tenfootpole.org

By T. Elliot Cannon
Sleddog Games
OSRIC
Level 5

“You must come to Castle Vezio for the Yule season. We have a special present your father told me to pass on to you. Your uncle, Lord Uri of Lake Unterfallen.” You knew the trip to Castle Vezio would take a few weeks, and the story about your father and your relationship with him has never been a topic of your conversations. You wonder though, what gift did he set aside for you? Why now does your noble uncle reach out from his small wintery kingdom in the northern mountain lakes tucked away from the world?

This 44 page digest adventure is …  useless? An outline of an adventure claiming to be an adventure? At what point is something a useful adventure and at what point is it just an adventure idea?

We start this adventure with … a two page read-aloud. Because life is pain. I hope, by now, we all know why this is bad. Anyway, what follows is a series of scenes. (Or, outlines of scenes, I would suggest) and then some maps/keyed locations for three places. We get Uncles castle, which is just a generic castle description with no action taking place there. Then a little monastery where everyone is dead … that only impacts two of the rooms though … everything else is standard boring monastery. Then a nine room “glacial cave” that serves as the hack part of the adventure, where you kill giants and drow. Everything ends with you falling unconscious and waking up in chains, so the next adventure in the series and start that way. Joy. Fuck off, man. 

There’s a good description in this. EVeryone in the monastery, including A BUNCH of children, have had their hands tied behind their backs, had their throats slit, and then been hung up inside the chapel to bleed out. Gahhhh! That’s rough! That’s the kindo f shit that should motivate people to get hacking! I like!

Otherwise …

The adventure doesn’t really start until page twelve, by the time you get through eighteen different “How to Play/To Run This Adventure sections. That say nothing of consequence. Again, not a good portent of Things To Come.

What follows is a series of chapters, that could really be called scenes. Uncle takes you out. Want to explore the castle and talk to people? There are a series of things you could learn … mostly trivia. But … there is nothing there to SUPPORT that play. No NPC’s. No attitudes of people in and around the castle, or even names of anyone other than uncle. You get to make it all up. Yeah You! Each “chapter” follows the same format. Eventually you get some map/keys, at the end, to support the hack portion. And the non-hack portion … even though you don’t in any way need them for anything other than the final assault chapter. You don’t need a map/key if the play doesn’t require one.

Anyway, the outline nature of the adventure is the difficulty here. No real specificity to speak of. A lot of “just handle it” advice in the main text. Or, “in my game the players blah blah blah so I blah blah blah.” There’s nothing really here to support any sort of play beyond the bare minimum that minimally keyed thing might provide. 

An adventure needs to support the DM. It needs to provide them the tools to run a great game. Yeah, the party could learn something in the rumors by just talking to someone random, and the DM could make them up on the fly. But, part of the value add is the designer providing something. Something specific. A NPC with a quick, to provide the information, or a vignette to show instead of tell. You don’t have to drone on about it, but the DM needs SOMETHING to hang their hat on to riff on for the party. Without it, youve’only provided an outline of an adventure. And, I would suggest, that even if you WERE providing an outline, as the core product, you’d still owe the DM a little more to help bring it to life. 

But, this, has no life. Ins pite of trying RALLY hard to have an heir behind everything, who saves his chick friend from the slaughter, and then gets double-crossed by the giants and drow. Cause thats what always happens. The animosity between the heir and the uncle is NEVER brought to life in any way other than “try to make the party understand he hates his uncle” Great.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $5.The preview is thirty pages. More than enough to get a sense of the adventure/outline/chapters thing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/432537/Order-of-Succession–OSRIC–ADD-v-12?1892600

By P.E. “beef” Larsen
Bovidae Studios
OSE
Level ? 1?

Experience temptation and greed in the luxurious Empire of Decadence as you uncover the true motives of the man behind the Cult of Austerity…

This 24 page digest adventure uses seven pages to describe six rooms in a cult temple. Or, you can use the one page summary to run it. It is exactly what you would think from the description; lame.

I had some hopes here. One of the hooks is being hired by the heir to a nobleman. Seems that dad ran off to join a temple … and donated all of his worldly wealth to it. Kiddo wants you to look in to it. I can dig some of that French detective Porot, so I can get in to that!

Too bad it don’t amount to nothing. You get 3 ½ HD humans, a 3HD MU (the cult leader) and a band of 1d6+1 kobolds. In six rooms. On seven pages. That’s a page per room. And not a full featured room with a bunch of shit going on. Just a bunch of trivia, and a trap or hidden thing in each room. So, padded. So much so that the entire adventure is summarized in HALF A PAGE at the end of the adventure, so you can run from it. Which, makes sense, because six rooms should just about fucking fit on half a fucking page. 

The actual adventure text is a mess. It’s divided in to Sights/Smells section and a Contents section. Except the contents are in the sights/smells. And the division makes no sense anyway. I don’t give a fuck about sights/sounds when the fucking monster in the COntents section is descending down upon the party. One room hides, at the end of a section “two stalls are occupied”. Well fuck me. I missed it the first time through the adventure. Perfect. You write an adventure with a minimal number of opponents in it, which is fine, in which you managed to almost hide the fact that there were two people in a room, which is not fine. It’s fucking insane. 

And, in one room, we get some sights/sounds, then a bunch of detail about secret doors and so on … and then, at hte end, a note about the floor being crumpled and replaced with wood planks in places. Jesus H Christ, put the fucking obvious shit first, man. How. Many. Fucking. Times. Put the obvious fucking shit fist/up high. THEN you put the secret shit in.  

I don’t know. The baddies room has the line “Gems and gold are piled up in a heap on the floor in the corner of the room.” A) “in the corner of the room” is redundant, but, also, B) HOW MUCH FUCKING LOOT IS THERE?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!/? It doesn’t tell us.. IT DOESNT TELL US. Hang on, let me go check the summary. WHich is necessary because THE SUMMARY HAS INFORMATION THE PAGE LONG ROOMS DO NOT!!!!! Nope, not there either, though. 

It’s all fucking bullshit. Lots of trivia. Lots of trap and door porn. And almost no emphasis on the shit in an adventure that actually mater in play. That nobleman parent? Gets a sentence. Which is “A fallen noble and the parent to the noble mentioned in the hook “ Yeah. ENjoy running that fucking NPC. 

Fucking useless waste of electronic bits, this one.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, showing you nothing of note, and therefore a useless fucking preview. And no level range noted anywhere on the adventure. But, a trigger warning about “People getting scammed.” Perfect. Fucking useless pile of fucking shit. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/419693/Cult-in-the-Empire-of-Decadence?1892600

By Greg Christopher
Chubby Funster
Shadowdark
Level 2

The Sunless Fane is an ancient temple of Vexitorus, the Narbonian god of the Underworld. It has been abandoned for over 400 years at this point. About three weeks ago, a band of Hobgoblins took up residence in the outer halls. They are aware of the undead and vermin deeper in the temple and avoid them whenever possible.

This eighteen page digest adventure features a dungeon with about thirty rooms. Half hobgob and half undead, it is inoffensive, if not particularly interesting. Lack of variety in interactivity and a slave to Balenciaga … err, I mean formatting, result in a humdrum product.

I was moderately optimistic upon cracking this one open. The map looked decent, with some loops and variety to it. A door in a hall opening to another hallway. A small six-entry wanderer table with some things going on in it. A nice clean format for the rooms, and they start pretty much immediately. All good signs.

“Entryway: This is the dungeon entryway. It is accessible by stairs leading up to the surface.” Oh boy … it’s gonna be one of those days. But, no! There is but a small number of rooms that repeat their purpose multiple times. Instead, though, we get a dogmatic adherence to a format. Each and every room gets a “Door, Light, Walls and Floor and Sound line, on a separate line. So, four sentences for every room. And, then, a one sentence description of the room. One sentence. Ok. Maybe two. But, all on one line. Ok, some rooms have two or three lines. But one is not uncommon. Thus Light: Total darkness   Walls and Floor: Cold dusty stonework   Sound: Silent. My life is enriched. Immeasurably. Is that what you wanted to do when you wrote this adventure? To list, by rote, the same conditions in most of the rooms? As if that were to asdd something to the experience of running it? I know, it’s my own fucking fault. 

Sparse light from above with long shadows in corners, wet and overgrown with moss and vines and soft dripping sounds. Tada! I just rewrite the dungeon entryway, taking up WAY less page space. 

Not to mention tha the slavish devotion to the format results in some weird things. Doors come first in the format, but, in one room, the door is off its  hinges and light spills out of it. Wouldn’t you want to know that FIRST? Won’t you see that FIRST? Isn’t that the most important thing for the DM? And then maybe the sounds comig from the room? And then maybe the door? You put the most important thing to know first in a description. 

And, let me say for the record, ANY time you are following your own formatting rules, strictly, you are failing. The format is in service to the objective. Sure, have a concept of how the format can help, but ruthlessly fuck it over in service of comprehension and usability at the table.

Interactivity is stabbing things and stumbling in to hallway traps. That’s it. No exploration at all. Or talking, for that matter. And not even a note of the monsters on the map for reaction purposes. 

The designer is trying, in places, to make something worthwhile. “2d4 zombies are in this room, fighting over the head of a hobgoblin” or “There is a ghoul here that appears to be arguing with a drawing on the wall.” But, it comes across as lifeless. Better than a minimal monster listing, but not by very much.

Room 29. The Sacrificial Chamber, gets the following description: “Several yellowed skeletons are piled in at low end (animal and human).” That’s it. That’s what we get. That’s your sacrificial chamber. Also, this is the SECOND room 29 listed … I presume it is actually room 30. This is why we have editors. 

Nothing to see. It’s inoffensive, mostly, but at the expense of being boring and a stab dungeon. As the name would suggest, without flavour. You can play Descent or Gloomhaven for that experience.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. You get to see the map and six rooms. So, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/430777/The-Sunless-Fane?1892600

By Daniel Kingsley
Ripped Tabard Adventures
Castles & Crusades
Level 3

The goblins have killed Sam the Spear, the mayor and leader of the village of Sounding Grove. They have been quiet for a very long time, but no one is wondering why they are active again.  The foul creatures have started causing problems again, and no further thought is required!  What better way to have them dealt with than send an adventuring party to deal with them?  They are only goblins after all, how dangerous could they be for professionals?

This 25 page adventure is pretentious garbage with two combats. And long read-aloud. And terrible everything. A monument to the folly of man and  hubris of conceit.

Everything is wrong with this adventure. Everything. Ok, so, it looks nice. I guess the marketing has succeeded. EVerything else sucks ass. And not in a good way. 

This is a complete railroad of an adventure. (Which, I would assert, means it’s NOT an adventure, but I know there are fuckwits who disagree with that assertion.) You show up in town and a dude lies dead in the town square, a bolt through the eyeball. The townfolk have gathered and are lamenting. The DM notes tell us that “The party has been traveling for days and living rough. They are tired, hungry, and dirty.” O, really? This is the first clear indicator that this adventure is going to be shitty. It tells the party what they are feeling. We don’t do that. We can set up a description. We can lean that way in our manner, as the DM, but we don’t tell the party what they feel. Or, dictate, to this degree, their own personal conditions. Eight pages later we get through the hook, and town description, and can go fuck up some gobbos that did this to poor Sam the Spear. Well, I mean, after this quick note “The party can go now and suffer exhaustion and poisoning from drinking too much ale” So, I guess, they drank too much? Cause the flavor text says so, that’s why! For the second time, now, we are being told what happens, removing the player agency. Plot. Railroad. And not, I mean, even GOOD plot. ZThis is is just trivia shit. It doesn’t matter. It’s just that the designer has dictated that the thing will go this way so it’s written this way. 

The encounters, likewise, are dictated with predetermined results. The intro has some DM advice which goes something like you should talk to people, rushing in leads to dead characters, blah blah blah. And, then, we can look a tthe three creature encounters in this adventure. The first is with bandits in the forest. Four of them, desperate. We are told, without too much more info, that they attack. That’s because the designer has determined that this is a combat encounter and thus they will attack the party. They get no personalities, or detail, because that would be useless … they are attacking. Then comes the one goblin encounter, with the entire tribe. And a matriarch who speaks to the characters, explaining that this is all a big misunderstanding. There’s a LONG read-aloud here. And a predetermined sentry encounter to ensure that the matriarch monologue gets read. This is NOT meant to be combat, so, it gets a fuck ton of detail. Finally, there’s an ogre, bullying the goblins, which is meant ot be a combat. So he gets no personality other than he attacks. Because … that’s what the designer has decided should happen. 

No bueno. The designer doesn’t get to determine these things. The designer creates a scenario in which things can happen. Sure, there are percentages here, but when things are written as a railroad plot you have fucked up. I note that, this tendency here, in this adventure, include a completely linear map. No deviations from the path, lowly player! Did I mention that, if you don’t attack the ogre then the ogre smells your horses, on the way back to town, and he attacks you. I guess you have horses. You WILL fight the ogre!

Read aloud is Looooooong. Which is, of course, bad. And, weirdly, the town is described in a combination of locations and actions. One site, in particular, is called “Stealing from the pyre.” I thought dude was laying dead in the middle of the town square? I guess he;s on a funeral pyre now? Who the fuck knows. You can, however, look forward to amazing room descriptions like this one from a ruined temple “Empty Storage Room: This room was once storage for the worshippers of the temple above” ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?! Clearly, value added! 

The adventure does do something I like … but, I think, by accident. Maybe. When you meet the gobbos the matriarch gives a speech about how this is all a misunderstanding. I reproduce it here: “I think there has been a terrible misunderstanding. You see, we went to Sounding Grove to ask for help with an Ogre. We have worked very hard at making peace with the other humanoids in this valley. We do not steal from you, eat your babies, or put a curse you, making you break your hoe. We are not evil creatures who lurk in the night to cause you pain and suffering. Instead, we are peaceful creatures who have been persecuted since the dawn of time. We do not match your description of beauty or ethics. We have different gods. We eat different foods and wear different clothes. But does that mean we deserve to have to live in caves for fear of being slaughtered? Simply for being? So in response to how we are treated, we made a home here and removed ourselves as much as possible from your kind. So, brave adventurers, members of the more “advanced” races, before you kill many of my children to make a point, how about you help us stay peaceful and rid us?” Indeed! The poor, much maligned gobbos need your help! I do this shit all the time in my games. To quote my favorite line from the 4e rules “Talking is a free action.” Absofuckinglutely it the fuck is! Meanwhile, my gobbos would be fileting human babies in the back room and maneuvering to ambush. But the designer is, I think, serious. In the monster description, in the appendix, for gobbos it says “They are like any other sentient race, but the bias against them runs very deep. A clear case of socioeconomics and bards telling tales about them.” The socioeconomics line makes me think its a joke, but, I’m not so sure. Because the fucking adventure is WRITTEN for the players to take the gobbo monologue seriously. Fucking weird. Also, to answer the hanging question: yes, it’s time to kill many of your children to make a point, lady.

Also, all that gobbo socioeconomic shit is right below “ALIGNMENT: Lawful Evil” and the gobbo plan is to breed up until there are enough of them to wipe out the human village. Heh 

Just another garbage adventure. Disappointing.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. Enough to see the read-aloud issue, ad the read-aloud of the dude that doesn’t seem to care Mayor Sam is dead. Heartbroken, that one is …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/432010/Goblin-Gobbler–A-Castle-and-Crusades-Adventure?1892600

By Scott Craig
Cutter Mountain Simulations
Shadowdark
Level 1

Life is hard for the clans of the wold, a life of toil and sacrifice. But there is joy as well. A marriage festival is underway; kith and kin have gathered at the homestead. But harken! The bridegroom has been captured; his retainers slain in cruel ambush. After a violent change in leadership, the Blood Blade goblin tribe has turned its face from peace and now threatens war. Can the raiders be caught, and the bridegroom returned to his family? Four heroes give chase, hoping to overtake the raiders. But when this hope is dashed, only one path remains to effect a rescue of their friend.

This 29 page digest adventure presents a dungeon/cave with about eighteen rooms. It would be a decent introductory adventure if it didn’t follow its own formatting standards so well. A tough edit and it would be a nice GoTo for starter plot adventure. And without that edit it shall also die and be forgotten.

Ok, so, Frank is getting married tomorrow so he thinks it would be a great idea to go to the local (Friendly) goblin tribe and do some trading. His buddy Bob comes back, wounded, along with a gobbo on a wolf. Gobbo says there’s been a coup and Frank is now held captive. But … he remembers that, years ago, the gobbos found a barrow on the other side of their hill warren. It was full of undead so they left it alone. But, eventually, a gobbo shows up in their warren from the failed barrow expedition … having come through it in to their caves. So, Gobbo the Gobbo thinks you can sneak in through the barrow and rescue Frank. There’s a very “clans of the steppe” thing going on here, which I can dig. At least I can dig the commitment to it in the writing; it’s not perfunctory. Well, it is, but its also consistent. Also, this seems like a good place to note that the designer drops the word “Verisimilitude” a couple of times in the intro. 

The dungeon, proper, is supported by an ok map. We’re not really getting loops in an eighteen room map. It’s more of a tomb map with a couple of caves attached to the back … the forgotten back way in to the gobbo warrens. But, it shows features on the map, which helps a lot with the DM immersion needed to riff on an adventure and make a good player experience. Lots of same-level stairs, cave ins, boulders, statues, water features and so on. And … monsters are noted on the map. I appreciate this, for reaction/noise purposes. I do note, with pedantic interest, that in a section of worked stone dungeon, there is a side passage, a tunnel, hand dug/collpased, etc, that you can use to bypass the hallway up ahead. Excellent! Except, the bypass saves you five feet. You are literally just cutting a corner. Sadz! Better, I think, to have an obstacle and tempt the players with a dark dank tunnel that they have to crawl through to bypass it … IF THEY DARE! Anyway, lost opportunity.

There are things to do in the dungeon. Undead that rise out of the water, gobbos taking a piss that you can sneak past or gack. Traps of various sorts, from designed to natural. Statues and alters. And the ever-present (in good adventures) water features that gurgle, rise up to your knees, have waterfalls, and so on. So, pretty decent interactivity, including some role play/talking to shit if you so desire. Nice variety. Nothing outstanding, but the college try was given to the interactivity checklist … in spite of a waterfall noting that “it is unclimbable.” Ha! Obstacle, meet party!

The major fucking problem with this thing is the formatting, and what it does to comprehension. 

Let us imagine, if you will, that we are in a series of dark caves. A thousand feet underground, with a thousand rooms behind us. All dark. All caves. Do we need to be told that the next room is dark, and a cave? In a dedicated heading section for each … in every room? This pops up occasionally. Someone decides that rigorous application of a format will bring extra clarity. SOmetimes it is using so many coloured boxes that it looks like a rainbow barfed. And, sometimes, as in this adventure, there are a multitude of section headings, the same section headings, in every room. Light. Smell. Sounds. Danger. In every room. You don’t need this. It wastes space and it distracts. Yeah, absolutely, I appreciate smells, etc. But integrate it in to the description. 

Further, there are an abundance of bolded section headings here, which essentially serve as bullet points. A lot of them. In one room you are looking at: Trap, Light, Smell, Sounds, Danger, Sundered floor, wall fissure, mortared brick walls, five alcoves line the walls, north door, east door, west door, wester half: wait-deep water, wester half: uneven terrain, examine the north fissure, examine submerged debris, search the alcoves, examine west door, examine north door, examine east door. Is that it? I think so. That’s too much. You are obfuscating the room contents in your effort to bring clarity. Bullets and bolding are not the answer. If, by using them, you are making the adventure HARDER to use, then you’ve not accomplished the goal. These, like all Tenfootpole criticisms and remarks, are guidelines abut tools. We can’t lose sight of the end goal: runnable at the table … which generally means easy to scan and locate information. 

And this thing is SO thick with this shit that there is no way I would ever run it. Not even close. Edited/rewritten, to condense it and focus more on the rooms, individually, than the overall adherence to formatting … then maybe I would. It would be a decent starter adventure for a 5e-like game. Or Shadowdark 😉 

And, while we’re at it, let’s look at the evocative writing. I was gonna be done with the review, but I want to piss about a bit more. We’re told:

Exposed megalithic stonework. Revealed by a rockslide.
Stone portal. Cracked and leaning.
Stone double doors. Stand ajar; sundered and pitted with age; crude knife symbol hastily painted in faded red.

So, made out of stone, yeah? 😉 Megalithic blocks, cracked and leaning, frame two pitted-with-age door slabs, sundered, with a crude knife painted in faded red. How about that instead?

This is $3 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/431649/Sepulchre-of-Dusk–compatible-with-Shadowdark-RPG?1892600

By Todd Leback
Third Kingdom Games
OSE
Level ?

The world of Absalom is one of constant change, where Law and Chaos are more than abstract philo sophical ideas but are instead metaphysical realities that shape the very world itself. Absalom is dominated by Cycles, each lasting between two to four hundred years. Each Cycle is divided into an Apex – when Law holds sway – and a Nadir – when Chaos sweeps over the lands, driving back the light of Civilization Cycles are marked in the beginning by the Apex and ascent of Law, and the end by the Nadir. During each Apex the civilizations of Man do their best to expand their domains and bring law to the land; these civilizations often shrink, or even crumble, during the Nadirs as barbarians, beastmen, and worse fall upon the kingdoms of Man

This 52 page adventure presents four hexes in the land of Faery. As in old school/Narnia-ish faery. I get where dude wants to go, but, I ain’t on board for this entry in to his hex crawl series.

Dude has a series of hex crawls, it looks like. Maybe two regions out and a magazine/zine with some more in it? Looks like, in the existing crawls, there are two locations that can teleport you to Faery, so this thing details that: The Pallid Fields. You have to think of a kind Narnia, including the snow. So, folklore fey. 

I’m not sure this was the correct first thing from this dude for me to review. It being a pocket dimension sort of thing, it might, perhaps, not represent the bulk of his work. But, it’s what I’ve got, so let’s use this to generalize the fuck out of everything else instead of merely checking it out!

The designer does a couple of interesting things for a hex crawl. First, he explicitly notes which features in the hex (6 mile hex) can be seen from a distance. Not bad. As I’ve mentioned many times before, seeing something far away gives the players a goal to work towards. “Whats the glowing red in the distance at night?” It’s accomplished here by a second, players, map. I’m not sure I’m down with all that, but, at least letting the DM know what you can see is a good idea. Secondly, he lists resources in a hex. “(Rare woods, 1) and (ore, 2)” A little flavourless, but, I get the intent in a hex crawl game as you dig around for resources. 

And that’s about it for the good. 

There’s an overall lack of cross-reference in this. Folks names and interactions in hexes are tossed around pretty freely, but the DM is left to themselves to find the person to get more information about them/the situation. Not cool. I’m down with a living breathing world with lots of interactions away from their homes, but that needs to be supported. And, then, in an opposite way, things that can show up everywhere are noted … in their own hex. The chief example is the wise owl. At the end of his description, in his own hex entry, it notes that there is a 1-2 chance that the owl comes to visit you, no matter the hex you are in, if you are a newcomer. Absolutely not! We put that shit on the wanderer table, or as a note or something. We dont’ fucking bury information about other hexes in some rando hex. Let us imagine a megadungeon. A thousand rooms. Room 876 has a minotaur in it. The description notes that if anyone enters room one of the dungeon then the minotaur teleports there immediately. Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know that while running room one?

There’s other things. You can run in to lots of random fey, knights, or nibbles. There’s an in-depth generator but no real handy list to run to. The wanderer table is frustratingly confusing. “12 guards.” Uh … more info please? What the fuck is a guard? 

But, by far, the main attraction for a hexcrawl, and main issue, are the hexes proper. They kind of suck balls. And not in a good way. If you like a bitter acrid taste, then they are sweet and lavender. Make up your own description of sucking balls that you don’t like. Go with that.

I covered this in depth in my Wilderlands/Isle of the Unknown review. You need a situation in a hex. You need to describe that well, in such a way that the DM can riff on it. More than any other type of writing, the hex crawl description MUST be riffable well. You can’t describe an entire hex, an entire situation, in one short paragraph. That’s what adventures, proper, are trying to do. But, in a hex crawl, you are essentially describing (potentially) dozens and dozens of adventures. Little summaries of the,, anyway. SO, you need to give the DM enough information so they can spin something up from the description. Something that the players are gonna get involved in (or, that is going to get involved with the characters) and also something that inspires the DM to expand it. And, maybe, links in to other hexes, potentially. And you need to do that over and over again. 

This don’t do that. One hex has a tree. You can use the wood to create better magic wands. Yeah. Here’s a hot springs. Sometimes people show up to camp there. Here’s the stone circle you teleported in to. Here’s the salt lick that elk sometimes hang out at. Here’s a spring. If you drink from it you might lose your memory. 

These are not situations. At best, these are little diversions. There’s no real interactivity here, and you can almost entirely count of cross-hex situations or possabilities. One hex has te owl, who has a berry that lets you in to the fey dukes palace and another has an ent that has the fey dukes heart hidden in a box. 

There are really no situations to speak of in this. And, thus, no adventure to speak of.

This is $7 at DriveThru. You get no preview, Bill. Use your Standard Oil money on that!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422121/The-Pallid-Fields-Hexcrawl-Second-Edition?1892600

By Stuart Robertson
Robertson Games
OSE
Levels 1-2

An expedition to the ruins of an old monastery uncovers hidden mysteries and monstrous peril. 

This 36 page digest adventure uses 24 pages to describe forty rooms. And ok map and occasional evocative phrase stick out in what is otherwise just another rando first level dungeon.

“… a massive bipedal frog looms out of the darkness at the far end of this large column-lined chamber.” So, “looms out of the darkness” is a pretty good description. And, there’s almost an interesting encounter or two. A room with a water-filled floor/sinkhole/collapse, zome zombies come out to attack. And in some kitchen you meet Seth, who is looking for food and will join the party. Turns out he’s a cultist out foraging in the dungeon. There’s a few other phrases of bits of encounters that are ok.And the map is, thankfully, non-linear with some features on it. Thank Nergal for small blessings. 

But everything else? Meh. At best.

The first six pages of this adventure tell you nothing. A meaningless generic background in a column. A section on how to roll up a character. How to start the adventure. Nothing interesting. Nothing evocative. Just the usual blandness found in most generic adventure settings. Oh no, trade wagons have gone missing. No expectant mothers with children looking longingly in to the distance. *yawn*

And then, Forward to Adventure! The adventure proper is more of the same. Descriptions that generally take a column or so. Multiple paragraphs. Nothing of interest. No real descriptions that are meaningful. A kitchen is a kitchen is a kitchen. 

Even the better things, that I mentioned above as some prime examples, are lacking. Those zombies? How much better to have them grab people and pull them under, rather than them lumbering out of the water to attack? A dead face staring up at you from under the water, all Dead Marshes style? THEN they can lumber out. Seth? Seth is a fuckwit. He does the usual attack the party, run away, lead them to danger thing. Just a bland cultist cutout. How much more interesting if we made Seth a real person? Yeah, he’s a cultist, but he’s fucking hungry. Give him some food, let him be ravenous about it. Maybe both wary and gleeful, eating like a ghoul cross legged on the floor, wide grin. Stick him in the fucking the fucking with some questionable morals. But, maybe also, some contacts and shit. That’s such a better encounter. Seth as a real fucking person. You know, in another room there are some bandits. They are looking for loot and interested in knowing more about the dungeon. You know what that makes them? Fellow Murder Hobos, that’s what. Treat them like that. I don’t know. Nergal forbid anyone go beyond the surface level tropes of D&D. 

“Large chamber.” That’s great. Large. Maybe a Big room next? Stick in some better words. “As the door opens you see …” We don’t do this. I mean, it’s not read-aloud anyway, so I’m not sure why we’re using second person. 

Further, the dungeon lacks coherence. It’s more of a random assort of monsters. Goblins. Bugbears. Bandits. Cultists. Dwarves. Zombies. Skeletons. Giant Bees. It’s like you took every level one monster and chucked them in. Each in one room. No real zones. No real story behind the current state of the dungeon. And I don’t mean an actual story, but, rather, the dungeon as a place that kind of makes sense. Not in a realism or simulationist way, but in a way that is meaningful to the adventure. The bandits have explored blah, blah, and blah, lost a dude in a trap room, hes on the floor there, and so on. Instead we get lots of monsters living in their own little rooms. Meh.

“Ruined tapestries and broken furniture litter this dark and decaying room.” I asked Ray Weidner once what this kind of sentence was and he didn’t have a strong answer. So, let’s call it “cumbersome and not effective.” I’m not sure what’s going on here. Well, I do, but, I mean, motivation wise when writing it. There seems to be an tendency in this to write … I don’t know, like a novelist? But it results in these sentences that are trying to be thematic and evocative instead just coming off as cumbersome. It’s … putting the modifier as the primary thing in the sentence (which, I think, is similar in concept to passive writing. A big nono) And, what it’s modifying, dark and decaying, isn’t really any description at all. They’re all fucking dark. 

I should note that this room description (thats the leading sentence) goes on for three paragraphs. To describe a room with six goblins in it searching it. I get what you want. Dank and wet, heaps of moldy tapestries hanging from the walls and on the floors, rotted couches and broken plush chairs turned over, with goblins poking through the piles and digging in to them. But that doesn’t come through in the column long description. 

Just as the room intent, the interactivity and the evocative setting, doesn’t really come through in any of the rooms. This was a one pager, expanded to 36. It’s not a terrible job at expanding, but, also, it’s not a good one either. Half the page count would have been better, at least.

This is $10 at DriveThru. No full size preview, just the mini quick preview. I has sadz. 🙁 Also, I paid $10 for this?!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/429427/Advanced-Ancient-Academy?1892600