Prison-Pit of the Agelast King

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
Shadowdark
Levels 1-2

A Request!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews | 14 Comments

You Should Never Have Come Here

By Thom Wilson
ThrowiGames
OSE
Levels 3-5

After being spurned by a handsome noble, the warlock Zor Zaynne placed an infertility curse upon a region of the land. Although she accepted numerous payments from noble families to reverse the affliction, she never intended to allow any family to reproduce. After years had passed, rumors of the warlock’s death became popular. Recently, an acolyte of a local order uncovered a potential reversal ritual. All it requires is the warlock’s organs, but they are hidden deep within her treacherous tomb. Nobles have offered the reward of any treasure found in the lair if the organs can be retrieved. Many have already tried, and all have failed.

This 42 page single-column digest adventure explores the question “What if the Tomb of Horrors was for levels 3-5.” There’s nothing evocative here, just room after room of traps and summoned/undead monsters. 

Didn’t Grinding Gear, or some other early LotFP adventure do the same thing already, better? Much better? Anyway, this is a tomb of horrors adventure. I hate tomb of horrors adventures. I hate trap dungeons. I think they suck and are not fun. They drain the life out of a game while the players search for how they are going to get screwed eight different ways in THIS room. And to do it in a level 3-5, without the massive resources/divination available? Pffft. Anyway, I have now disclosed my prejudices, so, make what you will of the rest of this review.

So, some wizard curses all the nobles in a region to be infertile. Then, a long time later, maybe dies and is buried  by “his loyal followers” in some tomb full of traps and guardians. They send you in to get his internal organs to break the curse. The infertility thing never comes up again, anywhere so it’s pure pretext. 

Let’s see here … the first real encounter area, room two, is a sixty foot hallway. Yes. It takes a page and a half to describe. Uh huh. And it has … seven traps in it. There are barely visible glowing runes on the floor and ceiling. And there is a “swing over” pit trap with an ochre jelly in it that is right out of Grimtooth. Seriously. What was it called … the Johnny Weissmuller memorial, or something like that?

Let’s see … save vs poison or die … 50% chance every minute of ceiling collapsing for 4d6 damage, save vs death or die, save vs poison or get a fatal disease. You get the idea. It’s just room after room of screw you traps. 

The room descriptions are utilitarian. After all, you’re here to get fucked. “Narrow hallway with four half walls staggered throughout. Wall murals of gory executions of nobles. Portcullis gates opened by control panels in area 21 or 29, or with a successful Strength (Open Doors) check. Air tingles with electricity. Humming noise within each half wall. Floors covered in white powder.” (BTW: Those half walls have instantly resetting blade traps and the rest is mini explosions that do 1 point of damage for each individual footstep you take. ) There’s nothing really to that. The gore thing and humming is getting close, but, also, its all very utilitarian and just not very interesting from a holistic standpoint.

But, ah, the magic items. Book items. +1 shield. +1 dagger. You enjoy that.

So, a lot of save or die, a lot of high damage traps, or continual damage traps. A lack of magic item resources or spells at level  3-5. A designer who says “the adventure continues until all of the characters are dead or the mummy-lich is.” Tomb of Horrors is one of the worst things to ever happen to D&D. And then whatever the fuck started character-driven super-heoric shit. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. No preview … SUCKER!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/462196/You-Should-Never-Have-Come-Here?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Reviews | 16 Comments

Riven Catacombs

By Bart Wynants
Bolwerk Publishing
Generic/Universal/OSR
Levels 1-3

Centuries ago, the Red Death cast its shadow across the realm. A demonic plague of gargantuan proportions, it felled nearly one-third of the population. Desperate survivors nailed the crimson corpses into hastily constructed caskets and sealed them inside a hidden catacomb within the Complex. Some accused the plague doctors of being overzealous, burying the living along with the dead…

This fourteen-ish page adventure presents an ossuary dungeon area with ten rooms. It presents interesting environments, well described, with pretty good interactivity. One of the better generic/universal adventures, it suffers from a lack of focus in its room presentations and, perhaps, some issues with its central conceit.

This is an interesting little thing in the history of adventures. It looks like it has evolved from a geomorph project. Someone likes geomorphs and has created some to stick together for your campaign. Then, they went ahead and started to populate the geomorphs, as a separate project. Or at least that’s the story I’ve made up in my head. These ARE geomorphs, with the connecting sides and ability to rearrange them as you will. This particular adventure is one map section with, at this time, six being available in total. What is interesting about these, though, far far more interesting than the geomorph concept (which always seemed attractive to me but I think, in practice, always sucks) is that the adventure is not bad, at all. Oh, it’s not great, but, also, you can see some hints of something/one really talented in the ways it counts. 

The premise here is that plague victims (“The Red Mist”, a nice touch) were buried on this “level”, sometimes alive. You’re being sent in by Lemnis, who wants you to find the “‘Thurian Heresy’—a blasphemous text containing apocryphal myths about the god of magic. The only known remaining copy was held by Dûdael, the “Prophet of Ruin” who lies entombed somewhere in the Riven Catacombs.” I’m not the biggest fan of being hired to do something, but, also, we’ve got some proper names, the book/prophecy has a name, and we’ve got a Prophet of Ruin. That’s exactly th e kind of specificity that adventure descriptions should have. Fuck your eye colour; I want a Prophet of Ruin.

The map looks nice. A little small, because it’s a square geomorph instead os a larger rectangle. A little symmetrical, but good detail on the map that helps contribute to an evocative environment. There is, however, a rather childish looking “clawl mark” of caverns running through the map. I don’t know, The Great RIft or some such. It’s an afterthought int he adventure, not really being representing in it, and, looks like one of the map as well. IN addition, the map page, the unused portion, is taken up by a summary of each room, but they are kind of useless summaries. “Pauper’s Columbarium. Hatred from beyond the grave infests this area.” Sure. Do monsters react to the the next room? It’s just wasted space. I’d have put the “always on” dungeon features, like light and sounds, in that area, so the DM is always looking at them. Speaking of, one of the always on features is sounds. “Eerie silence reigns in these halls, occasionally rent asunder by deep, ominous rumblings originating far beneath the surface.” That’s just window dressing, and I like my window dressing to actually being something, so the sounds should have something to do with the level, or, maybe, a neighboring one … which can’t be done because of the geomorph nature.

Formatting is pretty good. The room summary (which could also be ready aloud) will have some important features in them that then get bolded in the DM text so you can find them easily. There’s not so much text that you need to wade through it. There are a decent number of handouts for something this small. But, also, there are one pagers also included for OSR, 5E, Pathfinder, and Shadowdark, that localizes the adventure to those systems. The monster status, saves, etc. It’s a little cumbersome. The adventure is also a two column format but only uses one column for the adventure text. The second is full of designers notes and extra information. This is a great idea, but, also, not the best use of density. I guess page count is free in a PDF, so I should not worry about it. Id still have rather had the system information there, or a separate version for each system. 

The descriptions here, as well as the interactivity, are both very much a cut above the usual and quite interesting. As I noted earlier, there’s a specificity that helps bring things to life and makes life less generic. “Thick layers of melted candle-wax cover the surface of this votive altar dedicated to forgotten saints. An assortment of coins, holy symbols, and votive gifts sits embedded in the wax. Liberating these objects takes 20 minutes (10 if heat is applied) and yields 3d6 x10 gold pieces worth of coins and trinkets”  THICK layers. VOTIVE alter. EMBEDDED in the wax. All very nice. Ripples of darkness UNDULATE. “ A human torso protrudes from the north wall, arms outstretched hopelessly towards some absent saviour” That’s a great description and a great thing to investigate, for both the alter and the wall figure. Andthe adventure is full of this shit. “A careful search of the east wall reveals an alcove with a skull carved from stone. If a character presses their fingers into the skull’s eye sockets, the jaw clicks open a …” Fuck yeah! Stick those fingers in an eye socket! 

I think, also, you get a iint of a problem with the descriptions, particularly the read-aloud.summary stuff. It’s a little dramatic and purple. “Dire runes blaze angry and read in the primeval darkness of this dismal crypt.” Uh huh. That’s very much try-hard. But, hey, there’s a spiral staircase with a trickle of blood running down it. Pretty sweet thing to freak the fucking party out!

I really dig the interactivity here. It feels imagined first and then stated. Not “let me look through the book and find something to put in this room.” There’s a little too much for the DM to do “create some people to have buried here” and little bit of useless advice “you can replace the gods mentioned with your own gods!” Thanks man. Appreciate it. But, the rooms proper is pretty great and the descriptions pretty close to great … even if there are some italics sections that are too long.

I get that the designer is probably interested in geomorphs. We are all victims of our own conceits. Designing an actual dungeon, with multiple levels, with this degree of focus on formatting, interactivity, and good writing would be something really interesting to see. 

This is $3.32 at DriveThru. The preview will show you the adventure, but not the system localization, but, great preview to check out. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/464502/Dungeon-Domains-Riven-Catacombs?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments

Kavlov’s Sanctuary

By Jean Luc Lariviere-Lacombe, Todd Terwilliger
The Dungeon's Key
OSE
Levels ... ? 1-5?

A millennium has passed since Kavlov imprisoned the demon Balthazar deep beneath the earth, binding themselves within the Halls of Dread to guarantee their success. However, as Kavlov’s power fades, so does the demon’s prison. Do you have what it takes to stop the ritual circles from being activated and prevent Balthazar’s escape? Or will you take on the role of the villain, seeking to unleash untold destruction on the world by freeing the demon from its bonds? Explore the dread-filled halls of Kavlov’s Sanctuary and uncover the ancient secrets and betrayals that could determine the fate of the world. But be warned, your actions have consequences, and the ultimate battle between good and evil is closer than ever before!

This 107 page digest adventure is a Caves of Chaos thing, done for Mork Borg and then respun in to OSE. It’s not the worst thing ever written, but tends to to the Shock Jock side of the spectrum, and combines minimal descriptions with an ability to expand the text in to paragraphs while still not providing value beyond the minimal descriptions. 

This is a Mork Borg thing. Sure, it’s been respun a bit in to OSE, but at its heart it’s Mork Borg. What’s unusual is that they’ve managed to write something longer. A full on dungeon with supporting wilderness and town. And, yes, it’s inspired by the Caves of Chaos. The wilderness map is evocative of it, as is the BX version of the main map: a valley with a lot of caves in the walls. You’ve got about ten dungeons here, in the same environment as the Caves of Chaos. Dwarflings, Cannibals, Barbarians, a Cyclops, Orcs, Lepers, Hobgoblins running an arena, a Gorgon, a Lab, a giant boar, a basilisk, a “wight crypt” full of vampires, and the Halls of Dread … a little temple area with a dude continually back the chaos void devil he imprisoned long ago. 

I guess I’ll describe the supporting problems before I get to the dungeon proper. The town is a few pages long. It’s mostly boring description of boring shops. There’s a throw off line here and there about someone in the main temple (thats runs the town) actually being an evil cultists, with a few entries elsewhere in the town about how they are in cahoots with the evil faction. There’s not really all that much to go on here, for the DM. It’s like I described a town of, oh, eighteen sites? In about five pages and then said something like “The second in charge at the temple is actually working against it, and has a few followers in town.” This is about what you’re going to get out of the town here. It is the old wound, my lord. If you’re going to say something then say something interesting. That’s what the content of the town should be concentrating on. Something for the DM to hang their hat on, otherwise, don’t bother describing it much, or at all. I’m not paying $15 to read about how the general store has general store items for sale. There is, I think, a significant missed opportunity in town. The walls of the temple bleed evil blood that the temple sometimes uses in their ceremonies. That’s interesting. It smacks vaguely of reality and could have been expanded upon more. Also, the town has a fuck ton of laws, almost their only laws, realted to the dead and burel thereof. And five, I think, of the buildings,, are guild halls for the dead. Morticians, gravediggers, coffin makers, etc. And that’s not really expanded upon at all. Something seems missing here. These are the areas that could have been expanded upon, that and the subplot. 

The wilderness is where things get a tad more interesting. And Mork Borgian. There’s a fey encounter. Except they wear the skin of the people they’ve enchanted. WoW! That’s new. And fits well for fey, I think. It even has a little section on them skinning the party alive and how the party can keep playing. More on this in a minute. There’s also a “Carnivorous Keep” that has no context or details except that it has stomach acid, a treasure in the basement, its only entrance is 40’ up, and it can thrown stones up to 200’ away for 2d6 damage. I truly can’t describe the confusing nature of this. It’s like someone had a cool idea and had four people jot down notes about it ad just threw all of thor notes in. None of it really works together or has context. And then there’s The Forest, which has five encounters in it. Not mapped out. Just things for the DM to throw at the party. All of this is supported by a wandering monster table that is both long and provides nothing for the wanderers to do to help the DM out. 

But that Fey thing, what about it? It’s the perfect example of what I think is wrong with this entire adventure. It presents this idea: the fey wear the skin of people they’ve captured and skinned alive. That’s pretty freaky! Very old world of them, I guess. But it does nothing with this. It’s a minor encounter. There’s no context. There’s no lead in. We simply take that description, that they are waring the skin of people, and do nothing more with it or the environment in which you encounter them. And, I’m down for some randomness in an adventure (and in, weird shit just happens, like meeting fey wearing skins) but its nothing more than combat here. This could have been so much more, but nothing more is done with it, ever. This lack of a greater context, a greater environmental “Feel” is a major problem with the caves, once you reach them.

“The walls appear to be caked in mud.” This is in the first sentence in the caves descriptions. An auspicious beginning, using the word appears to pad things out. What we’re ging to find in the caves is much the same as in B2. It’s a lot of hacking with an occasional fetch quest here and there to bring something back. The interactivity is limited to little more than that and, even  then, is a little disjointed. A secret door in one room leads to a cobweb covered arch in the next. “A minecart and boulders obscure a secret passage.” vs “thick cobwebs cover two small passages leading to the Mining tunnels …” So … a secret door? Or not? It’s this confusion which abounds.

There are weird misses, like a pixie in a lantern with its wings torn off, being used as a light. What if you free it? No notes for the DM, even though thi happens in multiple places, including a room with dudes actively tearing the wings off of them. These sorts of missed opportunities are all over the place. It’s focusing on the shock factor and not the interactivity that the situation could bring. Or, I should say, potential situation, since they are just all combats.

And this lack of depth and focus on the shock extends to most of the adventure in the caves. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a dude strapped down to a table with leprosy and have his eyes rotting out! Or, the barbarians have a rabid dog with them … which I guess is not rabid with them? Also, no rules for rabies? Fucking sticking some rabis in should send the party in to a terror fit. The cyclops cave is full of feral children as kind of servants … who he eats the fingers and toes off of when he gets too hungry and they are too slow to cook. But they don’t escape? And, again, there’s no larger context. The cannibal caves don’t feel like cannibal caves. It just feels like the designer wanted to put ina room with someone getting butchered in it. Even the dude feigning death and rushing out with a knife, which could be a great little scene, is not handled particularly effectively. 

“Upon closer inspection, the merchant’s eyelids and lips have been removed, exposing their weeping eyeballs and gums” This is shock value for no other purpose. The caves don’t really FEEL like the environments they are trying to present. The descriptions are minimal, although they are expanded upon at length to no effect. This is the major sin with this adventure.

The BX map, and town map, in the adventure booklet are so fuzzy as to be unreadable. Fortunately there is a separate map pack that makes them readable. But the individual cave maps in that are a monstrosity of some background image overlaid, no doubt from the Mork Borg heritage. Which makes them impossible to use. But the mini maps in the actual booklet are fine. The net effect here is that the excesses of the usual mork borg presentation values are generally avoided. 

The Mork Borgians managed to write a longer adventure. That’s good. The focus on shock value descriptions might have been ok if the actual locations FELT like what the individual descriptions were trying for. Interactivity beyond pure combat (which, I allow for, B2 had little of) and focusing on situations rather than encounters would have gone a long way here.

And stick in a fucking level range and some order of fucking battle. Jesus. Still, one of the best things to come out of that genre. I look forward to seeing the next one from this group.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is 31 pages. The end will show you the caves and the two page spread. It’s a nice emulation of the OSE format, although I think kits missed the mark with its minimal descriptions and using that format.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/453667/Kavlovs-Sanctuary–An-Old-School-Essentials-compatible-campaign-module?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 5 Comments

Blue Star Forest

By Chris Carter
Exotic World Designs
OSR
Level ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

Garden of Terror

By Ben Thompson
99c Adventures
OSR
Level 4

The tiny village of Ostlund has long been home to a beautiful park, but, beginning around a year ago, the once-serene garden has become a very different – and much more sinister – place around sundown.  A mysterious dark curse now sees the village haunted by all manner of evil creatures that wreak havoc on the town and its people, causing destruction and mischief that is becoming increasingly more violent and frightening for the people living here.  Ostlund has managed to cope with this situation, for now, but with crops beginning to die, villagers going missing, and structures mysteriously catching fire at night, the people now seek help to free them from their torment. You must venture to Ostlund before the night of the Summer Solstice.  You will have just one night to wander the haunted park and cleanse it of the curse.  Succeed, and you will become the greatest heroes this small hamlet has ever seen.  Fail, and you doom these people to continue their cycle of misery for another grim year.

This 64 page adventure uses ten pages to describe fourteen areas in a small park that is about 300 feet on a side. No plants here, just endless read-aloud, too much DM text, and an obvious 5e adventure restated for the OSR to increase sales. 99c Adventures are now off the table. 

We start with a one page read-aloud; a letter to the party from a village pleading for help. Evil things in the park, crops failing, blah blah blah. Off you go. On the way you have a one and a half page encounter with a troll at a bridge. Nothing really special here; fight him or pay him off. There’s a night in the river underneath that you can recruit. Sir Eric. A kind of Gilderoy Lockhart type dude with a fawning fan club of women in the village you are going to. That’s fun. That’s ALL that is fun in this adventure.

A page and a half troll bridge encounter. What the fuck were you thinking man? With all that read-aloud? IN ITALICS so my fucking eyes would pop out of my head? And then ALL of that DMs text. For a fucking troll on a bridge. Why’d you do that? And none of it is interesting. None of it. It’s just troll bridge shit,all of it generic and nothing special or fun or unusual about it. It amazes me, the ability of people to pad shit encounters out with more shit.

Ok, then you get to town. There’s nothing fun in town, really. There are three Vampire Spawn, which are not vampires, but, close enough I guess. They don’t really do anything unless you hit on one of them (Hello Ladies!) And there’s the knights fanclub. I guess that’s fun. There are some druids you can talk to who will teach yo a spell to talk to the lake guarding in the park. Otherwise, it’s just generic shit and a few programmed combat/challenge encounters. 

Off to the park you go! There’s a giant statue head in the park. It’s the source of evil. How you know this I know not. You need to collect an incantation n the park and get the fabulous SUN SWORD, err, I mean Sunstone. The lake guardian thing can tell you to go get both. Otherwise , I don’t really know how you are figuring this one out. “You feel like there might be more to do” , I believe the encounters say. Yeah. That’s always a great sign. Telling the party outright they have more to do. Which, of course, means more of the DM running “INITIATIVE!” as monsters attack. There’s no real option to do anything but stab everything in the park. So, get stabbing boyo!

I really can’t get over this. Vampire Spawn in the broad daylight. Sixty four pages for just over a dozen encounters. Almost all just straight up combat encounters. It’s fucking absurd. Ridiculous amounts of read-aloud. Ridiculous amounts of DM text. Why would you attach your name to this?

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. Enjoy that intro read-aloud and the start of the troll encounter. Perfect preview, since you know nothing but pain is coming for you.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/464634/LC3-Garden-of-Terror?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 16 Comments

The Scourge of Northland

By Jacob Fleming, David Cameron
Gelatinous Cubism
OSE
Low Levels

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of the adventure is, well, …

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

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

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

But …

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

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

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

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

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The Lost Caravan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shadows of the Sunken Dread

By Michele Toscan
Self Published
5e
Levels 3-4

The incessant floods engulfing the region have forced the young Maddalena Malatesta, the wicked Lord’s niece, to leave Montefiore Conca Castle without her cat, Cerasus. Since Maddalena was brought to the ancestral Malatesta residence, she has grown weaker and weaker, yearning only for the company of her little companion. The company of soldiers from the house, sent by her father Ferrantino to recover the cat, never returned from the mission. Psychic storms prevent any form of foresight around the castle, which has been shrouded in a shadow of terror for days. Lord Malatestino I Malatesta has decided to enlist a group of assorted heroes to retrieve little Cerasus. But is that his only objective? And why did the previous expedition never return?

It’s the holidays and I’m in a generally generous mood. So I decided to accept this review request. I have regrets.

This complete and utter mess of garbage uses … three pages? To describe … a castle? Maybe?  It uses very general terms to describe a few things that might happen. Except, my description is WAY too concrete to actually represent what the designer has done here. This isn’t even an outline of an adventure, or a summary of an outline. Maybe an idea for an outline would be a fitting description.

Ok, so, floods ravage the lands. Some dude hires you to go check out a castle of his and report back. Also, his daughters cat is missing in the castle and please bring it back. You might have an encounter on the way to the castle. Inside you meet some mercs. Underneath, in its dungeon, you find a cthulhu that has woken up. It’s served by some etruscans. It made friends with the cat. The end. 

Come now Bryce, you can do a better job os describing the adventure than that! Ah, but, gentle readers, I cannot. For that is not a summary of the adventure. That IS the adventure. I’m being serious.

The opening journey through the flooded lands tells us that “Feel free to add as many chance encounters as you like to the journey that begins on the Roman Flaminia road and then

climbs into the southern hills. The hills are full of bandits. An encounter with the ghosts of Guido del Cassero and Angiolello da Carignano might lead the character to understand Malatesta III has well deserved the name Guastafamiglia“. We get another paragraph when we arrive at the castle describing the mercs and how they sent out a messenger. The implication, I guess, is that he’s lost and you should find him. But there’s nothing more than that. No messenger notes or anything. Then it tells us that under the castle are etruscans and their leader, this cleric dude named Velma. Again, I’m no exaggerating to say that’s all there is. It’s another four sentences. That’s it. Then it just morphs in to a table, without any heading at all, to describe a kind of random element in the tunnels. IE: they have been abstracted and you roll on a table to discover the room you are now in and what happens in it, until you roll “the final room” and find the cat and his buddy the cthulhu. Let’s see, you are rolling a d20 and there are seven possibilities. Enjoy.

The rest of the adventure is six or so pages of pregens and monster stats and a three page background overview of the campaign setting. 

Did I mention that the read-aloud section is long and in italics? Did I mention that the entire thing is in some weird ass fucking font that’s hard to read? Or that it appears on some kind of background to give the appearance of an old and weather newspaper, which makes it even harder to read? I fucking HATE that fucking people do this. I’m not gonna struggle to try and comprehend the written fucking words of your adventure. Why not just write the fucking thing in Italian and make me struggle to figure it the fuck out? It’s the same fucking thing. I would love nothing more than to torture each of these people with each others adventures. Hand them some other dude artsy fartsy K0oL font and background adventure and sit them down in front of people and tell them to run the fucking thing. 

There’s no fucking adventure here. “Hey, there’s a castle with some mercs in it. Five of them. They sent a messenger to someone” That’s supposed to be a fucking adventure? No map? No real indication of how they treat the party? I didn’t even know they were baddies until I noted that their stat blocks lists them as Enemies. 

I don’t know what the fuck is going on here. This looks like an idea I might have for a nights play before I started fleshing it out, generally, with a few extra sentences scribbled down. It’s not a fucking adventure. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and you get to see the artsy fartsy background/newsprint and fancy font and a few paragraphs of text for the background. That should tell you more than enough to let you know to stay far FAR away from this.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/458682/Shadows-of-the-Sunken-Dread?1892600

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The Temple of Kalonius

By Vance Atkins
Leicester's Rambles
OSE
Levels 3-4

Brother Sigeric, head of a local “charity organization” has asked the party to retrieve an idol as a favor. Break into the hidden temple, snag the artifact, and back to the pub. Simple. But the complex is still full of hazards, and, oh yeah, another party has gotten there first. Dangit.

This seven page adventure uses three pages to describe eleven rooms in an abandoned temple. It starts SUPER strong in tone, and has a couple of highlights, but ultimately is more than a little disappointing in its room descriptions and a little slow in its encounters. Perhaps an adventure for a more realistic campaign, but not for me.

I’m trying hard to like this one. A lot. But it’s not gonna happen. My joy here starts out QUITE strong, with the hook/intro. It is, without a doubt, one of the strongest I’ve ever seen. Let me take that back, the TONE appeals to me so much that I’ve stars in my eyes. You’re in an orphanage, upstairs in Brother Asshats room. His OPULENT room. ““Glad you stopped by. Got a little ‘charitable task’ for you on behalf of St. Vivinna’s Home for the Wayward” Uh huh. How the fuck can anything start with that and not be a joy to behold? He’s favor swapping with someone else and needs to get an idol from an old abandoned temple. He sent a couple of his boys (literally!) but they didn’t come back. There’s a little bit more to emphasize the tone, and then off to the temple you go!

Inside we find a young boy with a broken leg, trapped in a covered pit. Sweet! He heard some dudes come by a few hours ago, but they didn’t try to help him. Also, his leg is broken. WHat ya doing with him? Later on we meet said mercenaries, a strong party of … twelve? With two mages and a captain and some grunts. There could be a great little battle in a partially collapsed room while they try to escape the place with the idol they just picked up. Partially collapsed doesn’t really cover it; a room with a mound of HIGH rubble in the middle … and thus two exits. The rubble mound providing a means for the party to attack from behind or, if they come through the main doors, for the mercenaries to escape over to cover their retreat with the idol. 

Other than this, there are a couple of undead dudes and a small handful of traps. We’re not talking stellar interactivity here. Maybe appropriate for a small abandoned temple, but, realism sucks ass. And, if we were going for a realistic temple, then I’d need the human element to be beefed up even a bit more, in tone and situation if not in numbers. As is, this feels like a one trick pony. 

The map supporting play is not bad for something this size. Same level stairs, collapsed rooms and hallways, partial collapses and so on. Variety spices up play and makes an exploration in to the unknown less staid. 

Other than that … meh?

There are wandering tables but the creatures are a little .. well, bandits “lurking” and skeletons “clatterring” might fulfill the letter of the law of having them do something, but another word or two would really spice things up here. 

More importantly, though, the room descriptions are a let down after that stellar intro/hook. I’m not even really sure that the rooms HAVE descriptions? Dank and bare? A wide sloping passageway? These are a little too fact based for me. I don’t think they really communicate, well the environment in which the party is encountering. And, without that, we must lean more heavily on the DM to bring the adventure to life. And while that’s always the case, the central conceit of the tenfootpole is that the adventure exists to support the DM during play at the table. And my definitions of support must also include helping to bring the adventuring environment to life. There’s certainly a spectrum here, but Dank and dark and wide & sloping aint’ gonna cut it for me. And while that latter also include “bas-reliefs of jackals lining the western wall”, I’m still not sure thats much more than fact based reporting. 

Great opening here, with the orphans, sending in the boys, the charitable contribution, and the hag. And, the kid in the pit is a good touch. But that kind of colour just isn’t present anywhere else to the degree it is in the opening. And while I’m not suggesting that the opening two paragraphs are the correct amount of words, or detail, for an room entry, I do think that the vibe of the rooms must tend to that end of the spectrum rather than the more minimal end that this adventures encounters tend to. “Room 9: Another undead priest [stats]” just isn’t for me.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $2. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/463343/The-Temple-of-Kalonius?1892600

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