tenfootpole.org

By Brendan Barnett
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Lower Levels"

If legends of the Golden Gargoyle are true it could mean infinite wealth for any who possess it. Trouble is, nobody has a clue where to find it.  That is, until a goblin falls out of the sky with a pouch of gold dust and a map to a hidden cave, high in the mountains. What you can make out amongst the blood splatters is very promising.

This forty page adventure uses sixteen pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conflict cave full of goblins. It’s meh, mostly because it uses forty pages to describe eight rooms in a low-conlift cave full of goblins. 

Great looking little pdf. And I assume print book? Nice cover. Pretty little isometric map inside that is itself an art piece, like you might see as a two page special insert in Dragon or Mad Magazine. Nice illustrations and a layout style that looks pretty with its use of word color and boxes and highlights and so forth. And not garish, in spite of its use of pinks and purples. Nice accomplishment there!

Did you want to buy a coffee table book? Cause this is an awfully nice looking coffee table book.

It’s just real hard to take this seriously as an actual adventure given the page count to encounter ratio. Forty pages. Eight rooms. In spreads, of course. What is it that the designer wanted to do? DId they want to write an adventure or did they want to make a great looking book? Room one. This is all of the text on the first page of room one: A large rectangular chamber. In the centre a stone gargoyle statue sits atop a tall pillar with the word ‘umop’ roughly carved into it. The word ‘uado’ is scratched above each of two sealed stone doors to the north and west. The ceiling (30′ up) is covered in spikes. The floor is littered with broken bones. Searching the floor yields 10gp in assorted coins and a silver ring (40gp). It bears the image of a human figure immersed in a river.” There’s some line breaks in there. The second page has open and down in normal and reverse print. Yeah, the words are mirrors and one opens the doors while the other does an anti-gravity. Two fucking pages. Two fucking pages for this. And this is the norm for the adventure. Simple rooms, spread out over two pages.

We can, I suppose, ignore this. We can simply accept that the designer decided two pages per room. What we get, then, is eight (or nine, for an A/B room) are some relatively simplistic rooms. The interactivity here is basic. I’m pretty sure there’s one ‘fight’, with Vampire Kinght[sic] Armour. Nobody present really cares that you are nosing around in the caves. I can’t help but think that this could have been much better i it were larger. The goblins, cultists, bats, tomb, all with zones in the dungeon, expanding the thing to something with more going on and room for the adventure to breathe. 

The language used, for the room descriptions. Is rather plain. A large rectangular room. THis is not the height of language use to evoke imagery. The exception is the isometric map. It’s a pretty great art piece, harkening back to all of those Bat Cave and Hall of Justice isometric pieces from comics, or, the Starship Warden piece I have hanging on my call. Very evocative, but not exactly something you can run from. (There is a more traditional map as well, to run from, the isometric piece not being the most clear on room connections.) 

I can’t say it’s true or not, but it certainly FEELS like the isometric map was the starting point of this adventure. As if it were created and then the rooms followed on. Like the adventure, proper, was secondary to this and/or inspired by the art piece. That doesn’t have to be bad, but in this case the adventure just doesn’t feel worked enough. 

It remains interesting to me the many ways that the various subcultures produce bad adventures. Starting from bland, or assembly line, or wordy, or mini combats, or rote, or art, or layout, or, or, or.

https://pocket-sized-perils.itch.io/grotto-of

This is $5, Aussie, at Itch.io

By John Webb
Self Published
OSR/5E
Level 2

[…] Years later, a band of opportunistic brigands took shelter in the manor ruins. In the depths below, their leader, Halren Pike, discovered the dagger and fell under its influence. Compelled by its will, he now seeks out elves and half-elves, testing their blood in search of a surviving bastard heir to House Thalanor. Though the bandits themselves are not uniformly cruel, their leader’s fixation has led to kidnappings, imprisonment, and worse. Some captives are released after being “tested.” Others are not so fortunate.

This twenty page adventure uses about seven pages to present sixteen rooms, six above and the rest below, in the ruins of a manor occupied by bandits. It’s a tactical deathtrap as your small band charges in to a mesatop fortress with a lot of lookouts and bandits present. It’s a raid, with nothing going on beside that. 

I dunno know. Either the designer asked for a review or it was in the OSR category trying to Puffery its way in to a few more sales. Ok, so, a long time ago there was an elf noble house that was mean to its subjects. People rise up and the lord kill himself and his family when things go south. His god is pissed at that. (So, you can be a despot and have a chill god but killing yourself and family so you won’t be taken is just a step too far.) Bandits move in a long time later. Their leader finds a dagger, cursed, that makes him test elves and half-elves by cutting them to see if they are the heirs to the elf noble house. This entire nonsense of stuff I find lame, with despotic elf nobles and the like. Man, just make them human. The whole “Demihumans are humans with pointy ears” thing is kind of lame. Where’s Jorune when you need it?  

Back to this, the designer tells us, up front: “With a mere sixteen rooms, this adventure’s complexity lies not in a vast sprawl, but more so in the behavior of its inhabitants and the unpredictability of its emergent narrative. Will the party fight, bluff, negotiate, or sneak their way into the lower level? Will they seek a peaceful resolution, or simply kill all in their path? Will they rescue prisoners at the expense of time and stealth, or leave them to an unjust fate? These are the questions that must be answered, Gamemaster, over the course of play. Alas, I cannot prescribe them nor would I, even if I were so capable! “  Just to be clear, none of that really exists in any practical manner.  I mean, yes, there are prisoners to rescue, but they are not really troublesome other than wanting to leave, just like all prisoners freed are. Nothing mentioned in that section is anything other than the normal course of play. Nothing special is going on. In fact, there’s a lot less special in this adventure than in most adventures. I don’t know. I guess if you play Napoleonic Miniatures and someone introduces a dungeon it might be remarkable, so, if you play D&D in hardcore 4e tactics mode then “Look! You can roleplay also!” might be interesting? 

“Wood Door: AC 13, 18 Hit Points, and immunity to Poison and Psychic damage.” Oh, how I have missed this nonsense. There’s nothing funnier than then when pay-per-word padding becomes the de rigueur standard because people grow up with it. But doctor… I am Pagliacci!. And, of course, married to that are explicit illumination notes in each room. This is so dumb. I’m not sure who these things are being written for that this kind of garbage has to be included. Well, no, I guess I stated it above. It’s written for someone paying by the word. But the designer writing THIS adventure doesn’t know that. They think that’s how you write an adventure. The sins of PF Changs Pad Thai run deep. That’s not real Pad Thai, but you don’t know that. Once you have the real thing you’ll never be fooled again. 

This is a frontal assault. There are nineteen bandits present, but six start not-at-home and return 10-40 minutes after the party starts fucking shit up. There’s not a super good description of the outside ruins environs, but from the map it looks like a cliff face with a landing on it ten or twenty feet up with fortress ruins on it. There’s a broad stair case up running parallel to the cliff face that then turns 90 degrees to run perpendicular to in to it. There are the remains of three watchtowers on the cliff “landing” ruins. There’s a bandit in the towers watching the approaches. There’s guard dogs sniffing shit out. The bandits have planted shriekers on the “unused” cliff edges as an alarm bell. There’s also a patrolling bandit, watching specifically the approach of the stairs, walking along the cliffside it is on looking for intruders. I’m afraid this is a tough nut to crack, even for my “burn it down and reroute the river method of murder-hoboing. There is a 10% chance a guard is asleep. Yeah? And, there is a secret door in. Right in playing view of all of the guards, on the stair landing where it turns 90 degrees. You gonna have to search for it and then make a history check at DC14 to recall the password. I don’t see how you do this under the guards’ noses. This all seems a bit much at level two. Well, for anything other than a pitched battle. Which is fine, but, it looks like a death trap to me with that approach. You could silence the shriekers … if you knew about them? And had access to level two spells? The secret door doesn’t seem reasonable. I guess that leaves bluffing your way to the top? I don’t know man. This feels like a hack … with the odds stacked against the party.

Inside it’s more of a hack, although not quite in the same “its a trap!” set up. There IS a curse you can break. You need to make an offering to a goddess of the correct type. Then commune with here. Then make a DC14 check. Then you’ll get a scroll that of remove curse. Then you gotta figure out that there IS a curse on the bandit leader and use the scroll. Yeah! Now they are just a normal group of bandits instead of a group of bandits that also “test” elves and half-elves by cutting them. Uh. Ok? Or, just stab the bandits? Oh no! The bloodthirsty demon has acne! Good thing you have him some zit creme, now he can get on with his reign of terror AND look good for his portraits! 

None of this shit makes much sense, and, it’s just a hack. I have no idea why it is in the OSR section of DriveThru. Usually that means Shadowdark, but not this one. I mean, it’s basically just a 4e adventure. And you KNOW that’s not a compliment. More minis combat min-maxing then RPG.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview gets you eight real pages, including some keys. Good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/564113/the-ruins-of-manor-thalanor?1892600

By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR/Rovers & Riches
Level ??

Even the most ignorant children know the realm is divided by a massive, transparent wall. Everything outside the wall is “normal.” Everything that lies inside is “wrong.” The “wrong” lands are called Zu. Today, we take a field trip into strangest Zu…

This 35 page decently-sized hexcrawl adventure presents a bunch of hexes in Zu, a weirdo land full of bizarre things going on in a fantasy/post-apoc/PoMo mashup. The hexes can be interesting and are certainly creative, but they lack tension.

Let’s call this a farcical Rifts setting. A giant glass wall separates the Normal lands from the Weirdo place beyond the wall, which everyone calls Zu. There’s a break in the wall at Happy Town, to let you in. Tonally, a giant mecha made of junk is on the wanderers table and is described as “It powered by a dozen subjects running on human treadwheels. Six troopers (p. 24) with scoped rifles float from balloons lashed to the giant’s shoulders, poised to rain down leaden death.” 

This thing has a niche audience and it’s not me. And I mean this in two regards. First, the setting. It might be closest to that 4e D&D version of Gamma World, the Paranoia Zap of gamma worlds. Those things like Troika and Mork Borg come to mind as well.There is a strong element of absurdity here, maybe even Theater of the Absurd if I get a little meta. There’s an old school with a janitor in it and a teddy bear that needs stories read to it. Or, a water slide aqueduct trickling water to an empty pool where cleric chicks covered in sponge suits dole out the water to bedraggled people standing in line ala Fury Road. Happy Town itself is ruled by a little twilight zone Anthony with a wand of transmutation who turns people in to stuff if she doesn’t get her way, so the people there only make candy and cakes and force smiles here in Peaksville. Tonally, you’re going to have to be ok with this kind of content being your game if you want to use this, and I suspect the more niche sides of the OSR are where this is aimed. You not gonna be happy with this if you don’t like zaniness.

I’m struggling to find a way to frame this second point. There is, in my mind, a difference in game play in certain systems. D&D, of the classic OSR style, leans more towards a game. You are typing to stay alive and level. There’s an inherent tension in that, and staying alive and leveling is ‘winning’ at D&D. It lends itself to campaign play well since there is continuity, your character. This is one of the reasons that ‘museum adventures’ are so frustrating to me; you are actively discouraged to interact, which works against what you are playing. Other RPGs fall more in to an Activity. Baron Muchausen is the classic example. Your enjoyment comes from something different. And that, I think, is where this adventure lies.

The hexes in this have two general types of encounters. First there are some filler hexes, making up about half of the hexes. Short, with only two-three sentences, they provide some flavor. A hex full of wines, walking through them wakes them up, and they feel the party members and pat them on the back before opening up to allow them to pass. Freaky? Absolutely. But nothing else going on.

The second type of hex, representing the other half of the hexes, take about a page or so each. There is more text and whats happening is more involved. But, i would assert, to the same end. There’s nothing really TO DO. Oh, you can get involved, but why? Touching things and getting involved brings trouble. And there’s not really anything to exploit, as one might in a traditional hex crawl game. If you were just trying to interact to have a good time then you’re chill, yeah, freaky things will happen. But no one is going out out their way to gack you (other than perhaps the wanderers) and there’s not really treasure to loot to exploit, at least in a traditional sense. Some of the hooks DO send you on the hunt for something. Happy Town wants you to go get a candle. Ok, so, I guess we can explore and look for that. SOme hexes ARE mentioned in other hexes, but they are not really interconnected, either explicitly or, I would assert, implicitly, in that you can, say, break the dam in hex X to flood the orc caves in hex Y, or some other wacky scheme that the party were to come up with. You enter a hex, have a wacky encounter, and move on to repeat.

For the more Activity-based RPG”s this is going to be a great adventure. I think it serves everything they need to get in to wacky situations. But for a more campaign/game based game I’m not sure its overly useful. (Not that you can’t campaign Mork Borg or Troika or DCC, but I don’t think it works out that way in practice.) 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. PWYW and then preview is the entire thing, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/483434/field-trip-to-zu?1892600

By Jason Youngdale
Youngdale Productions
DCC/OSR
Levels 1-2

Long ago, beneath the fertile valleys south of Castle Dragonwater, a minor baron swore fealty to the Starved King, a demonic entity of hunger. In exchange, the baron’s land flourished with endless crops and fattened livestock. When the baron died, his descendants sealed the King’s shrine in terror—but the hunger below never ended. Now, farmers near Horndale report crops rotting overnight and livestock turning feral. Strange lights flicker in the old Granary Hill Mound, and the smell of roasted meat fills the night air. The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic banquet once and for all.

This twenty page adventure uses about four pages to describe twelve boring rooms of boringness using single-column formatting. Here are words that should be a contradiction: it’s a boring DCC adventure.

The turn of the millennia was an exciting time in RPG’s.the 3.0 explosion, indie RPG’s everywhere. I remember Polaris. Or, rather Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North. Conflict can be ended by someone saying “Thou are but a warrior …” Yeah, that’s tragedy all right. Your force of arms can do nothing here to resolve things. Noice! You know ol Brycy Bryce loves some human relatability and complexity in his game. Not to punish the party for wrong choices but to muddle the affairs of the way the word REALLY works in to an RPG and still have it be fun. Let us imaging, though, after saying this the party then stabs the NPC. And then they go all Lancelot-at-the-wedding and stab the king, queen, prince, half-brother, wedding guests, and everyone else in a ten mile radius. Ha! Damn skippy I’m a warrior biatch! I’m not sure that one is playing Polaris then, even though you might be using the Polaris rules. Blah blah blah its art is the creator calls it art blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s lost the point of Polaris. 

And thusly this adventure and DCC. Let us imagine a DCC adventure with three 30×30 rooms in a row. No doors. 4 orcs in each room. Each room is otherwise empty. Is this DCC? It’s stat’d for DCC. Does that make it DCC? Sure. But it has lost the point of what a DCC game is. What is it, Mighty Deeds or something, where you can describe using what’s in the room to do cool shit? That’s the point of DCC. It makes cool shit happen. The halfling, the thief, the mage, the fighter, they are all built around making cool shit happen ORGANICALLY. The person has an ability, but the environment and set up is there for the party to riff on. The designer takes us to the McDonalds PlayPlace and the fighter drowns someone in the ball pit. Except. What if there is no ball pit? Or slide. Or anything else. It’s just an empty room. I’ve played in DCC games like this at cons and the difference is marked. 

Examining this adventure, room 1 save or vomit. Room 2 save or eat dirt. Room 3 is a ghost kitchen with nothing to use to fight in. Room 4 has a banquet table to fight in. Room 5, finally, is larder is hanging hooks to fight in. Room 6, pantry of jars to fight in. Room 7 had a bed to fight in. Rooms 8 and 9 have nothing but saves. You get it. There’s is little to build on here. What the fuck am I supposed to Might Deed in a ghost kitchen in which nothing is real? The banquet table isnt fucking stupendious but at least it has a table, and the same goes for the larder, at least there are hooks with shit hanging on them. Not exactly a complex environment but at least its SOMETHING. 

And the save rooms. Ug. Save or vomit. Save or eat some dirt. These have no meaningful impact on the game. It’s window dressing. Just a reason to roll dice. It’s fucking lame. 

The locals are starving, crops withering, livestock fading away. “The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic …” WHat about them? DId they try and fail? No? We don’t care about them? Because we don’t care about the adventure? It’s just a flimsy pretext for a VERY lightly themed “hunger” dungeon? Yeah, I know, because it comes off like that. There’s no immersion here. All these pages. Nothing.

“Giant rats could also be in this room, waiting to attack any intruders.” Wonderful. “Four ghouls here jerk their heads sharply as you approach.” Great, embedded tenses in the summaries. “This appears to be a” Padded out wording. It’s only four fucking pages rooms and it’s still padded out. 

Nothing to see. Move along. Move along.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is the first three pages and shows you nothing but the credit and table of contents. You can’t make a purchasing decision based on that, so it fails at being a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555500/the-banquet-of-the-starved-king?1892600

By Taron Pounds, Lawrence Schick
Landof the Blind
OSR
Levels 5-10

Three relics have been stolen from their owners, and worries have spread about the power one person would have with all three in their possession. Word of a substantial reward for their return spread, with a poem as the only clue. 

This 36 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe the eighteen rooms of White Plume Mountain. A homage/updated version with the serial numbers scrubbed off, it is trying hard on the ease of use front but loses the charm of White Plume by under-describing. 

I’m down with the overall goal here. Updating some of the classics to improve upon them seems like a fine idea. I mean, I still have several Dungeon adventures on my ToDo list to overhaul and update for when watching paint drying becomes too exciting for me. As an experiment to understand layout and formatting and what’s important I think it’s an interesting idea. It also gets some eyes on older adventures, many of which forged new conceptual ground. And then also I suspect time would be better spent on new adventures, but, who am I to tell someone how to spend their few remaining precious moments of life? There’s another aspect to this as well: the system-neutral thing. It’s not really system-neutral, it’s aimed at D&D-like systems, with stat blocks to prove it. I’ve never really found a problem using adventures for other systems in whatever I’m running (which is generally B/X based with a heavy bend to oD&D) however I suspect there is a certain market limitation, or advantage, to saying “Works with Mork Borg!” in any event, I think this is the proper way to do it; stat it for a B/X as the foundation of most systems follows, and then note what it can be used/adapted for. Perhaps a little disingenuous in the marketing, but, meh, at least you planted a stake in the ground. 

It’s pretty obvious what they doing with the formatting. Bolding, bullets, icons, headers and so on. There’s a little intro section, a few sentences or so with some bolded words and then some bullets to follow up on those. The icons are probably overkill, meant to tell you “this is a trap” or “this is a monster.” All in all, I think there’s too much here. The pages end up busy and your eyes tend to glaze over a bit. This is a not uncommon problem in some adventures. Folks recognize that formatting and layout can bring clarity but they they take it too far and it can contribute to obfuscation. If everything is important then nothing is, or something similar to that saying. I’m going to list the lighting condition, door, stone texture, etc in every room, would be a similar problem. No. You have to craft these things carefully. Adventure design, or, room formatting and layout, is not a one size fits all issue. You can have go to techniques but you have to use them carefully to highlight certain aspects to bring clarity. When something becomes rote and is generically applied then it can lead to problems. 

But the major problem here is that this comes off more than a little soulless. There was a charm in White Plume that came through and this doesn’t feel like it has that. This feels like a bunch of rooms with challenges in it and little else whereas White Plume had just a little bit more going on to ground the rooms and encounters. S2 has a rather mangy and bedraggles sphinx squatting in the water. This, however has “a sphynx stands on the other side” [of the forcefield.] This has six globes of silver dangling from the ceiling, with bullets for their contents. S2 had silvered glass globes dangling from the ceiling on unbreakable wires, that a good crack would shatter, dumping their contents in to the muck below. It’s a much fuller picture and paints a much more evocative scene than just a mostly fact-based list of the challenges in the room. And this is not cherry picking, it happens over and over again. I ofton encourage folks to think about the room, devoid of mechanics, and create it, then adding mechanics, instead of the mechanics leading the charge. This is how we get the slim strands they hang from and the good crack and the dumping the contents in to the muck. Further, we can see a word choice in S2, spartan but present, that brings this room to life, and that just isn’t present in this adventure respin. While we do get the “silvered” globes, it feels like an extra adjective was just thrown in for the sake of having one rather than painting a complete and evocative picture of the room.

I do like the cover, but that art style is one I find personally appealing. And an attempt is made at the wanderers, with the gargoyles flying a corpse somewhere, for example. It lists factions, but, these are not really factions with a factions game and things they want, it’s just a list of major monsters. I not, also, there is a disconnect between the text and the supplementary pointcrawl map. (The adventure has a “real” map also.” The pointcrawl map point out rooms with the mucky water in them, but it disagrees with the text on rooms 13/14. No so great when the reference material is off. 

So, it’s White Plume, explicitly, with updated text and layout and the serial numbers filed off. But the updated text has removed the specificity that brought White Plume to life. Thus, it is just the wacko room challenges boiled down to mostly mechanics. And that’s not the vibe I’m looking for in an adventure. 

This is $5 at Drivethru. The preview is the whole thing. Yah! Great preview. I might suggest checking out page ten of the preview/page six of the product. That is the Globe room. I think it encapsulates the formatting/layout and the derth of specificity in the descriptions.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/561058/ghost-crest-peak?1892600

By The Crafty DM
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3

Arriving with little coin and no reputation, the player characters must earn their place through action, not titles. The town is wary, its people practical, and its problems real. Strange signs gather along the docks, the nearby wilds grow unstable, and something stirs beneath the waterline. Through investigation, negotiation, and hard-earned victories, the party builds trust with the townsfolk while uncovering the first threads of a larger danger.

This 39 page adventure presents three mostly scripted fights mini-quests in a small fishing town. They follow a pretty rigid outline with some kabuki of interactivity that amount to monologue, fight, monologue. It seems to have some U-series overtones. 

We’re not starting out strong with this one. The pretext here is that the party is new to town and they have to do a bunch of mini-quests to gain the town’s trust. Then, in another module in the series the town will trust them enough to give them an actual task.This strikes me as aking to the asshole quest-giver tropes who treats the party like shit and still expects them to run errands. The implicit assumption is that you can treat the PC’s like shit and that they have no free will. Yes, we all want to play D&D tonight but how many hoops do we need to jump through before they just go somewhere else to seek their fortune? The party has free will. This is followed up with bythe designer with a comments “Not all of these quests are presented with full detail in this module. This is intentional, allowing you to tailor certain tasks to the personalities, abilities, and backstories of your players.” I see this sometimes in adventures. This is inevitably NOT a sealed off passage for the DM to expand upon. It is instead getting ahead of criticism by saying the flaws exist on purpose. The whole It;s Up To The DM To Bring Life To The Game thing. Which, while true, ignores the central tenant of adventure writing for others: you’re supposed to be helping the DM out. Leaving a sealed off passage is great. Flaws in execution are not.

You’re in town, arriving in a bar in the opening read-aloud. What follows is a series of mini-quests that all follow the same outline. Some comes up to you to ask you to do something. You talk to them. You go to a location and maybe roll some dice in a performative way to “investigate.” You get in a fight. You talk to the person who gave you the quest. I know, this sounds kind of like the platonic outline of a quest, but, the difference is that this is three scenes. Someone runs to get you. You talk to a fisherman and look at a body and talk to an old lady. You might roll some dice to look at a body. You go back to the docks at night (I hope …) and get in a fight. You talk to more people the next morning and are told you did a good job. You talk to someone about a druid. You go looking and fight some woodland beasts in three waves. You talk to the druid and do the performative thing. It’s all a really simple pattern here. 

There is nothing really to fail, except I guess the combat. If you don’t do the thing you are railroaded in to then you’re instructed to modify the end monologue but to keep the arc going. On the docs, the Sea Devils you fight are looking for the body you examined, and that get stolen no matter what you do. I guess if you have it strapped to your chest and chained to you it still gets stolen? 

It’s just so … obvious? Low effort? Read a bunch of text. Lots of read-aloud and lots of italics. Everything just follows along the “plot” without any deviation, no matter your actions. Your actions and die rolls don’t really matter. What’s the point of this? 

It’s just a railroad of an adventure with a VERY simple outline of a pattern that repeats. I mean, again, I get it. We;re playing D&D tonight. But the meaninglessness of it all. Rolling dice for no reason. No pretext of choice at all. Yes, the DM can fill in and bring it to life. But you have to give them something to work with.

A haunted house on a hill. Sea Devils Lizardmen, The house in this is red herring, not even really covered. The lizardmen are friendly. But it’s the same elements as the U series. It’s fine, I guess. You get to reimagine and respin the classics. Well, if done right. And this isn’t done right. Perhaps the platonic example of a low-effort adventure that one might throw together on the back of a napkin in three minutes before the game starts?

There is no price of trust in the adventure. And I’m not sure I’d come back for anothe rgame if this were the campaign kickoff.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There is an annoying youtube promo. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563326/sinister-secrets-the-price-of-trust?1892600

By Nicole Mattos, Icaro Agostino, Davide Tramma
Angry Golem Games
OSE
Levels 2-4

After being denied recognition as the supreme lord, Severo cursed the region, bringing a devastating drought to the Village of Rangdum. In desperation, a Council of Elders performed a forbidden ritual, sacrificing a young woman who became a Rusalka, bound to preserve the lake through a hidden artifact deep beneath its waters. After being denied recognition as the supreme lord, Severo cursed the region, bringing a devastating drought to the Village of Rangdum. In desperation, a Council of Elders performed a forbidden ritual, sacrificing a young woman who became a Rusalka, bound to preserve the lake through a hidden artifact deep beneath its waters.

This fifteen page document is the outline of an adventure, in which most of what’s presented doesn’t make much sense given two seconds of thought about it. It’s just the usual low effort crap that gets churned out. 

Ohs Nos! People are disappearing down by the lake! There’s singing coming from the lake. Nobody knows whats going on! People are moving out! The village is dying! Blah Blah Blah. No one mentions that the villagers sacrificed a young woman awhile back. To the lake. To keep the lake fruitful. 

There are some timeline issues here. It’s not really apparent how long ago the sacrifice took place. It’s implied, and stated in one place I think, that the Council of Elders are the only ones who remember. But, also, how long as chickcula been doing this? Since day one? Did it start suddenly? Did the lake go from Dying to Healthy But You Never Approach It Or She Kills You in like two hours? None of the backstory makes any sense, which is gonna make an investigation pretty difficult to conduct. Oh, also, the lake is, I think, called “Cursed Lake.” Anyone? Anyone? No? No ideas? Ok, gee, I don’t know then, why people are disappearing in to the lake called Cursed Lake, that you hear singing from, that the elders know they sacrificed a young virgin to for prosperity. 

Not that it hatters, there’s not really anything to investigate. The Council of Elders are not mentioned in any detail, even by name, and  have no personality other than NEVER talk about the sacrifice. No one in the village has a name or personality. There’s a short six entry rumor table of abstracted information but that’s it. There’s one dude, in a cabin, a level five magic user who shoots lightning bolts at you and then sleeps the entire party and captures them. He’s the only one with a name, or any information. He’s also extremely paranoid, so, you know, good luck with that. 

Besides the MU cabin there’s also an abandoned tower i the wilderness. It gets no map, just a text description like “On the first floor of the Tower there is a guard room, along with a small fireplace and a spiral staircase.” and so on. PUT IN A FUCKING MAP!!! Jesus Christ, the effort is minimal. Just stop phoning it in and do it. 

Not that I would suggest wandering too much. The table has things like 1d6 wraiths on it. Civilization this is not. If they don’t get you then the bears will. This is a rough table to put right outside a town that you NEED the party to push through to explore. Oh, fuck, did I mention that the hook table is a 1d4 table? Fucking people who don’t understand the point of a table in an adventure. I guess its just de rigueur these days to slap a table in for this, nit that it matters, it just irks me. 

It’s an EASL adventure, I’m pretty sure, and that’s ok. There’s an awkward turn of phrase here and there like “The sight of the Village is devastating.” There’s no real expansion on WHY the sight of the village is devastating, just it looks a little abandoned. I am going to say this is NOT an EASL issue, but rather a general adventure writing issue, not providing any descriptions that are concrete, specific, etc.

At some point, I think maybe in the Lake entry, there are notes on how to kill the monster. Like a stab its shadow with cold iron sort of thing. We are told we can learn this trick from the council of elders or the MU. But, would it not be better to put that information in the entry of the place we learn it from? 

The adventure is rife with these sorts of basic disorganization issues. With missing descriptions. With a lack of specificity that would tie things together and bring it alive. This is just a hand wave of text balh blah blah monster in the lake blah blah blah. It’s just an idea of an adventure, some napkin notes that don’t really introduce anything interesting to the “lake sacrifice” genre. I think I’m done with the Angry Golem for awhile, especially since their liner notes say that their adventure have been well received. These designers to write this. Pffft.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The review is eight pages and doesn’t really show you anything of note. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563628/fortnightly-adventures-7-the-singing-lake-ose?1892600

By Martin Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A. Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Levels 2-3

They can’t see you. They don’t need to. A colony of blind, grotesque predators has infested an abandoned temple deep inside a canyon. They hunt by sound. They move in packs. And they’re starving.

This thirty page adventure uses about fourteen pages to describe seven rooms. Obviously long-winded and padded out, you kill a few monsters. Also, it’s not dark.

Oh lop-sided page count, where have you been? I’ve missed you. Look, I get it, PDF pages are “free”; you’re not paying to print them. Why not put in a bunch of appendices, and lead in, and backstory, and everything else? It’s free! Academically, I agree. But, in practice, what I see time and time again is a poor adventure with a low “core” page count with a whole lot of extra information. While a bit hyperbolic, one must ask oneself, is the designer interested in writing an adventure or ar they interested in world building and the adventure is just a pretext for that? Again, I don’t care if you world build. I don’t care if the page count ration is one adventure page per one hundred pages of backstory. But if you’re selling me an adventure then it had better be a ROCK. FUCKING. SOLID. Adventure. And it almost never is. The designer is distracted by the fluff. They spend their effort there instead of in the core adventure text. What pops out the other end is just another crappy adventure surrounded by a bunch of backstory and appendices. Who would like to guess if this is in the one in a thousand adventure in which there is a lot of fluff and a solid adventure? We all know the fucking answer already. You have to AGONIZE over the adventure text. It should be the best possible, that you are capable of (… ) and more. 

Ok, so, we’ve got some eyeless creatures in a cave. There’s a long backstory here about bandits, a holy order, orcs, and so on but all that really matters is that there are eyeless creatures in a cave. They hunt by sound. This whole “shrieks in the dark” thing doesn’t really matter. They can use a sonic attack, but the party is never limited on light. So, you’re just stabbing some monsters in a cave. The central conceit, of these creatures who can hunt without sight, is never capitalized on. We get long monster ecologies (in fucking italics …) who nothing about them putting out lights, etc. So, you’re fighting 5HD orcs in a cave that have a sonic attack. 

Room descriptions average a couple of pages each. There’s no need for that. Nothing that interesting is going on. “The disc was collected by the Shrieklings along with other debris from the caverns and has no special significance to them.” Great. You want me to etll you about the pile of shit I collected this morning? It has no bearing on anything, so why not? Backstory, meaningless trivia. Overexplained things. “The Shrieklings’ thick, mucus-coated skin produces a scent that naturally repels the barracuda, allowing them to swim and hunt freely.” Explanations on ecology. Great. That’s not coming up during play, so it’s a great thing it’s in there clogging up the descriptions (as my aforementioned shit this morning may have the toilet?)  These are simple rooms with simple interactivity that are just padded out in what amounts to a wall of text. Bullet point up the main issues, but if the bullet is half a page then what’s the point? Sixty some words to describe “+4 to move silently when within 15’ of the waterfall.” 

The designer notes that this is inspired by the a Dungeon Design Framework. Monsters have patterns and routines, etc. There are a couple of charts to help with the monsters wandering patrol paths. I’m not saying they are wrong, but they are poorly done, not noting the creatures locations. Just dots and blips that you must then interpret and expand on. Hooks are all “you are hired to “ nonsense. And, in particular, the claim that “Inside, you’ll find tightly written areas built around meaningful encounters, and systems that keep the dungeon active between player actions.” would not be true. Tightly written. Meaningful encounters. I think not.

This is likely the last Cubas review, joining Mohr, Filbar, Elven Tower and the rest.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. Meaning nine pages of background/fluff/intro and one that starts to show the first room. (There’s another full page of room one info.) Take a look at that Gannt chart like thing. The blue and reds could be handled much better to show current location, not moves. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/563481/c-c-shrieks-in-the-dark-c-c-edition?1892600