tenfootpole.org

By Franklin Hicks
Self Published
Shadowdark
Levels 1-3

A small village at the base of the mountain holds a terrible secret. Unknown to all but the village elder and the Shrine Keeper the villages goddess, Adeva, is actually a devil. Each year an innocent is sent to the mountain shrine to ‘join’ the Shrine Keeper. When the truth is they are destined to be a sacrifice to the devil.  This years sacrifice, a dwarven boy named Orik, escaped the Shrine Keeper and fled into the mountain. Edwin Swift, the village elder will ask the players to venture to the top of the mountain to find the boy and return him to the mountain shrine. Little does he know that soon the Shrine Keeper will be dead and the villages secret on the cusp of being revealed!

This seventeen page single column adventure details a small dungeon with eleven rooms. Some nice ideas in this one, and a touch of or or evocative writing. It never goes goes far enough, though, in its writing or the logical consequences of things in order to bring the place to life.

This thing has some decent ideas in it, rather than just being another throw-away. The premise here is a village full of goody goodies. They live by a strict code of charity, asceticism and devotion to their protector goddess. Really good people, the way you wish religious people were. I mean, we can argue about the asceticism part, but, otherwise, you get the idea that we’ve got a nice little village here, and they truly like to help others. As a player this would SO set my teeth on edge. I’m ready to be drugged and wicker-manned and because of that I’m ready to start slitting throats and burning shit down on a hair trigger. And that’s a good thing. You’ve manipulated the PLAYERS through an in game thing. They are invested, and that can be quite rare indeed. Oh yeah, once a year they send a kid up to the mountain shrine to join the others up there in their Adeva religious order. KLast kid, though, got scared and ran off. Maybe you could help find him? 

Really solid foundation there. And, like so many other things in this adventure, that really solid foundation is going to be fucked up by the designer. Subverting expectations, or appeals to imagination abound … but then are generally drug through the much of traditional RPG tropes, ruining things. 

The kid is a little dwarf kid, and he’s run in to a kobold sorcerer … with a backstory. Great. So, look, we all recognize all of that shit as crap, right? It’s some kind of fucking excuse to throw in some kobolds in the mountain shrine. And, that kid, he was about to be sacrificed by the shrine when the sleep drug wore off and he ran off. LAME. Just an excuse to include the kobolds. THis could have been so much better with a little more thought. The village gets almost no attention at all. Turn up the charm. Get the party in to the mood, or either being paranoid as all fuck or loving the place. Throw in a couple of (very) short vignettes and NPC’s. Bring that pat of the adventure to life. Then get rid of all that “he was almost sacrificed” shit. He just ran off because he missed home, or got lost or some kind of shit. This allows the party to get invested, have some mountain encounters, and then get to the shrine, Turn up the paranoia there. THEN you can turn the entire thing in to what it is, once the party clues in. You can some dips and rises here, which are just not present. 

There are hints of good things though in almost every room. One of the wanderers on the way up the mountain are the bloody remains of a mountain goat on the trail … fortelling a mountain lion. All of the wanderers get that little bit of extra to help the DM bring the encounter to life.  And we get little snippets of good descriptions, like a sacrificial dagger is wrapped in a gold trimmed red cloth. That’s a good detail. It brings it to life in the mind. Or a small leather book on a bench … with three spells in it, like a scroll. Good little description, nothing complex, recalling all of the little leather bound ratted up books in bookstores and movies and the treasures and secrets they contain. A description that is overloaded, alluding to more than there is on the written page. And to use it as a scroll, instead of just saying “scroll with three spells?” Perfect. Or, skeletons in a jail cell, manacled up … who struggle to free themselves. There’s great tension there. 

But the issues here are pretty major, beyond the nonsensical plot design, missed opportunities and mismatch in tone. The read-aloud over reveals, destroying that back and forth between the players and the DM. The DM text gives details on the mundane. “Bed. The small bed is neatly made and has several thick wool blankets.” That does nothing for the DM. You lean on the DM to provide that sort of information while the designers role is to tel lus why THIS kitchen/bed/etc is different and relevant to the adventure. Backstory is embedded “the last remaining embers in the brazier have died out.” Well no fucking shit they have. Or, phrases are repeated between the read-aloud and DM text, telling us, for instance, that there are faded and tattered red & gold banners hanging on the wal … repeatedly. This, instead of, say, working a description that ended up as “On the other side of the portcullises is a dead kobold lying in the center of the hall. A faceless statue stands on the south end.” Joy to you! Or, a glyph glowing with purple light … with no real details on it. I’m gonna ask what the fuck it looks like. Don’t leave me hanging Mr designer! And, of course, the fact that the goddess here is a Erinyes. Who can actually grant boons. The implications are staggering! 

This is not just a generic garbage adventure. There are bots and pieces of imagination and evocative descriptions that shine through. But, it’s not consistent enough. There’s not enough of them, and the missed portions, the straining of disbelief … there’s just too much of that and not enough of interest. Maybe next time?

Also, put the fucking level in the marketing blurb!

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/466489/Adevas-Mountain-Shrine?1892600

By James Floyd Kelly
The Tabletop Engineer
Generic?
"Low Levels

The best stories told by Niloshis the Whisperer here at the Dented Helm Tavern seem to always involve a theft. That old half-elf sorcerer has got a never-ending supply of wild tales. The Lair of the Battle Mage, for example… it’s one of my favorites and the one that’s been asked for tonight. Yes, a detail or two will sometimes change, but the heart of the story? That’s always consistent. Here – have a seat. It looks like he’s beginning his tale…

This 36 page adventure details a wizards tower with five floors. It’s over verbose, over explains, and doesn’t really have any treasure in its boring environments. Yet Another Boring Wizards Tower.

I don’t know how to do this one. Maybe walk you through it from the beginning? That doesn’t seem right. But, this thing seriously has me down in the dumps. The … futility of looking for that shining planet known as Earth.

We start with the usual “feel free to modify this adventure to fit your campaign” shit that prefaces all adventures. This is followed up by the page long backstory telling us all about some wizard that we don’t really care at all about. “The auction houses implored him to seel off part of his magical treasure collection!” Sure. Whatever. So far this is just the usual bad adventure stuff. Or, rather, maybe, the usual de rigour adventure shit that people feel compelled for some reason to include in their adventure serving to pad it out. Then comes a page of plot hooks. Number one is to change the location of the adventure from the city of Windblade to the city the party is currently in. Not a hook. But ok. Number two tells us to push the party to the city of Windblade by having the party encounter ex-members of the wizards adventuring group. This shit goes on and on. There are no real hooks in the adventure included. Just Ooo, maybe there’s treasure inside! Adventurers like treasure! Or maybe someone gives the party a reward for going inside! Or, maybe, they some gossip in the local tavern! No hint of what it couldbe or how to run it. Well, ok, there’s a handout. But really this hook is just “Maybe they get the handout in a tavern as gossip. I really can’t emphasize enough how useless these “hooks” are. More so than usual. It’s not even a caravan guard idea. That would be FAR more specific than anything here. It’s fucking weird man. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before.

Then we get a full page write on The Searchers, and the ex members of it. That could have been in one of the hooks. I have no idea. Am I really supposed to be using that hook? Is this the designers old pc party that he is Mary Sue’ing in to the adventure? Whatever. Let’s ig nore that also.

Then we get a full page write up on the local thieves guild and how they are watching the tower, and have been round the clock for two fucking years. When the local spies see the party goin then dude sends two thieves in after them. Not the worst idea on earth, but, also, anentire page for this? Sure man, whatever. 

Then we get a description of the tower. I guess that’s what this next page is. It starts with “To say that Ploren Darkstream was over-protective of his book collection and magic items is an understatement. While Ploren had no desires for lichdom or any post-death modifications to his body, he was sincere in his desire to protect his possessions for all time, including his body.” So … not a description of the tower. Some kind of backstory or justification nonsense. The entire page is a waste except the last paragraph. The tower sits in the NE chunk of the city wih some stables to the left and a burnt out warehouse to the right. At night you can see candles in the the two windows, up high and sometimes hear wood sawing from inside. That’s it. Urban? I guess so … I mean, it is a city. SOmething across the street or behind it? Crowded street? Out in a field on the outskirts? No clue. 

We finally, then, get to the two page description of the front fucking door and getting in. The read-aloud, in italics of course, tells us that “To enter the watchtower it appears that one must go through the front doors. No windows or other entrances are visible on the ground floor.” No. I refuse. There’s a window on the third story? That’s what the fuck they make rope for. But, no, we’re forced in to the front door, which must be picked. It does have a nice little section called “Observations.” This tells us that a candlelight flickers from the topmost window. That You can hear carousing from a tavern two blocks away, and that randos walk by every few minutes and you can smell burnt wood from some nearby warehouse ruins. This is quite nice. We won’t ever get anything quite this nice,in terms of scene setting, any time else in this adventure. By far. It’s also, I think, out of place. The lead in, with the read-aloud telling us we have to go in to the front door, is wildly misplaced. We should have started with this setting information and then transitioned in to the door. Also, I guess we’re kind of in the city since people wander by and the Guards can show up if you are obviously picking the door? Doesn’t sound realistic to me, but, again, whatever. 

Inside we get three pages describing the twenty foot hallway. Then a bunch more pages describing the first floors giant room (one room per floor here, the hallway making the first floor have two is an exception.) Wizoo McWizardson was such a bad  ass that his protective spells, for the first floor, involve a skeleton with a crossbow. Seriously? A skeleton with the crossbow? Melt the wall of reality, command tears in the fabric of existence. But, your protective spell ia skeleton with a crossbow? I LOATHE the fact that wizards towers never FEEL like a wizards tower.

Ok, I’;m out. The read-aloud massively over reveals in every room. Your Call To Adventure (an explicit section heading in each room) in one level is to “survive the traps in the room. Survive the awakened crossbow-wielding skeletons. Move to the second floor.” A call to adventure indeed! Where “Adventure” is defined as Monotony and a lack of interactivity.

The fabulous fucking treasure that the wizard is known for? A set of gauntlets and a shield. Oh, and a small leather pouch with some gold coins in it. The GM is encouraged to put a value on some of the books in the library. “The GM may also use the desk as a source of a magic item or some treasure for the players to discover.”

I loathe my life.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows you nothing of consequence to make a purchasing decision. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/390781/Tavern-Tales-1-Lair-of-the-Battle-Mage?1892600

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Shadowdark
Levels 1-2

A Request!

An exiled king’s castle has aged centuries overnight, terrifying locals and passing travelers. Although relieved to be rid of the ruthless despot, farmers are fearful of what the small keep’s sudden and unexplainable ruination could mean. Will some curse or foul magic now creep into their lands? Rumors of the king’s remarkable wealth have lured adventurers and brave villagers into the perilous tunnels below the castle, but none have returned. Can anyone find out what is going on at Castle Grushnal?

This 24 page adventure details a 25-ish room linear dungeon. Most rooms are the same. One or two decent ideas doesn’t make up for the monotony of it all. 

In the first big room of this adventure there are two actual fucking angels standing in a room, each guarding one hallway. You can check in any time you like but you can never leave. That’s pretty nifty! Mythic, you might even say. Like, we’re making sure the evil don’t get out. Therest of the room is not quite ENtrance to the Mythic Underworld, but a couple of fucking angels standing guard outside? Fuck yeah! And, in another place, you’ve got a room with a bunch of skeletons just standing around in it. Almost a trap, yeah? That’s a pretty sweet concept, using hordes of creatures as a trick or situation instead of just a straight up combat? Noice! And then it happens again with zombies. And in both cases it’s more of a fight than a trick/situation. There is, I’m afraid, no salvation in this adventure.

Our enemies list, up front for level 1-2 adventure, is: Two angels, 20 lesser skeletons, 4 imps, 1 imp-mother, 30 zombies, 4 succubae, 1 devilish advisor, 1-4 bone devils, 4 shadows, and 1 devil-king. My old complaint returns again and again: you have to know what you’re up against. If a 600’ tall titan has 1 HD and an orc has 20 HD, seemingly at random, then we’re not doing a good job with adventure design. What the fuck are you fighting at level three? Vampires? Gods at level four? (Actually, I think I just did review an adventure with vampires at level … two?) 

The rumour table is a disaster. “A few young villagers who went to explore have not returned.” Where’s the specificity? The young rapscallion, Blind Billy, who picks pockets and empties cess pots, has gone missing?! But, no, please, just shovel in some more generic abstracted words. What’s that Immortan Joe line? Don’t drink too much water lest you become addicted to it? 

Ok, back to the adventure. There’s this castle and it’s suddenly started decaying in to ruins. Like, overnight. The upper level is four big open areas. And a pool of water down at the bottom of the hill that a stream runs through. That has been poisoned by cultists. Now, the cultists are just an afterthought here. They show up in one room in the upper ruins. But, also, they have poisoned the pool of water. The pool of water that is meaningless to the adventure. In every way, this pool of water does. Not. matter. But, there it is, poisoned, and taking up space. The cultists don’t matter. The dead bandits in the next room don’t matter. It’s almost like these are separate adventures. There’s no foreshadowing, or secret entrances, or anything like that. It’s like I just stuck an exploding chest out in the wilderness for no reason. Sure, not everything has to have meaning or contribute to a larger cause of holistic design, but, this one just stands out as being … meaningless.

Let’s see here. The map is essentially lineart. Perfect. The text is full of “Seems to be … “ statements. You find a glowing magic sword at the bottom of a pool of acid. It does “an extra point on damage.” 

The adventuring environment is … a little repetitive. Here’s the description for one of the rooms: “Grand room. Massive collapse covers half of room. Broken furniture. Pieces of tables and chairs found throughout the room.” Got it? You now know what just about every room description is. Oh, I guess there’s the smell of acid thats missing, as well as the acid pools up against the wall, that are in … three quarters of the rooms? An acid pool., a collapsing room full of rubble and a monster. There’s your room. Just repeat that a dozen times or so. Ten of the eleven first rooms have acid or are collapsing, with a great many doing both. I stopped counting after that because I was bored. 

Mostly linear maps. Little to no specificity. Repetition to the point of monotony. Monster zoo or demons. At level one. 

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/453803/PrisonPit-of-the-Agelast-King?1892600

By Chris Carter
Exotic World Designs
OSR
Level ?

The forest now known as the Blue Star Forest has existed from ?me immemorial. Decades ago a star was seen going across the sky and entering the forest – giving it its name – before that it had a name (to the elves) which translated as the Twilit Forest [“Tinduglad”].

This 34 page adventure uses twentish pages to describe a forest with ten encounters, including a wizards tower with about eight more. It is an amateurish effort, but, also, not without a certain underlying charm. Which makes me not hate it, but, also, its not worth checking out in any way.

This is somewhat what I was hoping it would be. I was hoping it would be a kind of amateurish product that didn’t touch on the tropes of 5e, Lord of the Rings, Pathfinder, or even D&D. That’s not quite what it actually is, but, also, it’s not too far away. It’s closer, I think, to a computer RPG  adventure and its tropes. There’s a certain kind of randomness in this that does give it a bit of the Anything Can Happen that one might expect in a old school fantasy forest wandering. It’s also plagues by a lack of understanding of how to write an actual adventure. 

There’s a brief table of hooks and rumors to go along with them. Each hook being tied to a single encounter in the adventure. Yes, you could hook away at encounter one in the forest and be done after that. There are some notes about how, after encounter one, you feel compelled to go deeper in to the forest, but, also, you get to make a save, so, you know, adventure over! There’s nothing too remarkable about the hooks, or the rumors, standard things really. There IS a brief little note about a Nemesis, a rival party that could be in the first also. There are not details, and no rival party available, but, this also is an older trope from the early days that makes an appearance here. A kind of “you could also do this” sort of thing, without anything else provided. This is not the Assist the DM attitude that I think an adventure should bring, but, also, it DOES recognize that this is available to the DM, which is something lost from a lot of modern adventures. Look, man, I’m trying hard here to find the charm.

The adventure is actually quite confused. At one point we’re told that a recent battle with an outlaw band killed to outlaws. It is IMMEDIATELY followed up with “no one was killed.”  Not that any of that matters since it’s just useless backstory, but, you get the idea. Like a map showing the tower layout of a wizards tower … which is then constricted by the actual encounter descriptions. There’s a lack of proof reading here that is frustrating. Not game ending, but just frustrating. 

The forest wandering table is four pages long but has nothing, really, except monster stats and monster ecology. Nothing specific at all. The actually encounters are many paragraphs long, four or so on average, and the descriptions usually amount ot something like “3 orcors live in crude huts near the pool” … and then four paragraphs that don’t actually describe anything at all. Some ecology. SOme backstory that doesn’t matter. There is painfully little about the actually encounter you are currently facing. I don’t mean tacticial, although that would satisfy me and give me something else to botch about, I guess. But there’s just NOTHING related to THIS encounter. 

And yet there are these hints about things that could have been. A meteor field with stone stress and metallic fruit. I’m always up for a nice blasted clearing in a wood. Or glowing a farmers field covered in blue mushrooms … and strange effect. Or a Elf dude who can turn in to a giant spider. That’s fun. And yet we never get more than what I just stated, and it’s always surrounded by tons and tons of … padding? Irrelevant detail? That’s not right. Ecology and background, I guess. It just doesn’t hit AT ALL.

A little fantasy forest would have been nice, and there are hints of the weird and unusual here, but the padded out nature along with the lack os specificity in the encounters is maddening.

This is $2 at DriveThru. There’s no preview, sucker!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/465027/Blue-Star-Forest?1892600

By Jacob Fleming, David Cameron
Gelatinous Cubism
OSE
Low Levels

Beyond the city wall, there are creatures with their own plans. Giant spiders desperately assault the city in swarms. No one knows the cause of these attacks, but their frequency increases by the day. Far to the north, smaller orc war-bands are beginning to gather and remote settlements are all that stand between them and the walls of Obanhold. Too much blood has been spilled in the name of human expansion and the orc tribes of Maut’hgar have called for retribution. It is a matter of time before all out war is declared. A storm is coming.

This 72 page adventure presents a sandbox region to explore with a few things ostensibly going on. It feels, though, like it doesn’t have a soul. Going through the motions of an adventure. Going through it very well, but it doesn’t feel like it’s heart is in it.

Yeah yeah, I know how that sounds. Hang in there though.

We’ve got this city, Like 35,000 people. Just past it is the wilderness. Abandoned ruins. Hardly any people. And lots of orc bans. Don’t make sense to me, but, it’s D&D, so, we’ll ignore reality and handwave a “supporting lands/communities to the south” kind of thing. Anyway, there’s another town, like sixty miles north. And then there’s a lot of hexes to explore. It’s not a hex crawl, but more of a sandbox region to explore … although I guess the difference here is mostly in format. You’g got these orcs in the north, various tribes and their ancestral homeland. You’ve got some bandits here and there hiding in ruins. You’ve got some kind of spider queen thing giving birth to lots of spiders who like to charge the city walls every couple of weeks. And you’ve got some ancient ruins of The Builders, some three eyed giant dudes who liked to leave statues of themselves in the ruins, it seems. A wyvern flying around, some orc ancestral artifacts/magic items … some decent elements to mix it up together.

Then, you chuck in the party. This would normally be flamethrowers in the gas factory, but, not in this case. IN this case it’s … boring?

There’s this really nice region map. The art style is great, with nice shading and topo marks and a clear legend. Maybe my favorite of the various styles of overland maps since it looks fairly realistic. And then the design on top of it is interesting. Towers in high places. Trails that lead, out of nowhere … but they make sense when you look at the map. I note, also, the presence of a couple of treasure maps in the adventure that leads to buried hoards, noted also on the map and unable to be found without the map. A very good implementation of this feature. Not quite a full adventure hook, but finding them gets you moving on the overland map, wandering encounters, and perhaps finding a few of the other fixed locations that are off the beaten path. Quite the nice map and utilization of it. The wandering table isn’t large enough, or interesting enough, to support the map and Idon’t think there are rules in OSE for hex visibility, so I’m not sure just exactly how you’re finding some of these places. But, handwave handwave handwave … nice map.

The rest of the adventure is, well, …

We get an opening story. Rated on the “fiction in adventures” standard it’s a fucking masterpiece. Which means it’s inoffensive. It’s just some farmer who has his village raided by orcs and rides off to the city. Oh, oh, good time for this, I guess. This is a Colonization adventure. The orcs are featured as natives who just want to get along, their lands encroached upon by the humans. Some want peace and some want war. “The orcs had been here long before humans settled it. “They had no tolerance for the human expansion and saw any encroachment on their land as an act of war.” Also, their history has them encroaching on these lands when they migrated to it. SOMETHING THAT ONE OF THE ORC NPCS ACKNOWLEDGES AS A REASON THEY SHOULD JUST MOVE ALONG AGAIN. That’s interesting. Anyway, this isn’t really played up, at all, beyond what I just typed. Yeah, they are nomadic traders and it goes on a little long with this, but, sure, whatever. Alignment: Evil. Hey Frank, what’s your god say, they glow evil? “Yup.” And you cast Detect Evil, not Detect Different Culture, right? “Yup.” And there’s a god of evil that they worship … whose goal is the destruction of all life? “Yup.” Okay man, just checking before I get to stabbin.

The first half of the adventure is useless. We get a generic description of a generic fantasy town. Then we get a generic orcs-as-natives overview, and a generic overview of a few locations on the map. Like a paragraph for each location that includes little to no specificity. In one village you get a couple of sentences and then it ends with “Some of the villagers claim to have seen orcs roaming in the distant hills, and there is a standing reward offered to any who can find those missing and deal with the orc menace” That’s your call to adventure, so better pick it up. Seriously, there is very VERY little to help the DM get things moving. Just like with that entry, there are hints here and there of the adventure actually having a soul. One watchtower had all of the guards recalled to re enforce the city walls. Except, three of them stayed behind. That had some play opportunities. Grizzled rangers or some kind of shit. Guerrillas. Maybe doing some Aldo the Apache type shit to the orcs. “And the Orc will be sickened by us, and the Orc will talk about us, and the Orc will fear us.” But, nah, it doesn’t give us anything like that. It just says that three of them stayed behind to keep a watch on the orc movements. *Yawn*

The orc strongholds are treated much like the human villages: a single paragraph of description. The second half of the adventure describes about ten locations that you can explore, each with between six and two dozen rooms … with a dozen being average? That’s a decent number of locations in the region. 

But …

It’s all just a little … staid. Static. The descriptions are note very evocative, and, again, I might make the statement that they feel soulless. I’m not even sure I might say that these are fact based descriptions. They feel lifeless. And the interactivity is just seemingly lacking as well. A trap here and here (although, far too often the adventure says something like “the door is trapped” and then doesn’t actually tell you anything else about the trap.) but, mostly, it’s stabbing monsters. In the grand context of the region there might be interactivity. The orcs, their cultural magic items, some thieves in a tower, the interlinking ancient ruins. But, individually, it just feels like the rooms are going through the motion of being an adventure. Descriptions which lack life and rooms rather than situations.

I could, I think, get behind this in some ways. It’s a more realistic, or, naturalistic adventure in a region. But, you are gonna have to bring hella imagination to bring the thing to life. You’re going to have to take “three soldiers stayed behind to watch the oc movements” and turn that in to a full on thing that the party will remember and enjoy playing out. And your’e going to have to do that for every single thing that the party encounters, in every region, in every room. That’s really not much of springboard, in any of this, to build upon. Cutting down on the word count, the mundane vanilla and generic word count, and instead inserting a little life in to the encounters. Turning things in to situations and giving them, and the NPC’s, some character, would have gona long long way to turning this in to a kind of instant classic. The region is there. The locations interlinked are there. But the lack of a soul means this is not a classic. I don’t hate it, but I would never in a million years run it.

This is $10 at DriveThru. That’s a fair price, if the content delivered. But, the preview is broken. Sad 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/456393/The-Scourge-of-Northland?1892600

By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
OSRIC
Levels 3-5

The annual caravan bound for Insarna Castle is weeks overdue. The lords who rule over this remote castle are worried that some grave calamity has befallen it. Since resupplying the garrison is of vital importance to the realm, this is highly alarming. They urgently seek a group of capable adventurers to locate the missing caravan somewhere in the wild expanse that surrounds the route to Insarna. Time grows short for the missing men and supplies. Can your party of adventurers solve this mystery before it is too late?

This 21 page  adventure has the party following a trail through the wilderness, fighting monsters, until you find an eighteen room cave system with more monsters in it. All you do is stab, in rooms with minimal description. Just a generic OSR “adventure”.

Some copper dragon has gotten itself possessed by an amulet with five demons in it. It attacked the caravan. You track it back, following a path of destruction and finding some people who fled from the caravan. Usually they are being held captive by gnolls, etc. Oh, also, the dragon has a wife who is flying around. She  might ask you to help out. She doesn’t do the job herself, of course. Why this is a part of the adventure I have no idea. The wifey thing does nothing. Well, she does have a cave and the cave has a nice hoard in it, so, youknow, time for a humanoid-centric view of the world. I guess, in the name of XP. Or, you can do your own goody two shoes thing. But, killing her and taking her eggs is more fun. And this adventure desperately needs more fun. 

You wander around this valley and have some wandering monster encounters on your way past the various monster lairs. All of the wandering monster encounters are essentially the same variation of “These wicked lizard folk ruthlessly attack all who cross their paths.” It’s boring as all fuck. It acknowledges that they SHOULD be doing something, but fails to recognize that “they attack ruthlessly”, at every encounter, is exactly the same as not having them do anything at all. 

The wilderness map has a wagon trail on it, so it’s pretty linear. The dungeon at the end with the evil dragon is essentially linear also. That’s always fun. Enter a room, kill who is in it and then go on to the next room to do the same thing. There is almost no interactivity in this beyond just killing what is in the room. 

Examples of the masterful evocative writing style include “Two firenewts each armed with a glaive guisarme stand guard here.” or “Two burst sacks looted form the caravan lie on the floor of this ordinary cave,” That’s D&D for you. An empty cave with two sacks lying on the floor. Is it dark? Moldy? Damp? Running water? Rocks from the ceiling everywhere? Path through it? Shadows? No? It’s just “an ordinary cave.” Abstracted and generic. Boring. 

The descriptions are generally not that short. They fall in to a kind of expanded minimalism category. This is hard to describe fully, but it’s when you wander on and on with the text to no real point. You pad it out with background and other useless trivia that does nothing to help run the adventure at the table. Here’s a great example, from which I have removed the inline stats: “Two aspis drone guards watch the passage that leads out of this cave into the deeper caverns to the south. Each one wields two clubs (1d6 damage each) and two shields which give them Armor Class 2. A wooden pen holds 17 giant aphids These harmless creatures have no means of defending themselves other than to flee if threatened. The insect men harvest the honeydew they produce as a food source (see AREA b, p. 12).”

Note how that description doesn’t really SAY anything. Two drone guard a passage. Yawn. It leads deeper in to the caves to the south. Boring description, and its just telling us what the map says, not adding anything to the action at the table. What they are armed with. Boring. Shield. Boring. A wooden pen is somewhat interesting. Note how its stuck way down in the description. That should probably be the first thing noticed. No way to defend themselves is useless, as is the honeydew background information that is completely irrelevant to the adventure. It’s a WHOLE lot of words that add nothing to play. 

When you finally meet the dragon you get to fight it. But, in addition to the stat block there you ALSO have to turn back to the beginning of the adventure to reference the rules for the demons possessing the dragon. Like, the possessor uses it’s THACO instead of the dragons. There’s a whole section, with table. But you have to use it AND the stat blocks at the end to make everything work right in the combat, That makes sense.

It’s just a boring old stab everything adventure with no real interactivity. Nothing very interesting happens. The same kind of generic stab adventure that has plagued the OSR since its beginning.

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/463632/The-Lost-Caravan-DUNGEON-DELVE-SIDE-QUEST-2?1892600