginian culture will one find this to be an overall truth. The Gods of both pantheons play an everyday role in Styginian society and every person, giant or Styginian, is devoutly religious. Every man, woman, and child, giant or otherwise, wears a token of a God that is believed to have some forbearance on that individual’s life. Gifts are given to the Gods on their holy days and sacrifices are made during the midsummer solstice, in the capital of Olafsvellir.” Speaking of gazeteer, the vast majority of this reads like an early travelogue. It’s in a rather dry style which is only exacerbated by the genericism of the content. 

And everybody and everything has a backstory. It’s everywhere. And it’s integrated in to the descriptions. “Large two story manor: Originally built by some of Arnvid’s generals after the sack of Miraslava, these two large manor houses were later added on to, becoming what is today known as the Capsizer Inn. Wood sign over the door: While the sign does not name the inn as such, every regular to Miraslava knows the carved relief of a longship tipping to the side in a large wave. The sign is stained in a deep burgundy that many claim is from the blood that was spilled when Arnvid came to power. These are most likely nothing more than tall tales.” There’s nothing to any of that. It’s just preamble to a fucking inn. Hey, you know one of those Black Demon Knight things? Lord Soth? There’s one of those in the adventure, in some room in the dungeon. He gets a backstory also. And when you walk in he immediately attacks and does nothing but fight. So, what’s the point of the backstory? I guess if you just want to read the adventure and imagine all of the games you’ll run then it’s great. But running the adventure? All of this nonsense padding just gets in the way of the DM locating the information they DO need in order to run the room. You have to wade through the dross in order to find what interactivity you need to respond to the party. And, it pisses me off. Because the effort spent on this backstory nonsense, this justifying and explaining the whys and wherefore, is effort that should have spent on the actual adventure, the interactivity, the shit that WILL matter at the table. That’s what the fuck the adventure is for, running it at the table.

The adventure, proper, is just a hack with a few traps. Sail on a ship. Fight a giant squid (with backstory.) Walk across some snow. Fight some frost giants. Go in a cave. Three levels, about eight rooms per level. Fight some ice trolls. Fight some other shit. Fall in a pit. Fight a bunch of 12HD druids. Yeah, it’s putin the middle of nowhere but there are all of these 12HD druid hanging around, protecting the place. I don’t need toilets and a mess hall, but SOME allowance for them as something other than a generic stat block would be nice. No names, just a bunch of 12 HD druids. There are a couple of groups of them. One group just fought some frost giants. The giants got past them so they are just standing there in the same room, not giving chase or anything. Joy. Injured? Missing spells? Nope. It’s just a stat block to stab.

And what stat blocks! It’s not unusual to see a full column of them! This is right out of 4e, with all of their special abilities present. Trolls? Why they are known to set traps, so we gotta include that in the stat block! It doesn’t matter that they just wandered in and have had no time, it’s in the creature stat block so it gets included. I don’t need Ready Ref one liners here, but, man, use some common sense. Don’t be beholding to your style guide. Include what’s needed and lave out what’s not. A trivial creature encounter takes up LOADS of space here. (It’s OSE, so none of that only four 12HD druids in the world shit. Although, I still find that rather romantic …)

Then there’s what’s NOT included. In a dragons lair, with dragon: “Glittering piles of treasure: Piles of coins litter the floor of this chamber. Sparkling gems are interspersed through these pile, marking a near incalculable wealth at first glance.” And the treasure? “Treasure: In addition to Izyntainth’s hoard, there is an additional 100pp, 5,000gp, 1,000ep, 2,000sp, 6,000cp, and 100 gems worth 10gp each.” BUT THERES NO HOARD DESCRIPTION! Jesus christ man, that’s what you SHOULD be including! How about a more differenter dragon? “Treasure: The entirety of Rirglazic’s hoard, from Treasure Table H, can be found here.” This is my life. This is what I signed up to do. Where’s that other entry? Oh, here. The Dangerous Shark. An inn in town. Like, eight pages to describe it. A fairly typical seaside bar/inn. But everyone looks like a viking. It includes a description, taking most of a column, of the owners bedroom. There’s nothing special about the bedroom. Just a normal simple innkeeper one. There’s nothing special about the inn. No hidden cults or anything like that which would make the innkeeper’s room interesting. But you know what we do get? This, in the OSE style: “Heavy door (this heavy wood door is good at blocking noise; locked).” And then, cause we gotta follow up, “Heavy door: Kalf installed a thick wood door on the master bedroom that deadens the sound from within and without. “When we’re in here, I don’t want to hear or know what you girls are doing out there, and I don’t want you to hear or know what we’re doing in here!” The door is locked. Both Kalf and Gudny have skeleton keys to all the locks on the second floor.” Is there a point here? Is the designer implying that the daughters are fucking and the parents know? I mean, that must be it?! BECAUSE WHY ELSE WOULD THAT BE IN THE ADVENTURE? This is the kind of trivial bullcrap that gets included. But, the dragons treasure trove? Nope. In what POSSIBLE frame of mind do you have to be to include that shit about the door, or all the other minutia in the descriptions of the bullshit parts of the adventure, and then NT include the treasure in a dragons hoard? That was your fucking decition that you made here? 

Oh, shit, I was bitching about the dungeon. Anyway, lots of stabbing. Nothing really makes sense or “clicks.” It’s just stuffing in some monsters in a lot of rooms for you to stab and finding a pretext for them to be herein their backstories. Nothing special about the stabbing. A few traps, nothing really special about them, not in a “specials” kind of way. Everything is very straightforward. It makes no sense, but its straightforward. 

It’s done in a kind of OSE style, with the descriptions. I know people have strong opinions about that. I think its effective when done well. Guess what? It’s not done well here . Emphasis on the wrong things, too long in its keywords, not very evocative. Blech.

But, that’s not the major problem here. I am hesitant to review fluff. I don’t know what makes fluff good, or, perhaps, there is less, from a technical writing viewpoint, about to critique in a fluff sourcebook. And most of this is just a regional guide to the land of Stygia, full of vikings. But it doesn’t approach it from a historical viewpoint. And it doesn’t approach it from a Metal standpoint. It’s just mostly a typical fantasy setting, with people dressed up as vikings. I have a hard time believing this is what folks want from a regional guide. After all, you know what a kitchen looks like. The focus on the mundane and trivial doesn’t hit what IM looking for in a regional guide, but maybe its for you? I don’t know, like I said, I don’t know fluff. 

On the adventuring side of things though, there are several problems that drag this down. The emphasis on stabbing and “normal” traps. There’s not much special here. Certainly there’s a place for a raid, but this just seems like a level noe dungeon scaled up to levels 9-12, and not a very interesting level one dungeon at that. Nothing fits together well. The depth is quite shallow and there’s little to learn or figure out. The added emphasis on the DM coming up with their own content for, say, the dragons hoards, is just icing on that little cake. I find the inclusion of the human sacrifice thing very distasteful. It doesn’t meet the moral compass test of either making them the baddies OR even raising interesting questions of complicity. (That would be a much harder line to walk and I’m not suggesting that anyone SHOULD walk it in a D&D game, but it’s the available out if you are going to do something like this. Gaeta during the Cylon occupation comes to mind. But, then, how much of this is appropriate for a fun game?)  I can’t see much in the value here.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The review is eight genero-background pages on culture, etc. You have to squint some, but the entire booklet is like that, to certain degrees. A few encounter pages would have been good to include. Not a great preview, although, it does tell you what to expect …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/509390/stygina-the-land-of-ice-and-plunder?1892600

By Leo Hunt
Published by Joel Hines
OSE
Level 1?

The Shrike is a world of decay – rusted iron, crumbling stone, saltwater, blood, and fog – surrounded by a roiling ocean, a lifeless archipelago, pewter-hued clouds, seabirds, and pitiless stars. In this infernal Galapagos, players will encounter masked Devils, blood which gives life to things which should not have it, stones which give life to people who do not want it, terrible and stranded monsters, perilous locations, and wonderous treasures from across the planes.

This 169 page sandbox provides for about seventy locations in five zones in one of the better representations of a dante-like hell. It riffs on suffering without becoming grecian about it, presenting a picture of many desperate people trying to survive with hopes of either escape or despair. It does try to do everything to everyone, presenting several options for the direction of the goals the party might chase/factions they support/ends they want to obtain, and suffers somewhat for it. Lots of situations, with  a lot of people who want something.

Welcome to Hell! Literally! Well, a part of Hell, anyway. Well, a part of Hell that is no longer a part of Hell. It’s a G I A N T chunk of ragged metal surrounded by ocean and it has a god impaled on top of it, dying for all of eternity. You know, just like your morning commute feels. Anway, Hell being what it is, sometimes shit happens and chunks break away, detaching from Hell proper. And that’s happened here. You’ve got some sinners here, serving out their normal old sin of divine punishment, as well as some devils (five factions worth) overseeing things, a few other beings of power, and then some inanimate objects that have been turned in to people by the dying gods blood. Hmmm, something sounds familiar … Anyway, if the sinners die they get reborn the next day; death isn’t the end of things for them. Oh, and nearly everyone is starving. As the booklet says, play them like they are one meal away from starving to death. So, almost everyone is a cannibal. Sure hope you’re not a player character who ends up here; that create food and water spell is looking pretty good about right now! This part of hell is laid out like a pointcrawl, in about five zones with maybe fifteen areas per done, and maybe a dungeon per zone with about another rooms. 

One of the highlights of the adventure, and the reason I think it does such a good job modeling a kind of hell from Dante, is the focus on the normal every day old sinners. Sure, the place exists because of the dying god impaled on top, his blood animating things, but it’s the normal people that bring the grimness and false hope to life. 

First, everyone IS starving to death and almost everyone is a cannibal. You’ve got your friendly folk in caves playing their violins, who turn out to be cannibals. You’ve got your villages, who have a ritualized combat every night where the loser gets eaten. You’ve got your run of the mill cannibal gangs. There’s a line in this about the people living near the shore being able to eat fish, but that’ not what is going on here. There is no food for almost everyone. Everyone is a cannibal. But, it’s more the false hopes and resignments that I mean when I say it strikes well on the Hell front. In one encounter “Another hour’s walk and one comes across a great grove of silver trees, deep-rooted within the coastal stone, each branch holding countless sputtering candles. Careful observation reveals the candles are slowly going out, extinguished by harsh winds and drizzling rain.” You’ve got these two sinners, an old man and a young teen, huddled, living in a cave nearby, scared of the party. But they have to keep the candles lit. For if they can do that then they will be saved! “He believes Pin to be his daughter and the Candle Grove to be their penance. Each tree must remain lit, to demonstrate their faith in salvation.” She wants to journey to an island nearby, where she sees a green flame, believing it stays alight forever and they can use it to light all of the candles and win their salvation. If the party does not agree then she slips away in the night to do it. (Only to end up a thrall to it, but that’s another locale.) And, the party being the party, what if they manage to help out and light every candle?!?! “When they are not immediately freed from their suffering, Herot loses hope completely, becoming a Husk (p.148) within days. Pin will follow the PCs from this point on, whether they invite her to or not.” Well now, that’s depressing. Crushed expectations and disillusionment abound. People believe in things, they give themselves hope and are sustained by it. We must follow the devils orders explicitly to be saved. We must defy them at every turn to be saved from this place. At one point you see a MASSIVE chain coming out of the sky. Following it up leads to a floating ship  inhabited by people who think it will leave and take them away. A wizard is trapped here and constructs a bathosphere to escape through what he thinks is a hole to the abyss at the bottom of the ocean. These things sustain them through eternity. And invariably they want the parties help. And … some of them ARE true, Which do you think? And who is going to be devastated when you, the party, bring the crushing truth of reality in to what they have been clinging to for hope to sustain them through eternity? It is this, the hope and futility, that really shines here. Gonna harden your heart?  Gonna swallow your tears? Do you become like The Ghoul? Do you give them hope? Help them? Shit on them? How do you decide which ones MIGHT be on to something? Eternity is a long time to figure things out. 

Take, for example, the dead god. Forgotten name. No one knows his crime, blah blah blah. He’s got an avatar, created using his last strength. The devils would sorely like to capture and destroy it. It’s only a disembodied voice. And its working to free the god. Shall you help? Get the heads of the five devil houses to show up at the top of the spire in the Garden Incomparable and have them all five vote to free him. Which will free him. His avatar doesn’t tell you that doing so will destroy the Shrike and everyone in it, immortal or not. So, you know, I hope you pick the right people to cozy up with.

We come then to the sandbox nature of the adventure. The party ends up here somehow. The motivations for doing so are loose, but the mechanisms are the more interesting part. Beyond thepbvious “you died” and a journey by sea, we are presented with a false burial, in an iron coffin, replete with someone giving a false eulogy listing all of your sins and lapses. Buried in sand as the tide rolls in, you end up on a beach in an iron coffin as the tide rolls out, in the Shrike. There’s some local color for you! Or, perhaps, you would travel by traitor goat? “When a goat has performed this duty for seven years, it is slain by impalement, and its blood daubed upon a door made from iron, bone, silver, stone, and gold.” I think there are like two sentences to this, but which provide oh so much color. Great specificity and a good example of what TO color. 

The adventure keys and locations provide little in way of goals. For that, and perhaps in your reason for coming to the Shrike, we rely on another page in the front of the book. Escape and general exploration are covered, but then also working to free the nameless god or agents for the infernal court, working for unity, or against, to sow discord amongst them. It is one of these that is suggested as a goal for the arty, with the keys and locations proper remaining rather neutral in their orientation. There are some clunky rules for GOLD=XP, dumping them in to the mouths of idols to Mammon or offering them to one of the five devil leaders as tribute. Both seem clunky to me, as stand ins for “spending it in town”, since there are no towns, but, you can always ignore the “spend” part. Once in the mix most of the folks want something that the party could do. That bathosphere wizard needs a bunch of parts obtained for the construction. Him being level one makes it difficult for him (A great example of the consequences of a teleportation accident!) “The Abyss is pitch-black. We must have supernatural radiance to guide our path.” And then it’s up to you to find something, somewhere to help with that. There IS something provided, in the DM notes, but it’s also left openended as a problem to solve any way the party can. Continual Light isn’t mentioned, but hey, you’re the DM. And thus with a giant iron vessel to ride in (the kettles in one locations?) or something else the party comes up with. Looking at the Candle Tree situation, that’s open ended as well, as are most of the problems to be solved. They do, mostly, feel disconnected from each other. Vignettes, with the occasional “I’d really like a X”, or “I hope Y suffers.” In one of the devil courts you can interact with some random imps: “Have you all seen the light over in the Lantern Isle? Loads of stupid Sinners dance around it. We should go up there and steal that light from them.’ Two Imps of Salt will accompany you to the Lantern Isle (p.53) to steal the Wormwood Lantern.” Colorful, fun, and fits in with the imps. And a little quest-givery. This is the problem with an open-ended sandbox. You can do what you want and join any side but then also most things are written to be quite neutral and disconnected from each other with only tenuous ties. That’s not my favorite, I prefer something open ended and yet with a clear direction it is going, but I see how the framework can be appealing to some.

The maps for the five zones are all pointcrawl, with notes in each location about the various exits. “If you walk along the beach ,,,’ There is a small dungeon in each zone of, say, twelve rooms? The layout is not going be award winning. It’s better than a lair dungeon but not by much. 

There are parts of this that are quite quite good. “A tablet of stone containing the spell: The Storm Speaks Through Me (Lightning Bolt)” That’s the kind of thing I like, color. It evokes a vibe of thunderstorms and holding your arms outstretched and grey beards. Or was that Moses? Anyway, good local color. But, that doesn’t carry through the work. It lacks, I don’t know, cohesion? Falls apart at the devils? Some combination of the two?

The devils in this here part of hell are not exactly what you might call Go Getters. The locations of the devils courts and the devils proper tend to be rather static. There is some weirdness about, and some minor devilry, like those imps wanting to steal the sinners green party light, but the Grand Game is off. There is no VIBE of devilry here. The leaders of the devil courts are suitably weirdos, and most are willing to talk to you if you’re not immediately hostile. But it really just feels like a facade. There’s no life to them or their courts. And, no, this isn’t Marie NDiaye, this is an RPG adventure, it’s not on purpose. 

That is a pretty serious disconnect here. While the sinner, proper, including the forgotten god, feel suitable mythic and sisyphean without being too much in your face about it, the devils themselves, just about everything about them, lack that mythic nature. Or, pretty much any nature at all. They seem almost completely disconnected from the rest of the locales. You will recall I noted the lack of an overall thrust to this adventure. This is, I think, one of the ways a sandbox can fall down. Yes, we want an open environment, but, also, there should be a few things to hang your hat on. 80% of games will go like this … well, then lets write for that 80% while not explicitly excluding the other 20%. I might make an analogy to the Generic/Universal adventures. They are so afraid of doing anything specific that they come off as bland. Pick a path and go with it and then throw in a few extra words here and there on alternatives. Aimlessness is not a virtue. The locales have some wants, but they generally seem just that, local. La Grande Campagne does not exist here, or even a mini version of it. 

It does an absolutely excellent job of creating those little mini encounters, mini locales, mini situations. Everyone seems to have a want or need. (Maybe too many sometimes. Now what the fuck does THIS guy want?) But those connections between sites are weak and shallow. Local Troubles, as they say, if even that. More like uncles lightbulb is out. 

I seldom bitch about money. I’m willing to pay a lot for a good adventure, no matter the page count. I am not thrilled to be paying $30 for a PDF for encounters that are mostly isolated. Accepting its flaws, it’s a decent enough little thing for what it is. But that doesn’t correlate to $30 to me. It’s missing purpose. It’s missing a vitality, at least in the devils. 

This is $29 at DriveThru. The preview is 37 pages. You get to the overview of the devil courts, the various background information, hooks, endings, and so on. But, you don’t get to see any of the encounters or locales. That’s too bad. Those ARE the strength of the booklet. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/501615/the-shrike?1892600

By Morgan Finley, Jack Cæsar, Chris Cæsar
Caesar Ink
Doomsong.

THE FIRST SEAL IS BROKEN AND PESTILENCE SPILLS FORTH.

THE KINGDOM OF LETHE FALLS BEFORE ITS FOETID LORD,

… but the Gravediggers’ Guild does not kneel to heretic gods.

Half a lifetime ago, the border kingdom of Lethe vanished in the blink of an eye. Its fate has long been a source of fear and resentment for the Church of the Divine Corpse — the disappearance of an entire kingdom implies a power far beyond what the Ecclesiarchy likes to contemplate…

This 347 page adventure uses about 180 pages to describe … fifty? Locations in a semi-realistic medeivel setting that has been overcome by plague. In some ways a better Barovia than Browvia, it has quite the large scope while consistently providing the framework for eeriness and a general unease grounded in reality. It also feels like the world is not populated, has a bunch of editing issues, and can be capricious. You can undertake an epic quest! And you can fail. I think it’s interesting, and like a lot of things I think are interesting I’m going to spend too much time talking about its faults and do a terrible job on its strengths.

There’s a vibe going on here, and for me to get anywhere near to talking about it then you’re going to need an overview. We’ve got some kind of mudcore setting. Medieval, lots of grit in the vibe. One LARGE region of the land disappeared awhile back. Your group of Gravediggers (literally) is travelling when they are pulled in to this disappeared land: The plaguescape. We’ve got a map, maybe six squares by eight, of the the region, it taking a day to travel one square and there being about one setting location per square. Would you like to go home? There are a couple of questgiver locations to move people along, including the Gravediggers Guildhall. 

It’s in the OSR section and for some system called Doomsong. I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t immediately recognize the reskin, if that’s what it is. I guess ‘OSR” is the ‘Misc’ category now in DriveThru? Anyway, I’m ignoring the whole rule system shit. You’re gonna need to stat it. 

There is an epic, oh, sandbox quest? present in this. You’ve got Plague, THE Plague, who has shown up awhile back and is responsible for yanking the land away in to this pocket dimension like place, separate from the rest of the characters reality. He’s present. He’s also got a chief follower, the daughter of the local lord, who is now a minor power also running around causing trouble. Beyond this we have a number of major supernatural entities of Plague, and a few others, as well as a few people working against Plague, some locals, or who would be if they weren’t currently in trouble … like a lordling addicted to bug juice/excretions straight out of a greek myth. There are objects of power that can help defeat plague that you can go get, and there are shrines to Plague that you can disrupt. The shrines are ,perhaps, the most pronounced example of the game. Each contains a token, a tongue, the left hand of someone, a sewn up stomach stuffed with dates and oats. If you destroy the token then you weaken Plague. (There are, if I recall correctly, seven of the shrines.) There is a cryptic message at each shrine. For the one in which you find the stomach we get “‘He stole my last meal, meagre morsel to share with truest love.’” From this we deduce ….? Well, one day you MIGHT find dungeons underneath the local lords castle. And therein find a dude locked in a cag who is ravenously hungry. Feeding him the stomach contents destroys this token. Yeah! It is not guaranteed you’ll visit the castle Or find the dungeon. And it’s not unlikely that you will kill the dude first. And then you’re gonna have to put two and two together that this is the true love in question. Other tokens have other ambiguous references: graves, bells … could be lots of those, yeah? Which witch is which? I’m not complaining, I’m pointing out a strength here: you can fail. Accidentally or on purpose, it is not guaranteed you will find a bit of information or put things together, or not fuck something up in a way that you can’t come back from. But these are all, in a way, side quests towards getting home and/or killing Plague. The key point being there are things you can do to weaken him/his allies. Strengthen yourself. Help your allies. But the plot, such that there is (going home/killing Plague) doesn’t rely on the success of any of them.  Nicely done. A sandbox to run around in, ala a video game, in which the side-quests don’t FEEL like side-quests. (That’s, what, only the second time I’ve ever made a positive video game comparison? Vista Overviews in Fallout) And, I hope from the summary I’ve given its obvious that it is NOT obvious what you are supposed to be doing. There’s a line or two about someone carrying a token being given certain dreams and portents, but thats with a kindly DM feeding you the right dream.  You gonna have to figure shit out along the way. Noice! 

[ED: Tell everyone it’s a mudcore adventure. At least in vibe if not practice. That it’s this kind of, idk, romanticized low medieval period. Maybe a church belltower and manor but lots of hovels. Except, that’s not ACTUALLY what’s going on, what with an orphanage being present and so on. But that’s the vibe, the feeling of the place. Make sure and mention that this is, no doubt, achieved by leaning on several good bits of imagery and side references. “Hundreds of bird corpses dangle from the treetops, strung up with red woollen cords.” Well now, that’s given this thing a kind of grounded earthy vibe to things, yes? Use that as an example. This imagery that kind of tugs on a shared cultural myth and story. Too much Blair Witch or too much Turnip Princess? Or, this kind of an appeal to old school witchery “For each of them, she has made a poppet dolly (lh:332) in his or her image; the orphans carry their doll with them wherever they go. These items put them under the control of Granny Redwork. To free them, a character must cut the child’s hair out of the doll’s scalp and burn it.” And to be clear, Point out that Weapons came out after this. Oh, and make sure and mention Spoilers before you say that. And then finish by saying something like Tomorrowland is the future that never was. Nevernever land is the childhood we all remember, and this setting channels all of D&D Europe before the scientific method ruined everything. People eat that shit up]

You are all members of the gravediggers guild which is, I take it, the gimmick of the system, Doomsong. You’re a part of a guild and that’s a part of the game here. Once you find the local gravediggers guild (there’s a slight problem with a dead member of the signmakers guild …) then they give you a map of the region, with all locations already on it. The local guildmaster also has a series of tasks for the party to undertake, to get things moving. And then there’s also a little minigame of rebuilding the guild. You can take on roles like florist or chaplain or scribe, and you can expand the guildhall. Want to cut down the old hanging tree to use its wood to hasten construction! Great! You speed up by a week … and unleash a ghost. Oops. It’s kind of an interesting base idea, brining in ideas from the higher levels of D&D and maybe melding the a bit with base construction in modern video games. You know, build the granite carver studio and get XXX bonus. Most of it doesn’t feel videogamey at all though. It integrates pretty well, and is also not forced down your throat so you don’t have to engage in that aspect if you don’t want to. Then again, you gain the BOLSTERED condition if you plan your next outing at the Guildmasters planning table … The inclusion of a small down time mechanism is a nice addition. For a lot of games, the realism and immersion of the game is enhanced when the innkeeper has a name and, more importantly, is having an affair with the millers wife, which the party gets to watch unfold in real time in weeks as the campaign progresses. I don’t need a lot here, but if the players are plopping their asses down on a map that takes a week to cross, and which they will need to criss-cross several times, then we better have a little more to go on to help out for those moments of NOT sheer terror. I don’t need a fully developed town, that’s a waste. But these little idles add a lot in a longer game. (Which this is; see again, the map size.)

The Guildhall thing is interesting on several fronts. It also reveals more than little about some flaws in this booklet. Essentially, everything (wrong?) with Lord Have Mercy Upon Us can be seen in the Guildhall. I would specifically note the depopulated feeling (and not in a good way), the disconnected between various elements in the text, literally, and a kind of abstraction of detail that is particularly interesting given that this is 350 page adventure. 

Abstracted text is something I touch on frequently in reviews. Specificity is the soul of a narrative. It provides the color of the world, often a key to evocative writing. I quoted a section above about the dead birds hanging from the trees with red woolen cords. And yet you don’t want to drone on and on and on. We know what a kitchen looks like and what should be in a kitchen. A solid vibe for the forest is nice, to cement it, if needed, but we don’t need to drone on about it and not every forest needs more unless, perhaps, its a core part of the encounter, environment, or vibe you want to set. Too few is minimalism and too many is padding. We want to target something solid that gives that vibe and that the DM can then riff on well. This needs to be balanced against the degree of detail needed and the purpose of the description. The most basic example is the typical room/key format. A standard, for good reason, and yet not appropriate for all seasons. I most frequently cite the example of a village where the purpose is not going room to have an encounter. The village is used for a different purpose, so even though it might USE a room/key format it is clear that other things are important here. Likewise, there is a type of adventuring environment that doesn’t really need full blown descriptions. A dinner party at a mansion, or a ship that is not being explored can get away with some more basic and general descriptions, much closer to minimalism, because of this. It’s serving as a framework in which other things are going on, social or otherwise.

Which brings us to how this is described. Caste Lethe is one of the sites in the adventure, the home of the lord. What we can see from this a framework. Not a traditional room/key, although its laid out like that. And, yet, it almost certainly iS a traditional room/key exploration. No one is home. The party will be exploring this unknown environment just like any other dungeon they have invaded. But the descriptions are pretty utilitarian. Like I might expect if this castle were hosting a murder mystery or the ship the party is travelling on. The specificity is lacking in these. There is little here. Two entries, the Scarred Cook and Mouldering Bodies, get a little paragraph follow up, and you get some “Echoes”, ghostly vignettes, to toss in. (A diary, in essence, showing you what has happened and perhaps helping you understand that stomach lovers last meal, or, at least, might in some circumstances let you eventually jump to that conclusion.) But beyond that there is little here to base an adventuring locale  on. And I’m not talking about the standard loot, monster, traps, and specials framing. We can acknowledge that an empty ghostly castle, forlorn, with ghostly vignettes and a catatonic cook can be a thing. But there’s nothing to sell that vibe. We have almost, if not totally, generic descriptions. There is almost nothing n the way of help to the DM  to sell that forlorn vibe. This is hard, as a designer, to communicate your vision to a page in such a way that the a DM can pick it up and run it the way you envision. And, yet, that IS the goal of the designer. And this just doesn’t do that. It comes off as generic. Abstracted. And the adventure in play will suffer for it. You must inspire the DM with the environment. And that is not happening here. Evocative writing and specificity sells the adventuring locale. And this is the manner in which it feels like the majority of the locations are described in this. It is not the one-pager that has failed but the context in which the one pager is presented, along with the actual descriptions of the environments. 

It felt empty, yes? And that is the way this entire game world feels. This is an entire fiefdom, ripped from normal reality. Eight days to cross on foot in one direction and six days in the other. Lots of locations to visit. A gracediggers guild, with people in it, implying therefore that there are MORE people than are in the Gravediggers guild. And, yet, no one is home. But only the lords manor and a single village seem to be what we normally expect to find, and then only the village has a few people. Tavern, mayor, church, and … Dentist. Is it bustling? No idea. Full of disease? No idea. It indicates that there are hovels and the like, but the movements of peoples is strangely absent with almost no indication that they exist. Either in the village OR in the greater region. We shall ignore tha the plague doesn’t kill everyone, after all maybe THE plague does, but, still … bodies? None. Signs of the plague? None. People? Almost none. The entirety of this place is devoid of life. I guess that’s ok? I just find it a strange decision. Except, I don’t think it was a decision because of that village. I applaud spending your word budget on the bits that are important and dirt farmers are not important, but, still, you need to set the vibe of a place. Bodies in the streets? Paranoia? Cult vibes? People drinking bleach? Just a sentence or two and it would have been fixed. 

This extends somewhat to the actual encounters. I don’t know anything about Doomsong, the system, so it culd be that it takes a more … studied approach than Ye Normal D&D. But the encounters here are few and far between, and the chances for combat perhaps even less so. There might be one hostile per location, This isnt quite a Shadow of the Colossus situation, but it is a slower pace than most would be accustomed to, making Stargazer look like a hackfest. This doesn’t have to be bad, but, again, I think it doesn’t quite work here. If you’re going to have these slow build ups to these tension relieving moments, the combats, then you are going to actually have to have these slow tension build ups. And the adventure here, as I’ve stated time and again to the point of nausea, just doesn’t have the chops to support this. It’s almost minimalistic in its descriptive style. It is NOT supporting the DM in carrying these eerie, plague, tension filled build ups. Which just seems to be madness for a 350 page adventure.

There is a lot wrong, mechanically, as well. The Castle Lethe tv show, which is just a stand in for a diary. “The magpies (lh:266) nest in great numbers here. The Tithe Barn contains all property that has ever been stolen by this kind of bird” ala Hoard of the Dragon Queen, you will enjoy the lack of anything meaningful behind that statement. “The sound of bells reverberate for miles, audible as far as Castle Lethe when the wind is blowing northward. Their cacophony is constant, originating from the top of a stone tower in No-Fly Forest.” better to be told about this BEFORE I reach the belltower, yes? So the DM can add the build up? No? Not gonna happen? And there are a disturbing number of high death situations that come with no warning. High death is cool. But if it is seemingly random then the players that that there is no point. No amount of play will save them. And thus we lose buy in to life. (Hmmm … sounds too familiar?) You can’t just do a save or die party wide effect out of the blue. (At least not at this level. We can discuss the impact of divination on lowering the combat effectiveness of wizards by draining off their spell slots) It’s arbitrary, and arbitrary is not a good thing. 

Just two quick notes about formatting, beyond the whole “one pager” thing. I’m looking at the PDF version and it switches between spreads and single page. I fucking hate this. Zoom in, zoom out, fuck with the scroll bars. Not cool man. Pick a poison and go with it, nothing here dictates the need for a spread. And, then, there’s a fucking index. Thank fucking god! Designer of the year just for including that!

Again, a larger adventure with an interestingly large, and open-ended, scope. The pace here could be slower, with a mundane world suddenly punctuated by madness. In each. square. moved. But, also, not a whole lot to riff on well and sell the vibe. It intricate, and openended. And it relies a little too much on quest givers. The scale and the sparseness also works against it in way, as implemented. Plague, for instance, goes on rampages, as one dies, when the party destroys his tokens/shrines. Will you ever hear about the destroyed village thats a long way away? Consequences should generally be seen to be impactful to the game, just as decision points of importance should be clear. I think, perhaps, this is one of those cases where it might play better … the slow burn. But, also, in spite of the page count the resources for the DM to support a meaningful game world in a slow burn environment are generally not present. 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, showing the map that the players eventually get. Maybe more in the video? I don’t watch videos. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499568/doomsong-lord-have-mercy-upon-us?1892600

By Jim Pinto
Port World Games
Generic/Universal
Level- Ha!

The Valley of Brycshire has been infested with a foreign and strange problem for a quarter of a century. This alone is not unique to fantasy gaming. Most adventures start with, “There’s something rotten in Denmark.” But it is for this very reason King for a Day works so well. It starts simple enough with an errand or a missing woman, concepts PCs can easily understand and want to solve. The hook is baited and slowly they come to realize there are a lot of problems in Brycshire. Too many, in fact. And no one seems interested in fixing them. There are nonhuman tribes fighting a war no one can see. There are two groups of cultists, shockingly similar, yet with nothing in common. There’s a local Baron, unable to think straight and unconcerned with the impending extinction of his people. Underneath it all, keeping their intentions hidden, is the Dagon Cult. The cult is fixated on serving three masters who in turn serve a disguised god, who is lying to everyone, including the cultists and puppet masters. Every layer of the mystery is buried under another lie. The enemy at the end of the story is never named. Not in this edition and not in the previous one. I thought it was obvious who it was. But some people didn’t agree and fabricated endings I didn’t intend. And that lie makes me happier than any truth I could reveal.

This 373 page book attempts to paint a picture of a small region with a cult problem and many other intrigues. It is, instead, an unusable mess that spends a lot of time either touting itself or being purposefully ambiguous. 

This frequently comes up on lists of Best Adventures. I’m gonna assume this appealed to the Pathfinder Adventure Path crowd and that they were amazed to see a sandbox? Otherwise I just don’t understand why people think this is a good adventure. A quick google to learn its history instead turned up people say it was SUCH a good adventure or people saying something like “I’ve read through this book several times, made pages and pages of notes & scribblings, and have been working for over a year on bringing this into a playable adventure that I can DM for my group. All during this time, I have been wishing repeatedly that there was an index at the back of the book rather than all my Post-It page markers with notes on them sticking out everywhere around the edges of the book.” A lot of people seem to be saying how great this is … but there are not a lot of Played comments. This causes me to raise an eyebrow. Either this (Revised) edition fucked up the origional (as, say, kickstarted Rappen Athuk did), or peple are just reading this instead of playing it, or It Was A Radical Departure from the ham-fisted adventure paths at the time. This version, that I’m looking at right here, is not playable. There are some good sandbox adventures and many more acceptable or not terrible ones. I can’t see anything radically different in this one that would make it more appealing than those.

The region has a lot going on in it but the core of this is a cult playing the long game, poisoning the water supply, slowly turning the people apathetic. They just don’t care about anything anymore. And it’s not in a radical way, something obvious, but, if your kids go missing you should give a shit, yeah? They don’t. Parallels to the modern pharmaceutical industry and its pills, removing both the highs and the lows from list so everything is just kind of bleh? Well, no probably not. There are, listed, 39 storylines in this. 39 separate things/plots/etc going on that range from minor to full on campaign themes. There’s a lot going on here, probably too much even if the product was perfect. That does give the DM the ability to pick and choose and perhaps use this as the basis for SEVERAL campaigns, and it also means that a good deal of space was wasted in other circumstances. Although, I do think it would be fun to run this, like, three times, name changes and the like, dropping in different plot elements, all eventually ending in the same way/cult. “Jesus fucking christ! It’s the same campaign!” Always down for a good “appeal to the player not the character. I’ll speak to those later.

There are going to be many issues with this adventure, but the most immediately obvious is the conversational tone in the writing combined with the smugness of the designer. What A Clever Boy Am I gets real old real fast. And the designer speaks to the reader directly and frequently, if not continually. “The gamemaster must see everything at once. The PCs want to see everything at once, but the act of discovery is everything. The more the gamemaster knows and understands about the environment, the more she can ‘wing it’ when the PCs go off course. After all, a great percentage of roleplaying is improvisation, but sandbox play can be more demanding on a gamemaster’s freewheeling spirit. Gamemasters that aren’t comfortable with this style of play should map out each scene or segment of play ahead of time, drawing players through the story by the nose. And if this is your intention, I recommend not playing this adventure at all.” That the designer condescends to allow us his secrets is a great honor indeed! I suppose I could get over the smugness if it were not married to the conversational writing style. As a reminder, I’m looking for four things in an adventure: usability at the table, evocative writing, interactivity, and overall design. If you’ve really created a masterpiece of design then I can be forgiving in some of the other areas, and it’s an easy c- if you can use what you’ve created at the table. All stabbing is going to be frowned upon, generally, as is Victorian laundry lists rooms, extreme minimalism, and purple prose. Conversational text gets in the way of locating information in the adventure. I’m not dying on any hill; it’s theoretically possible that you could write an adventure using conversational text and that it will still turn ok. But possible and probably do not have the same definitions. Adventure writing is, at its core, technical writing. It MUST assist the DM in running it. That’s why it exists, its entire reason for existing. And the conversational writing leads to both padding of the text, making it harder to locate information, burying the important parts of text in surrounding walls of conversational tone, and a cognitive difficulty in parsing the text to pull out the portions you need for the game RIGHT NOW. I mean, you don’t seriously expect me to keep 370 pages of text in my head, right? I’m going to hit this again and again and again in this review. A book filled with underlines, highlights, post it notes, and separate notebooks of data and excel spreadsheets is not a success. It means that the designer has fundamentally failed in the core purpose of the adventure. I don’t care. It’s its written in iambic pentameter in inuit then, maybe, it shouldn’t fucking be written in iambic pentameter in inuit? 

Let’s talk storylines. Plots. Whatever. These start on page 290. Of 373. “Border Disputes” is a minor plot. It takes, oh, a page and a quarter to describe. Humanoid tribes have turf and they put up rocks to mark the edges of their turf. A border marker gets vandalized and no one knows the graffiti of the new tribe. A couple of villages are suggested as places remote enough for warring tribes to fight over. That’s it. There’s nothing else here. Oh, there’s preaching: “While this is not an important storyline, certain players come to expect combat with humanoid species as a staple of fantasy gaming. Border Disputes provides an organic method to introduce physical threats to the campaign. Without this storyline (and a few others), the gamemaster can ignore most of the humanoids in the valley, especially if it seems unlikely Brycshire could support so many creatures.” But anything else? That’s on the DM. This is, at best, a series of events in a better written adventure. But, hey, want to run it. Let’s turn to page 556, where the locations start. Hmmm, a footnote for “Abandoned Farms” on page 59 tells us that “Goblins from the Carrembarrow Hills have been spotted on the edge of Thursley Bog. Someone from Osathorpe travels to Halford in order to report it.” That seems useful. Ashley Forest is described starting on page 60. It has a small note about two tribes using the southern tip to trade, as well as a couple of other events related to the forest, a wild boy a dead orc, humanoid on humanoid ambush. Seems like something to remember. Ah! “Avendeep, a couple of sentences on page 64 about a locale in the forest. It has “another passage into the orc tunnels.” Basing Hall has a note about the Roughskin tribe nesting there occasionally. Ah, Carrembarrow Hills. “Border Disputes and Warring Tribes. The Carrembarrow Hills are

where problems start, but the valley floor of Brycshire is where most fights seem to end.” Seems like a major site to me. Ok, an hour later I’ve scanned the location, up to page 146 and noted the places where humanoid tribe shit happens. I have now reached the orc Caves” section. That’s nine locations over two pages for the Blood Eye Orcs. Regale yourself with “3. cave stairs Massive stairs are cut straight from the earthen cave, breaking through into the natural cave entrance above.” This is all generic content. Ok, lets see, page 160 is people, let’s scan that also. Ah! Blood Eye Orcs appear on page 174. Wait, no, they belong to a major plotline, not the minor warring tribes plotline. Ah ha! Page 176 are the Bog’gog, a small tibe of peaceful goblins. Led by Bez. Is there an entry for Bez? Lets flip back and check. Ah, yes, there is! /4 page to tell us he’s a pacifist. “He now understands the value of life and death.” Seeems lie that could be said in less than ¾ of a page, but what do I know? Ok, back to the Bog’ogog. Nothing relly good here. Ah, Broken Fangs on page 178, aggressive warline Gnolls. Led by Remmock, we’ll need to go look that up later. Another ¾ page to tell us about some gnoll names and other trivia, and that they will blame the tribe of eight in border wars. Ok. Ah, yes, page 249, their leader does have a separate entry. Hates Snygg. Better go look that up. “Alpha, Intelligent, Hunter” hat’s fucking boring. Hmmm, ok, lets grab a map, print off a copy and note the tribes on it and locations on it, maybe with territories? Seems like a good idea. Oh! Looks like page 51 has a list of factions and MAYBE the tribes are on it? Eight of them maybe? Ok, lets pop out the handouts PDF. It’s got all of the locations in it and who appears. Ashley Forest says “Duncan Fangrin Gnolls Gremock Spearfang Order Of The Serpent Snygg Tribe Of Eigt Viviene” Ok, some of those looks humanoid. Serpent? Oh, hmmm, those are hippies who dress up like snakes, not humanoids I guess. We can dig through the rest of these to try and find humanoid sounding names also. So, I’ve read everything, made by notes, stuck in post-its, and created maps and a kind of event timeline. I’m now ready, after a couple of hours, to include one of the more minor and throwaway plotlines! Yeah me! Remember this feeling. 

Obviously this is absurd. There is some kabuki regarding organization, cross references and the like, but it’s just that, kabuki. I don’t think it actually does anything to help you run this, or, mostly even, prep to run this. This is, likely, not an adventure. It’s a regional setting with a lot of suggestions and the possibility of a lot going on. It has, through its obtuseness, crossed the line from adventure and/or sandbox in to regional setting. And I don’t willingly pick out regional settings to review. I don’t know how to review fluff. 

As a regional setting the organization is still shit. But, clearly, you can see how this might be used as a starting regions for the players. They go about their business exploring dungeons and the like and the regicide, apathy, coups and other intrigues happen around them. That SHOULD have been how this was organized. It’s not though, there’s not nearly enough to the locales to support adventuring “down time.” 

Plus, there’s a very strong, explicit, Harn vibe going on. We are solidly anglo-saxon with this. Laets and Cnihts running around. You know what those are, right? How about compurgation? No? Shit is just thrown in to complicate things. This should have been a more generic setting instead of going hard core down the angle-saxon path. Yeah, it adds flavor. You’ve also got 30+ “storylines” to dump in. How much complexity do you want in a supplement? The hundred court. The shire court. All tools for you to use, but, also, not directly referenced anywhere in the adventure. COULD either of those show up as play elements? Yeah, there’s noble intrigue. Do they deserve all of the space they take up? No.

You can see why people got excited about this when it came out. And, even, why it might be interesting today. The scope here is quite large, with lots of people, places, and plotlines. And there’s always something quite impressive about these larger scope products. Rappan, Night Below, GDQ … the larger scope products have room to breathe. They are rare beasts and its hard to not be impressed when you see them. Even cynically, someone got it out the fucking door, no small feat in and of itself. You can FEEL the possibilities in these things, including this one, and that is a magnificent thing. If the purpose of fluff is to inspire then it got it right. I’m not sure it’s possible to pick this up and NOT feel that way. Time slips, but I suspect that in 2013 something like this would have been a revelation. Not just a single plot. Not just room bashing. A campaign in which to house your OTHER campaign. It’s in that weird category of a regional setting that has things to do. Not just geography and history, people and place names, useless trivia, but things that can happen. This is a dynamic home base. And that’s a great thing.

It’s also the case that this is pretty multifaceted. Once you wade through the self-aggrandizement and conversational tone, you get several levels to the plots going on. We’ve got the standard warring tribes thing, that I went through in detail. There are a few other things of this ilk going on, standardish humanoid trouble and the standard “normal” cult activity. Then we’ve got some politics; the dude in charge of the region is the Regent … and would to continue to rule. So we’ve got the spies, troops, noble shit going on, economic stuff. Then we’ve got the main troublemakers: the Dagon cult. Lots  and lots of things leading to this and lots of the humanoid and politics lead to this also. They have a subtle APATHY poison in the water supply, there are kidnappings, all sorts of machinations. A standard home base would have little of any of this, maybe some hand waving about orc tribes raiding and burned farmstead before you go off to stab them. Here it’s more integrated, and the consequences more integral. A great home base might have some politics in it. But, again, seldom to the degree this thing has, so we’re adding yet another level. And then there’s the real trouble in the region, the Dagon cult, underneath it all, doing their thing. Anywhere you dig in this you’re going to find something going on, from the straightforward to the subtle. The amount of actual fluff, beyond the anglo-saxon culture stuff, is at a minimum here, perhaps raising its head most prominently in the NPC descriptions. Again, the scope and layering here is impressive. 

There are few specifics here. What you get are outlines of things.Think of them mostly as events that could happen rather than locales, with a lot of unnecessary commentary and “questions for the DM”; how does the party react, what does Bjorn do, how they react is up to the DM. And the organization of the booklet, for that, is just no where near where it needs to be to run this effectively. Fuck me, it’s also nowhere near where it needs to be for a DM to just understand what is going on. The comments about a year of study with notes, highlights and post-its are spot on. 

I have led you down a path to a certain opinion, and no doubt several people have opinions. Let us consider that in view of (what I anticipate) to be the reactions of the last review of a similar product, Brink of Calamity. These are, essential, the same product. This booklets scope is substantially larger and Calamity is less of an series of plots and focused more on specifics. This is an outline format, almost a book of lists (a list of anglo-saxon terms. A list of NPC’s. A list of Places. A list of Plots) and Calamity beds more towards room/key. But they both require SUBSTANTIAL prep to get you to a home base type area that you can use with the party in the way in which they intend, rather than just stealing one or two plots. What for the difference? Other than circling the wagons for one and burning the other at the stake. 

I don’t see this adventure as being fixable at home; to do so would require a complete rewrite. You can steal parts, of course, but there’s nothing special here to steal, the magic comes from the depth, scope, and layering. An editor needs to eliminate the conversational style. The NPC’s need shortened immensely. The anglo-saxon/normal fantasy village shit needs to be cut; its flavour can be integrated in to the NPCs, places, and events. Cross references need to be prevalent. It’s needs a brief summary of the MAJOR plots, then a list of places with their plots in them/directly after them. This could be followed or preceded by the major area spanning plots. It needs a few other things also, like home base shit and some normal home base plots, Mike is having an affair with Mary the innkeepers dog, and so on. I know what a fantasy village looks like, I need the deets on the Mike/Mary thing and that Bill is a serial killer who worships the local orphanage. There should be an event timeline, or at least a suggestion if inserting things in a particular order in the background when the party if off on the other side of the region, so that when they come back they can see the school marm is missing, has been for a week, and none of the searchers can find her. Ignoring the socio-economic implications of what I’m about to say, if every megadungeon were scattered throughout this region, how do I drop some shit on the party in an effective way when they return to town, or pass through the village of Pigsty on their way to Stonehell? Oh, sorry, I mean when the party feahfang’s the local frith-borh to avoid the nithings being healsfanged by the gemot. It’s been a few years, maybe it’s time for a “You can actually use this one” edition on kickstarter?

And, quoting from the adventure, “And don’t be afraid to say, “There’s something really wrong here.” 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages and shows a portion of the second booklet, the handouts and people/places reference. That’s a really shitty preview of the adventure. The preview should give a potential buyer a view of the product in a way that they can make an informed purchasing decision once looking at it. And this don’t do that at all.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/112514/king-for-a-day-revised-edition?1892600