tenfootpole.org

By Tim Duncan
CritHeads Gaming
Castles & Crusades
Level 9?

150 years ago, each continent was ruled by its own Kings or Queens, with the exception of Athel, which was a true wildland and sparsely populated. King Bisdain of Othellis, a primarily human continent, set his eyes on Athel. He wasn’t the only one. In the west, the orcs of Undgar had several settlements established, and in the East, the elves of Vewul had built a magnificent frontier city, Mulvic, and had designs for another one. King Bisdain began his bloody conquest in the west, while secretly building the Eld Bridge to the east. The human steel was far superior to the orcish iron, and they managed to drive the orcs entirely from the land and into seclusion on Undgar. The King and his troops wasted no time moving east, converging with reinforcements from across the newly finished Eld Bridge, and laid siege to Mulvic. While the elves had far fewer numbers, their tactics and techniques kept the invaders at bay for nearly 20 years. As the years past, the elves’ numbers slowly dwindled, and the capital City of Isvewul across the sea was getting desperate to liberate their surrounded people. It was in this desperation that the elves created the Sentinels, mechanical humanoid constructs built to be controlled by the implanted brains of volunteer soldiers

This 104 page linear adventure uses roughly ninety pages to describe twelve scenes. There are no specifics, but there are a lot of motivations and backstory. It’s abstracted nonsense about the fallout from some political thing with elf kingdom manipulation or some shit like that. Boring crap.

Sometimes I just wish I could say “It sucks” and move on with my life. There’s this category of adventures that really are disasters, in the most amateurish way. Hubris, I guess. I can get behind some hubris. But, also, Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror. I admire someone’s ability to just go out and do it. And I absolutely loathe the result, everything that led up to it, and the fact that I get to pay, literally and figuratively, for the hubris of others.

That’s the opening page. Well, after the table of contents which is in the same style except all of the text is in that blue underlined font, making it even harder to read than a page of fancy font italics on a “fun” tan background image. Did you look at it? Did you look at it and say “Yup, that’s easy to read!”

Great. A column of read-aloud to kick things off. Ingenuity of its people. Got it. Time for a city adventure. I love me a city adventure! It’s one of my favorites! The adventure immediately transitions from that read-aloud to you waking up on an airship.

I don’t know. You’re on your way to another city. That’s like all you get. There’s no adventure between that meaningless starting read-aloud and that “night two” start of the adventure. No boarding of the airship or reasons or anything like that. I guess this will have to do, as well as being told the food is expensive and bad: “The first two days aboard the Airship is rather uneventful! The captain is friendly and more than happy to chat with the passengers. The crew are respectful, but in a hurry, as their duties keep them pretty busy while underway. Addison Buchard and CPT Greene keep to themselves as much as possible, trying to keep out of sight. Addison is shy if approached, and CPT Greene is standoffish, but not hostile or rude.” Abrupt transitions from scene to scene. Overwrought text. And a massive railroad. I guess you’re taking the fucking parachutes, ey?

This one scene, of the twelve, is a good example of the text and playstyle. You have a rather abrupt read-aloud to begin things. Then there’s a very general description of the scene, the number of bandits and their objectives, etc. You are essentially seeing all of that in the screencap above. Then there are like five pages of maps of the ship, one of which is a small keyed map with a very general overview of each section. “Main Foyer: This connects the Crew Quarters, the stair to the Passenger Quarters, and the Mess Deck together. The Door to the Crew Quarters is kept locked at all times. DC 18 DEX will unlock it.” It’s not really a keyed encounter map, and, for the play style envisioned, it’s probably the right amount of detail. About a page for everything and a brief enough overview to get the feel. But the ACTUAL encounter is not specific at all and, i think, is essentially just an idea padded out to a column of text. There are bandits. They want to capture the chick and will destroy the ship if it looks like the characters are fighting instead of fleeing. I mean, that’s the basic scene, just expanded. That’s seven pages to describe “the principals jump out with a parachute during a bandit attack.”

Everything is this very loose description of a situation surrounded by a very strict railroad so you can get from point a to point twelve. I’m normally down for a situation, but in this case it doesn’t feel like a situation. Or, perhaps, it doesn’t feel like the text supports the situation. It’s just TOO loose. I recall one of the early 4e adventures that had a complex of cave rooms and a monster in it with the party negotiating the entire area with its difficult terrain and so on. Like a traditional cavern map but with a only one creature. The minotaur in his maze or one of those “trick” levels, like the mirror maze level with a robot and laser beams. Not a room as a set piece but rather the level as a set piece. Except this isn’t a set piece. It’s too loose for that. And it’s not a sandbox, it’s too constrained for that. Here’s a genericish map of an airship. There are twice as many bandits as characters. Go! “It’s entirely up to the GM how many Terravore
occupy each mound, and if any mounds are vacant.” Well, good thing I bought an adventure And, yet, there is tons of backstory. And motivations. And NPC description details that don’t really matter.

Leaving aside the plot based/scenes/chapters issue, it’s the situations here that are frustrating. I get situations. I love them. And open-ended play and a sandbox. Great. If I squint hard I can tell that the designer is TRYING to support the DM. There’s an attempt to explain what is going on so the DM can improvise and adapt. But the emphasis is on the wrong spots. Those motivation and background parts should be shorter and the encounters/situations more specific. It’s too open-ended where it needs specificity and too wordy in the parts that are to support “off the rails” play. The formatting also doesn’t contribute to locating information easily for the off the rails portion.

This is $25 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages. That’s really just a table of contents and some background information, the first six pages. It should show a chapter, from start to finish, to give a potential buyer an idea of what they will be handling.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/532342/aoethera-cataclysm-book-1-for-castles-crusades?1892600

By Onslaught Six, Roz Leahy
Tidal Wave Games
OSR
Levels 1-9

[…] Deep beneath Castle Gygar was a thriving maze of magical creatures. These levels would shift and expand at times, as if the dungeon were taking a breath. The divine magic of Lord King Gygar was no match for the chaotic energy of his dungeon’s denizens, and, before long, the Castle was abandoned. The land of Jotun has been without proper rule for hundreds of years now. Castle Gygar’s ruins stand as a kind of warning now, a warning against digging too deep in search of power. For the foolish few who now and then decide to ignore this lesson, a p

This 64 page digest adventure fits in a megadungeon with twelve levels and about 25 rooms per level. It’s got a kind of disconnected vibe between the rooms, a very terse minimalism, and some videogame overtones. It does hit at a consistent mediocre level. I just find it hard to sustain interest.

Well, it got done. Which is more than most large projects can say. I’m going to struggle, somewhat, with describing what this is. “It’s the ruins of Castle Gygar, it’s dungeons anyway. Duh!” But, more than that, the kind of disconnected nature of the levels. But, perhaps, I should start with the room description style. That’s a weird place to start but I think it kind of is the origin story to everything going on in this, in one way or another. 

You can, from that collection of room entries in the screencap, tell that the rooms are pretty terse. We’re talking twelve to a digest place terse. “Four +1 Spears hang on the wall, glowing brightly as they are approached. A small vent conceals a low tunnel to 1.3” Two sentences. Quite terse. Not the more evocative sentences ever written, by far, but also it’s hard to slam them for padding. 🙂  So. Why are the sentences not longer? Why select this ultra-terse format? It’s twelve levels and over three hundred rooms. Size can’t be the factor, the entire product is long. Unless 64 pages is a logic publishing format that it needs to fit in to? In which case … why twelve levels instead of ten with longer descriptions? I feel like I’m missing something, a gimmick or something. It just feels artificially constrained, although I can point to no real reason for that feeling other than the very short descriptions in a very large number of rooms … and thus implicitly a large page count. I do appreciate a terse format, but, not so terse that we lose the room proper. In the grand scheme of things a padded out product would be shittier than this, this kind of terse but ok would be neutral and an evocative terse description would be the ideal. So, first do no wrong is taken care of. I just can’t see why the word didn’t end up somewhere better. The rooms come off as barren.

And, more than that, they come off disconnected. Why are the spears there? I don’t mean backstory. There’s an ogre nearby. And imps. Gargoyles. Beastmen. The Hunger. That’s a lot of monsters. A zoo almost. In the rooms surrounding Ye Olde Glowing Speare Roome. I don’t need a historically accurate number of farmers to yeomen in a village but I do need the vibe to seem plausible. Why are they still there? And, for that matter, why the fuck are all of those monsters living so close to each other? This is why we have lairs, and zones of control, and themes areas in dungeons. It keeps this kind of monster zoo thing from happening. There are dead zones. And dead zones between areas can have secrets. Like four glowing spears hanging from the walls. So, it all just kind of comes off as disconnected. Sure, it’s a room and the description does not overstay its welcome. But, also, the description isn’t really bringing the room to life in any way AND the overall design and placement of the room doesn’t really contribute to a bigger picture. On the first level the leader of the beastmen, a single orc, sits on this throne, his 3000gp(!!) treasure in the next room. He’s flanked by his beastmen guards. So, I guess two of them? Pretty nice fucking loot. And no beastmen lairs or orc lairs or really ANY other monsters nearby. Just dude on his skull throne with his two bros. There’s no real level vibe. Or zone vibe. Or room vibe. Just do you thing in THIS room and move on. It’s not even full of special rooms, like, a set piece after a set piece like the Tower of Gygax con game specials. I don’t know, a more boring Stonehell barbican?

And there are quite clearly come videogame play loops. You can convert temples to your own god, which will give you a small attack bonus You can rind relics which are like one-time-use spell scrolls. You can go through a twelve step process to find a +5 sword on the last level that detects secrets doors and can cast list and cure wounds. Which, frankly, seems a bit of a rip off after twelve levels and the hoops you have to jump through. It feels like maybe its a way to help with that interconnection issue and lack of purpose, but, you also don’t really seem to know WHY, to what end, all of the mini tasks are leading to. And if you don’t know you are making a decision then the tension around making that decision is lost. 

And, of course “The door to 0.8 is locked by the Gold Key (0.15).” How much more of a videogame flavor do you need than that?

Monster summary in the back, along with wanderer tables, which is a good idea. No monster descriptions, which is a bad idea. The map does denote which rooms have internal light sources, which I enjoy to help me run a level. But, also, the rooms try to denote it also by placing the text in either white or black font, which I think  makes it busy. Not to the point it’s illegible or anything, I just don’t think it does what the designer wanted, it’s already on the map, and, worst of all, it annoys me. 🙂 

Things are just not … vibing together the way I would like. It really needs a rug to tie the dungeon together. Outside level. Dragon level. It’s just, overall and individually, not working together toward a common end. Maybe you can sustain long play like that, I don’t think I can. 

This is $10 at DriveThru. There are multiple previews, so, good job with that. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/510225/the-ruins-of-castle-gygar?1892600

By Kuba Skurzy?ski
Nerd Sirens
OSR
Levels: Low to Mind

[…]  To protect St. Honegund’s holy site, stone wall and tower were built. Tower became inhabited by owls over one, full-moon night. From that date onward, the full moon was a special moment for the inhabitants of the fortress, as during these nights the foundations of the so-called Moon Tower would light up with a blue glow, as a sign of the divine providence over the castle. Imperial guards still repeat a frightful prophecy to each other, that when no more owls will be nesting here, the whole Karpaki shall be flooded by the infernal heat of the Eastern Sun. So far, legend has never been verified, as despite many sieges of the castle, the Moon Tower has not fallen to ruin, and owls have always been around.

This 44 page thing is not a adventure. Maybe a setting? A castle description? It’s Wall of Text, that’s for sure, with many issues that stem, perhaps, fro a lack of understanding of what the thing they were writing IS and thus how to write for it.

It’s a castle in some pseudo-historical-like central european setting. Gunpowder, Kaiser-moustauches and so on, mixed in with fairies and medieval markets. But, it’s not really an adventure. It’s like you included the Keep portion of Keep on the Borderlands but not the Chaos Caves, but then padded out to many more pages the keep. There are castle rumors. “The tower will fall when the owls leave the roosting!” Hmm, sounds familiar. Anyway, shit like that. Some rumors about the castle, some rumors from servants in the castle, a random guard generator as well as a random prisoner generator. And, a nice little section on the guards. Their hour, rotations, how they respond, and a note that they can also be lazy, corrupt, and don’t necessarily dislike the prisoners so they can be lax and give special favours at times. That’s a nice bit of realism and a nice little appeal to the party interacting with both groups, both to exploit or make friends with. There’s also a decent little wandering table, with things like a soldier or servent trying to witness something suspicious/illegal and wanting to report it to their patron. Decent. A situation, which is what things in adventures should be. Something for the party to exploit and a nice appeal to richer interactivity inside the castle. 

I’m assuming that this is an EASL adventure and it shows through in a place or two in some awkwardness in the language. “The old well was drilled for sieges – on a daily basis it’s secured by brass plate and the castle crew does not draw water from it.” I’m not quite sure what is being communicated here. It IS or IS NOT ever unlocked? The phrases seem to contradict itself. These DO tend to be the things I care more for, I’m chill with some awkwardness but when I can’t figure out what’s going on in it then problems arise. And there were a lot of people associated with this in production. Weird

But, really, the core issue with this “adventure” is that it lacks a purpose. And that the way the adventure is formatted/laid out/described can’t then match the purpose/objective of that part of the booklet/adventure/whatever. We know, for example, that a map/key format is great for a kind of exploratory dungeon. And that other types of adventures, like investigations, or social adventures have other formats that work better for them. But this booklet doesn’t really know what it is so it can’t really match its formatting to it. 

It is supposed to be, I think, a castle setting? This is the local major castle in the area. These are the people who live there. These are various general parts of the castle. And, then, for each part of the castle, these are some Things Going On. So, bandits hiding in one area, caves underneath with more. The blacksmith and carpentry shop. 

There’s no real thrust to any of this. In this way it is very similar to the Keep. You could, if you were so inclined, do something with the various parts. If the part is visiting then you could drop in part of it, or, rather, use some part of it to spice up their visit. But there are a couple of issues. Unlike The Keep, there’s no real reason to visit. In B2 it’s natural to visit the Keep as a home base, and, even, some of the rulers and such have a reason to eventually interact with the party. That larger framing is absent here, so it really is just a place for you tp drop in and use. But, also, it’s not on the borderlands; it’s a fairly major place. So we’re looking more at civilized play/intrigue. And then the various areas inside are not really set up for intrigue. Theres prisoners, in the jail underneath, but no one and nothing to hook you in as a small todo or such. IF you wanted to include a prisoner for your own game then you could insert them and create some play from it, but this is all just a general framing. Do you want to explore the included Moon Tower part of the keep? Why? Well, there’s not much here. Yo uCOuLD place the McGuffin there, or give the party some need to go there and thus do it. Or create your own intrigues in the political realm and thus give the party a reason to hobnob. But, again, with little purpose to it from the product proper.

So, we get the various parts of the castle explained in a very general way. There’s specificity here but no interactivity to speak of. Its missing things to get something going, but provides a setting if you want to add your own. And, thusly, not an adventure but rather a setting. And, given the lack of interactivity in the product, a kind of weaker one at that. 

And, given this focus, or lack thereof, the formatting it off. General descriptions, with some specificity. Lots of overviews and bullets, to the point that I think it becomes kind of a wall of text in places. They are used as paragraph break rather than calling attention to important things and summaries of them. 

The closest I can get here, I think, in comparison is the fortress supplements from MERP. Here’s a place. You could do something here but we’re not really going to provide an incitement to do so. 

This is $10.50 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/532586/castle-of-the-veiled-queen?1892600

By Nicholas Lemler
Self Published
OSR
Levels 4-5

Hubert the Halfling was a successful adventurer before settling down and beginning a Shire of his own. After building a home to humble many among even the big folk, Hubert invited his clan to live with him in the hopes of starting a vineyard. Little has been heard in the last week or so, however, and passersby say the place looks ransacked. A group of Expert adventurers could potentially find answers, as well as loot from Hubert’s many adventures within.

This 26 page adventure uses ten pages to describe about sixty rooms over about three levels in a hobbit hole complex now overrun. It’s got some interesting specificity here and there that really grounds it as a halfling adventure, but in general it comes off as a hack with a few traps in a bland environment.

How do you have an elf adventure FEEL like an elf adventure? How do you make a dwarf adventure FEEL like a dwarf adventure? Well, the designer here managed, in spots to really make this adventure FEEL like a halfling home. At least in places. I don’t think that’s a small feat. The number of generic elf tree forts and dour and bland drawf homes that I’ve seen is seemingly beyond number. We have resorted, a great to edal, to treating them like humans with points ears or short humans with beards and calling it a day. Oh, and stick in a few trees or a rock or two, depending. They have never felt alien, or even that different than humans. Even, accepting that they don’t really need to, they’ve never felt that interesting to me in tha vast. Vast majority of adventures. This adventure, however, does a decent job, in some laces, or really bringing in that halfling vibe.

I want to highlight just three halfling related phrases from the adventure; “Lobelia Tumbleberry”, “A breathless halfling named Fredegar Hardbuckle (second cousin, once removed to Hubert)”, and “Jar O’ Pennies sits forgotten in a southeast corner.” 

I frequently talk about the power of language and its ability to reference more than the written word say. The very best in evocative language lets you learn things about the world by implication. More than the written word, the implication of what was written has meaning and lets you springboard off of it. It summons up from the dark recesses everything you have ever known about halflings, large families, and that pseudo-english small village vibes that Tolkien channeled. Sackville-Banningeses! If you can’t channel the personality of each and every one of thirty halflings from that one throw-away-like “second cousin, once removed to Hubert” then I don’t know man, I can’t help you. Anyway, there are some very nice little halfling vibes, at places, in this. Not a lot, and generally in to the preamble rather than the adventure keys proper, but there are some good examples here.

It does a few other things well. “The stench of trolls in room 11 is strong”, tells us one room. I love a good light/smell/sound warning, or, at least, and adventure that thinks about the environment as a whole to assist the DM. The descriptions are … let us politely say. Focused. “Mess of long-since pillaged crates and boxes. Gnawed animal bones spread about floor, primarily near hall east. Old Jewelry Box lies in a broken crate. 30’ x 65’” I like the GNAWED animal bones, and the east hall gives us a hint of what’s to come. Both are nice touches. But, also, let’s look at a general layout/description:

There’s a room name. That’s good. I might stick in an adjective, but, we’re starting off well with a framing of the information to come. I’m not the biggest fan of room dimensions in a description. I think that  most cases it’s repetition from information on a map, but, also, I know some people, the salt of the earth, like it. But, then  there’s the Occupants and Loot section. I am less than thrilled at these. We can generally intuit if there’s no loot in a room by the description not mentioning loot. The same for creatures, if none is listed in the main textual description then there must not be one present, eh? I get, perhaps, that the Occupants section might just be another way of listing creatures, instead of say, bolding or some such. But I think it’s a poorer choice. The creatures come late in the description and, in most cases, they should probably be up front, or at least near the top,of a description when they are obvious. No sticking in a “oh, yeah, ancient read dragon” after a five minute room description. They also, I believe, fit in a little better. They feel more at home when they are in the room description rather than listed at the bottom of the description like this. A little more, naturalism? They generally feel more like they belong and are doing something  there. 

The actual descriptions tend to be quite light. There’s nothing wrong wit being short, but they also feel more than a little hollow. An almost minimalism element present. That description of the backdoor is great. Narrow hallway, dirty shoes, clothes piled haphazardly. And the weasel nest fits PERFECTLY in to that. I’m reminded of an adventure centered around three singing witches. Which actually turned out to be harpies, not withes. Doh! Oh course! I love it when the party is told exactly what something else and then doesn’t see it. Masterful stroke, doing that. The room one guest room is a little meh, but, also, it could be  the entrance (and, to the adventures credit, windows are listed on the rooms, and their state, so you can break in. Yeah!) I think the descriptions are a little too workmanlike for me, a little too fact based to really communicate the vibe of the room. Taking that room five description, the wide table is a nice nod, as is the bones and rotting flesh, a clue as to whats nearby. But its just a little too … staid? And the room numbers could stand out just a little more.

The encounters feel a little … plain? The doppelgangers in the barn from the screenshot are a good example. There’s a little note elsewhere about them, but the encounter is just a little off. It needs a little vignette, or situation. The weasels are a high point, I guess and the others feel a little like “also, there’s a monster in this room.” Not integrated in, or lacking activity. There’s also little in the way of alerts, for monsters reacting to things or to intrusions. It feels like everyone is just in their room, as a kind of afterthought. There are a few “survivors” hiding in rooms, and those feel a little more integrated, but not as much as I would like either. As if the room occupants were divorced from their surrounding and/or environment. There’s just a little too much DM sauce needed. I think I’m looking for something to springboard a more dynamic environment, as a DM. I don’t need to be spoon fed but just a little more to get the a more dynamic play style going.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first eight pages, with no rooms shown. Traditional room/key adventures should show you at least a few of the rooms in a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/532723/hubert-s-hole?1892600

By Martin A Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Level 1

Willowdell was once a quiet halfling village hidden deep in the forest. Now, a blood pact with a vengeful spirit has transformed its people into fiendish predators, and the land itself twists with corruption. The characters must navigate the village’s haunted streets, face warped townsfolk, and uncover the truth before the horror spreads beyond the trees.

This 54 page adventure uses about 22 pages to describe twelve locations in a ruined halfling village full of crazed halfling-fiends. It’s padded out, and tries so hard to explain things that it comes full circle and is now HARDER to understand. It’s just a basic hack. 

The local halfling villages have appealed to the human castle for help. It seems they think there’s gonna be “a humanoid invasion.” Rather than respond with the army, some scouts and mercenaries are sent in to look around and see what is actually going on. You make your rounds and when reaching one particularly isolated village you see a bunch of bodies on the road. Gnolls and halflings, with most of the village razed. Rather than just go home and say “yeah. You lost a village, better send in the army!” the dogooders poke around, find some  crazed halflings as well as a survivor or two that tell you about the local “sacrifice a child for a great harvest and safety” tradition. Looks like it went wrong. At the site of the sacrifice a local specter fills you in via an exposition dump and points you to a small buried token. Taking the token to the town hall, you confront the evil forest spirit on the other end of the bargain, destroy the token, kill the spirit, and free the crazed townsfolk. Yeah! 

This is all a REALLY basic adventure. There are really only a couple of locations of note. The tavern with a survivors locked inside. The mayors house with the same, and some clues. The center of the cornfield where the sacrifice took place, and the town hall that contains the possessed mayor. The other eight or so locations add a little color but not much else to the way of the plot. There’s the required “oh no, what has happened here!” location when you first enter the village, and then the single crazed halfling that was partially lobotomized they transformed, so now he’s just banging his head against the wall. Literally. You’ve seen enough zombie movies to know what the score is. Err, I mean crazed halfling-fiend movies. 

There’s an art pack that comes with this adventure that is rather better than most. I’m a little confused why it’s stand-along pieces and they don’t appear in the text. Maybe to use as handouts? Anyway, it gives a pretty nice rural halfling creepy vibe. Only when you hear the wind blowing through dry corn stalks, or the liminal nature of farm fields and orchards can you truly understand the kind of … hollowness that the art communicated well. Anyway, it does a good job and it should have been included in the adventure proper. There’s no real art nin the adventure, just some full collor textured battle maps. I fucking hate that trend. They are confused and hard to read. I dare say that its not the fact that they are full coloror textured, just that the full color and textures are badly done., in the same way a hand drawn map could be clear or illegible. 

I’m rather fond of the hook here. It’s rare for an adventure to offer a pretext as to WHY the adventurers are doing the work instead of the local lord, but in this case it does make a little sense. Or, maybe, I just read Pillars of the Earth.  Anyway, the locals think they are going to be invaded “by humanoids” and so instead of committing the troops the local lord send out someone to see if he needs to send in the troops. “The castellan is now recruiting mercenaries and adventurers to scout for signs of hostile activity before committing regular troops.” And, then, when you reach the main halfling village, “The adventurers are received in Greeneye with every courtesy and comfort the humble village can muster.” Well, there’s a pleasant change. You’re treated like you’re there to help and that they’ve asked for your help. It’s a nice start. I am pleasantly surprised and looking forward to more.

But, of course, it’s gonna suck. And it does. 

Two pages of backstory. A lot of appendices, as the page count would suggest. The wanderers take a page to describe even though it’s just “you might run on to a roving band of halflings while going from one location to the next. (Which is a 33% chance every five minutes …) This is an insane amount of text for something so simple. And the only color here is a suggestion that the DM might make them come from a nearby house or something, in almost those exact words. There is no specificity. There’s epilogue, which I’m usually glad to see, except in this case there’s nothing much going on. You won! Yeah! The mayors wife is the new mayor. And if you lose? Nothing much happens, in terms of specific outcomes. “Epilogue – The conclusion of this adventure will depend on the characters’ actions and decisions. While there are multiple possible outcomes, these are the primary scenarios, which you can adapt to t your campaign:” Yup, that’s what an epilogue is and how you got there. I’m surprised, a bit, that each word used is not defined. 

But the major problem here, beyond the simplicity of the thing, just hacking, is that it is wordy and padded out to a pretty extreme degree. 22 pages to describe twelve locations gives us an average of two pages per location. And some are much longer, with the majors house being five pages long. And that’s not a bunch of room s being described. How do we get here? “CK Notes. This is the village mayor’s residence.” Yup, that’s what “Mayors house” usually implies. We get a bunch of backstory in it. And we get a SHIT TON of backstory and exposition. Everything is padded out. Every “room”, every creature, everything that you could come across. And every entry n the adventure is like this. Single column everywhere. The presence of bullets doesn’t really help, with information being spread out over so many pages. The effort to make it more approachable has resulted in it being infinitely more confusing. For a relatively simple hack adventure. And it comes off as rather generic. While there’s backstory and explanations on the hows and  whys there is little in the way of speciality to ground the adventure. 

It’s a simple adventure, padded out to an extreme degree.

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, and you get to see a bit of the first couple of locations, so it’s an ok preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/533161/c-c-the-fall-of-willowdell-c-c-compatible-edition?1892600

Joshua Bassler
Jitur Games
Generic/Universal
Level: Ha!

Smoke rises from the hills,
and in the shadow of a colossal skull,
the Gnawbone goblins prepare their blood-soaked feast.

This twenty page adventure uses about eight pages to describe five rooms in a goblin lair. Proving, once again, that Generic/Universal is the kiss of death, it fails to present an adventure and instead presents ‘possabilities.’ Thus in spite of more than few decent ideas it trudges blindly down the failed path of the Five Room Adventure.

What is the ratio of good to shit that you will put up with? Like, if i stick in ONE room in a 150 page adventure will you call it good? Worth playing? If it’s ten percent? Fifty percent? And how torturous can I make those good ideas? Can I surround it with so much bullshit that it makes you roll your eyes and vomit? 

Dude can write some read-aloud. “Smoke drifts into the night sky. A rough barricade of sharpened logs blocks the canyon path ahead, its timbers hung with bone charms that clatter in the breeze. Goblins cluster near a fire, their laughter sharp and cruel. A mangy wolf pulls at its chain, teeth bared as it scents the air. Beyond the wall, firelight flickers — and in the distance, looming above the tents, the shadow of a massive skull rises against the night.” It’s drifting heavily towards purple. And it tells us there are goblins instead of describing them. But, also, massive skull, looking above, mangy wolf. Sharp and cruel laughs. Bone charms that clatter. Quick, Robin! To the thesaurus-mobile! A little too much in places but the designer has the right idea and I’ll take this over a thousand other worse examples. It does feel forced, or perhaps a little ‘novelized’ in places, but he’s on the right path for sure in using the power of language to paint a picture.  

There’s also some decent foreshadowing going on in places. There’s that hint of a giant skull in the read-aloud above, and that shows up in a couple of the rooms. Then there’s also some pretty explicit foreshadowing: “Foreshadowing: A sickly prisoner mutters about a ritual “in the skull’s brain, ” planting dread for Area 4.” So… uh, ok. Yeah, the foreshadowing is good. I’m not sure we need it hammered in three times, by listing it as Foreshadowing, by doing the foreshadowing proper, and then by explaining what foreshadowing is, but, again, dude tried. 

The designed also included some explicit conclusions to the adventure if you fail then then the goblins ravage the and there are rumors of a goblin warband. I’d like a little more specificity in what was mentioned; refugees on the road speaking of atrocities or some such, but, again, at least he tried. The victory conditions are much less interesting or specific than even the loss ones. At best some prisoners (GENERIC unnamed ‘prisoners’ might stay with the party and offer their services. If would be funny if there were, like, a thousand of these, but only like five or so around at any one time for one reason or another. It’s like a wand of five magic missiles; how can be best use these five before they are used up and the wand recharges tomorrow? 

So, the designer has tried, more so than most. That read-aloud is from the entrance room and it gives you options for sneaking in through a garbage pit under a barricade. And you can meet a goblin deserter, maybe. The designer has tried to paint a decent picture of an environment, from the read-aloud to the potential for interactivity through stabbing, sneakin, and talking. 

But, also, this is a five room dungeon. It looks like the entire series, Delves, are going to be five room dungeons. As is so painstakingly, and repeatedly, explained to us in the introduction pages, that means an entrance, a puzzle/roleplay room. A setback, a climax, and a treasure/reveal. Hark! The enemy at the gates! Five room fucking dungeon. This is one of the worst trends to ever grace the RPG industry. Fucking pay per word blog/magazine crap. Sure, you want to five room up your home game? Have at thee! I still think it sucks but I can at least understand how it might be useful. But, as a paid product? Jesus Christ. It’s absurd. It’s like going to a Michelin starred restaurant and getting a generic brand Kraft Mac & Cheeses from a box. I think you misunderstood the assignment. This is a place for shit you can’t do at home. Something with some depth to it? Something more? Adding value? No? *sigh* Formulaic. That’s what I want to pay for. Formulaic. 

This is a five room dungeon. The entire purchase is twenty pages. The five rooms take up about nine of those pages. And how can this be? No worm juice here, just the usual crap. “Grashnak Bone-Eye, Shaman of the Gnawbone Tribe. Grashnak was born small, even for a goblin. His tribe — the Gnawbones — had always been weak and fractured …” and on and on and on the background information goes Irrelevant. Padding. Not useful at the table. “But Bryce, I like …” I don’t care that you like shit. It’s shit. T’s fucking padding. It distracts. It distracts both the DM at the table who is trying to run the fucking adventure, making it harder for them to locate what they need to run the fucking thing. And it distracted the fucking designer. They concentrated on that kind of shit instead of concentrating on making their fucking adventure better. Hey, here’s a fucking idea. How about making the actual five fucking rooms better?

YOU COULD START WITH INCLUDING A FUCKING MAP. 

Yeah, yeah. Not everything needs a map. It’s not clear that one is absolutely required here. But, you know, the relationship to the entrance, the garbage pit, the canyon, the crawly hole to bypass the entrance and so on would have been MUCH clearer. It would have added an extra element of play. 

You know what we get instead?

Twenty fucking pages and the designer can’t be bothered to put in a battlemap? That kind of shit is how you get twenty pages. That kind of shit is how you get almost two pages per room for the most simple of encounters. What happens is all goes according to plan is a section that tells you … how each room works. In a five room dungeon. Then there’s a “Planned Path” outcomes. Which is kind of like the same thing. Fuck me man. Maybe a good rule of thumb is to consider what you’d put in the adventure if it were fifty or a hundred rooms? Would you describe each and every room to us three times? As is, there’s ALSO an intro to each room for the DM, that’s not read-aloud, that sounds a lot like read-aloud, but THEN the read-aloud follows. It explains the room. “The Gnawbone tribe has thrown up a rough barricade across the canyon path leading to their camp. It’s a ramshackle palisade of sharp- ened logs, lashed together with rope and hide. Bone charms dangle from the gate — crude runes carved into skull fragments and tied with sinew. A watch fire burns in front of the barri- cade, where goblin sentries lounge.” That’s the section for the entrance room, with the read-aloud I threw up in the review earlier. It says the same thing! I think that’s four times now that essentially the same thing has been said? Sometimes you just wonder what the fuck s going on in peoples heads. Work the fucking room!

And it’s Generic/Universal, so you know it sucks. I wish I didn’t have to say that. I wish that a generic/Universal adventure could be good. I believe, deep down in my heart, that they COULD be good. But in practice they never are. Why? Because for some fucking reason when someone writes one up they seem incapable of putting anything concrete down on the page. The fact that something is generic/universal seems to mean that the adventure must be one full of ideas instead of one that puts something in front of a DM to help them.  Here’s an optional reward. Here’s something that could happen. Here’s something else that could happen. Come on man, do something concrete with the fucking adventure. And use that concrete thing to springboard to something else. You’re the designer. Design. That’s what the fuck we’re paying you for.

It’s clear, I guess, that they want that sweet sweet lucre from both Pathfinder and 5e. Just do a separate version. People do it all the fucking time. I think it’s a filthy money grab, but, also, that’s why you made it generic/universal in the first place. 

Let’s see … goblins are always running to raise the alarm, but there’s no guidance on what happens then. Who comes? How do they react? Nothing. The entire place is in a canyon. Narrow enough, as that battlemap screencap tells us, for the party to feel penned in. Nothing about the top of the canyon though. If the fucking idiots walk straight in then they deserve their deaths. Get on top, divert the river, sort it out later. Who the fuck camps in bottom of a ravine? I’m mystified why, given all of the words, there’s nothing about being on top. Or reactions. Oh, no, I’m not. Because it’s not imagined. Or played. Because, in spite of the page count, word count, etc, not much actual worthwhile effort was put in to it. *sigh* 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Just fork over the money and prais ethe fact you were allowed to consume.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/533699/delves-the-gnawbone-encampment-issue-1?1892600

By Stone Fable
Stone Fable LTD
5e
Level Fucking 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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