The Tomb of the Sand Sorcerer

Posted on August 2, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Lewis McMeekin
Mucker71
OSR
Levels 1-3

In ancient ages past, the high sorcerers of the endless deserts ruled with mighty magics and fiendish spells. As time went on and their empire fell to infighting, demonic influences and wayward spells, each subsequent sorcerer king and his fellows grew weaker and weaker, until finally a rebellion crush

This eight page adventure have a tomb with eight rooms. It’s garbage. 

Okok, yeah yeah, it’s garbage. But, get this, it’s Levels one through three, right? Yeah yeah, but, get this: it’s got EIGHT mummies and a lich in those eight rooms! I know, right? But, you see, that’s click bait, from me. The mummies are AC7 HP4. With an init of -3! They are zombies! So, you know, pretty interesting to put some zombies in mummy wrappings. (And give them a penalty to attack while wrapped up) Anyway, I thought it was cool. My “this is my tomb and I’m the sand sorcerer and I’m a lich now” is a different story.

There’s a central chamber to the dungeon with the other eight rooms hanging off of it. I’m not actually sure where you enter the dungeon. There’s some puzzle thing outside that you have to solve and then stairs appear in the earth, a kind of ramp. There’s this black semicircle on the central room in the dungeon, so, maybethat’s the ramp? I don’t know. Anyway, you go in to all of the eight rooms. Ones got the mummies in it. Otherwise, you just loot the rooms of a couple of boring treasures. Then, once you do all eight, and come back to the central chamber, the sarcophagus lid (magically sealed, of course) pops off the sarcophagus in it and Mr Lich appears. Or, rather, mr lich, lower case. AC14 and HP30. If he defeats the party then leaves his tomb and seeks to restart his empire. With his one spell “sand blast” and the ability to hover. Oh, and he drains 1 HP from each person in a small radius. Anyway, he’s restarting his empire. With AC14 and 30 HP. And one spell. I mean, sure, restart your empire my man. Until you run across a group of kids that throw rotten apples at you and you then die. But, also, who am I to shit on someones dreams? 

As for the rest of this … the map is uninteresting. These sorts of things are just “Have an encounter have an encounter have an encounter” Lame. Why have a map if there’s nothing to do on it? No exploration? [Ed: Because Byrce will slam you if you don’t.] No real interactivity here. The Get In puzzle and then the mummy and lich fight. No other real puzzles or things to do besides loot a bit. 

But there is TONS of text. Looooong sections of boxed text… yeah! It’s been awhile since that particular vice has shown up. And long DM’s text. That says nothing. Well, besides historical backstory that is meaningless. And the text there is contains overwrought text. “The

fabric, once vibrant and regal, is now weathered and worn, covered in layers of fine desert sand that cling to its every thread.”

*barf*

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $2.62. The preview is four pages and show you only the outside puzzle. Garbage preview. Garbage adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/444478/TOROHA–The-Tomb-of-the-Sand-Sorcerer?1892600

Also, congrats to Kelsey! I revisited DriveThru after an absence and saw a TON of new adventures in the OSR section … 95% of which were Shadowdark! I mean, I LOATHE the fact that they are there, but, also Shadowdark is the new hotness for sure. Congrats!

Posted in 2 out of 10, Reviews | 10 Comments

GenCon

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Bryce Lynch

Going to GenCon?

Drop me a line

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Tomb of the Twice-Crowned King

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By G. Hawkins
Self Published
OSRIC
Levels 8-10

When death finally drew near and the forces of law were at the gates, Heimfell the giant two-headed king built a great tomb in the hills. He ordered his sorcerers to place a curse upon his family and servants, forcing them into a state of unlife to guard his crypt for eternity. Many treasure seekers have died within his halls and to this day the two-headed king is still lord of his final domain

This twelve page adventure features a two level dungeon with about 55 rooms. It’s varied, interesting, and not quite as static as most tomb adventures. It’s a good dungeon, suffering only from a lack of evocative writing, and, perhaps, just a tiny touch of the The Tomb Problem.

This is part of a compendium of adventures. About fifty pages with nine adventures included. Which, doing a quick thumb through, appear to be decent adventures.This one, though, is a two level tomb dungeon housing the skeleton of a giant two-headed king of old. And his undead buddies. And some static shit. And a decent number of traps. IE: What one expects from a tomb adventure. The level here is a bit suspect. Ye Olde Cleric will be getting a workout calling on his god to wash that undead right out of their hair. Chock full of nuts, and undead … with the second level of the tomb having a -2 to turn attempts. Nice try buddy, but eights and tens are still gonna fuck up some undead, I think? Meh, it’s just a resource, like anything else, I guess. 

A lot of what’s going on in this tomb is going to be familiar. You enter a room, it’s got a sarcophagus, and inside is a clawing sound and a moaning female voice saying “let me out, help, let me out.” A wight. Or, Ye Olde Niches With Skeletons In Them. This extends, even, to the classic statue trap/puzzle, of which there are several present. Statue with gemstone eyes, a hand raised in warning, eyes begin to glow and then shoot disintegration beams. These are all classics. Up to and including bridges over chasms and a giant stone rolling ball trap. The classics are present, both in trap form and in creature form. The adventure does a decent job with them. Take that wight encounter. The scratching and the female Help Me (Daphne?!) sound help set this apart. It’s not just a sarcophagus with a wight inside, but the sounds, and lure from them, help to amplify the encounter just a little bit more. 

You could have a room with a wight. Or a room with a sarcophagus and a wight inside, which is better. Or, Make the sarcophagus stone. Or, how about white-streaked black marble. Stick in some tattered tapestries of a stern faced elderly woman. Make them tattered and decayed. Finally, add the scratching at the lid and the Help Me. We;ve gone from a minimalist encounter, a wight, through some other versions to arrive at an encounter that has a smattering of evocative text and has something active going on, the scratching and voice. It’s now closer to a situation and infinitely more interesting than just a boring old sarcophagus with a wight inside. 

And the designer does this, over and over again. “Two 12’ tall bronze statues, two-headed and

holding giant mauls, flank a crumbling stone bridge (60’ long) arching over a canyon. Below, a raging river fed by a thundering waterfall cuts through the black rock; on the other side a ledge before thick, granite doors embedded into a cliff face. The cavern ceiling towers above (200′ high)” That’s pretty good scene setting, but, also … wonder what’s gonna happen with those giant statues carrying mauls … you know, the ones next to the crumbling stone bridge… 

Formatting is great. The maps are clear and interesting, one has an iso view. Different elevations present, rivers, statues, etc. And the text is clear and easy to read. Seriously, this is one of the easiest to read things I’ve ever seen. So much so that I hazard to say that any other font/spacing should be illegal. Bold room names (which, perhaps, could be a bit more descriptive) followed by a short little descriptive paragraph, keywords bolded and expanded upon in bullets below, with brief uses of italics and shaded boxes for more clarity.Nine rooms per page, on the first page, and they feel good. Each room is clearly separated from the rest, good use of whitespace to shift attention. I seriously can’t give it enough praise, especially in the layout/font category. 

That bridge entry is, perhaps, a highlight of the evocative writing in the adventure. It’s not that any of the rooms are bad, but, it does get that “Just another marble tomb room” vibe to it after awhile. How many marble sarcophaguses can you do in a dungeon? But, when there is something more colourful to describe it generally gets a decent enough treatment. Magic items/treasure could be better described, but, I guess that’s the nature of this particular beast. 

So, it’s a solid dungeoncrawl in a two level tomb. More than good enough to challenge the players. I might say tha the interactivity is a bit low/slow, as is similar in a lot of tomb adventures, but it’s not exactly the static place that most tombs are.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eleven pages and shows you several rooms. It’s a good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/442331/Tomb-of-the-TwiceCrowned-King?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 9, Reviews, The Best | 17 Comments

Skalbak Sneer The Stronghold of Snow

Posted on July 29, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By J Blasso-Gieseke
No Artpunk #2
OSE
Levels 5-7

Skalbak Sneer, the Stronghold of Snow, is located in the foothills of the Blackcrag Mountains. It is the northernmost defensive outpost of the snow dwarf realm developed eight generations ago by King Thazkal to remove pressure from the mighty halls of their central mountain hold, the vast Undercastle, Khazal Kharak. . The Stronghold was designed as a deathtrap, requiring few

dwarves to garrison. By way of rumors bruited about by dwarf ore merchants, the legend of the

wealth it contains ensures a steady influx of the foolish: parties of adventurers, greedy barbarians, and raiding bands of orcs and other savage beastmen — all test their mettle to steal its riches, never to return. The Stronghold is now under the stewardship of the eighth Skalbakson, Thulmir.

This thirty page adventure is a dwarf base, full of treasure, with about sixty rooms. It’s a straight up no-gimp lair assault. I can pick at it, for what it is and how it does things, but, also, it knows what it is and it does its job. 

The snow dwarves have a fortress on top of a mountain. There’s no reason for it to be there. It’s not guarding a route in to their lands, or a passage to the underworld, and it can serve as a sally point. But we’re gonna ignore all of the real reasons to put a fortress up someplace. It’s chock full of cash and magic. And that means XP. Lets go fuck up some dwarves! The hooks, as well as the hirelings mentioned, all kind of lead you toward this. Some have rumours, some have bits of the map. It’s all oriented toward the task at hand: getting in, killing dwarves, and looting the place. 

First you gotta climb up some stairs on the outside of the fortress to get to the mountain entrance, four hours up. Griffins make it harder. Then, inside, you’re stuck in a kind of series of looping passages, where the dwarves use the numerous murder holes to stab and shoot at the party, as well as opening some monster cages to set them loose on the party in certain rooms. The main task for the party is to act like a bunch of level sevens and not n00bs. Don’t play the dwarves games. Don’t go for the main entrance but look for the hidden ones. Get your ass passwall’d (or something) behind them and out of the main murder-hole/cage loop . Don’t play the DM’s game but rather be the free thinks that got you to level seven in the first place. There’s a good order of battle here, with various reactions of the dwarves to the party and plans to fall back, etc. And the little shits have a kind of doomsday device: when the place is ready to fall and you’ve slaughtered almost everyone they release the wights of the former fortress commanders to cleanse the place. (I’m not so sure about this … I seem to recall clerics fucking up wights at this level. The different games all tend to handle turns differently though, so maybe the fact that this is OSE prevents too many of them getting cleric’d?) 

Descriptions are a little boring. The rooms are a bit sparse, a combination of The Dwarf Problem and needing to make whats there a bit more. It’s a concentration on factual room descriptions, the contents, rather than what the room feels like. It’s not bad, it’s just not great. Formatting is decent. Lots of headings and bolding and so on. The rooms do tend to run a little long for what they are, I think. I’m looking at you, Mr. Kitchen, as an example. Perhaps an emphasis on descriptions everything in a separate heading instead of leaving some stuff alone and just moving on, covering the more interesting bits and letting the doors and drab gray curtain exist without more detail. Now that we’ve got formatting down, lets pull back and use it appropriately. 

The challenges/interactivity is ok, for what this is. I mean, it’s a lair assault. You’re stabbing things. The main loop should confound the players and, hopefully, they “imaginative play” around it. And, you can see one of the treasure rooms almost immediately, giving that tantalus effect to keep people moving and interested. The multiple entrances, all but one hidden, help as well. But, once inside, you’re mostly just fucking dudes up and it’s the order of battle and the DM running a large and long battle sequence.

There’s not much support (none) in the way of trickery and diplomacy for the fortress so that’s up to the DM. And that map. Man. It’s wonderful and terrible both. Lots of detail on it, maybe too much for the scale provided. And the color coding gets a bit heavy in places. It sure is useful though. I suspect that a two page map or some such would have helped quite a bit.

As a hack, this is not a bad adventure. Not my thing, but, hey, dig in if you want to stab things.

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 10 Comments

Alchymystyk Hoosegow

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Alex Zisch
No Artpunk #2
AD&D
Level 7

Legend says an aristocrat once kidnapped an alchemist and held him captive hoping to create untold fortunes and wonders for the noble’s domain alone. If the secret of turning base metals into gold was found surely treasures and magic can be discovered in the archaic prison.

This twenty page adventure details a multi-level dungeon with … fifty rooms? It’s got a … richness to it, a degree of depth that is seldom seen. And it comes off in many places as notes,  or ideas for an adventure rather than an adventure. Until the last level of the dungeon is reached, where things chill out to a “normal” dungeon crawl.

The overland portion of this adventure is weird. There isn’t one. But, the multi-level nature of the dungeon kind of acts like one. You’ve got this plateau, with a tower, mine, and sewer pipe. Picking one can get you in to the main dungeon. After you travel through what I might call a mini-level. And it is these mini-levels and the tower/mine/shaft thing that I’m going to do the majority of my bitching. Once we hit the “main” level then things change. 

These mini-levels/locations are quite strange. First, it’s kind of a neato idea. Placing the main level under or behind a couple of loosy goosy locations that you pass on the way to it. Very D1. But, in this, implemented  kind of terribly. They are almost outlined instead of described. And, I think, that’s not the way to do this. Let’s look at the mines.

We’ve got a small map with maybe six-ish rooms on it, four keyed, with a lot of hallway/”mine tunnels” between them. This, alone, stands in contract to the 35 rooms on the main level. Then, we’ve got one room described as the “orc camp.” You see, there are thirty orc miners and a couple of supervisors. “Off duty orcs congregate here. Ten sleep while ten eat and gamble at a fire.” There’s a sentence about the casserole they cook and one about shovels scattered about, before a one sentence treasure description. More of a general idea, or an outline or the pre-adventure and what could appen than the main adventure encounter descriptions that we are sussed to seeing. Sure, there’s a couple of paragraphs in the “intro” to this level that describe the orcs a little more, their motivations and how they act, but, again, at quite the high level. The sounds of work and what happens is up to the DM to bring to the table. Which, to a certain extent is fine in an adventure, but, here underground, I would have expected something a little more akin to a traditional keying rather than a D1 type merchant caravan listing. And we get maybe four or five of these “sub level” locations. Very loose. The mines, for example, imply that the orc miners are dumping tailings outside, but there’s nothing on the plateau description to help with this. Detail about the exterior of the mines in is in the interior of the mines. And I’m still not the fuck sure where the fuck that sewer pipe goes. It’s all a jumbled fucking mess of text. Both too short and too long and badly formatted to aid in comprehension.

But all of this changes once we’re on the main level. Things chill out and you get a dungeon that looks and feels like a “normal” adventure. Some descriptions are a tad long, with four or so paragraphs not being unusual. But, also, this is mostly due to the complexity of the rooms. It manages it 35ish rooms in about seven pages, so it’s generally keeping things to a paragraph or so. This provides an interesting mix. For each “mundane” room, still choked full of lab shit (this is an alchemist level) you will then get one in which things could/can go south. The very first room on the level has three 3 foot tall humanoids floating in their own beakers, all weakening oversized rings on their fingers … each glowing blue. A great invitation to fuck around and find out, eh? Tempting the players is always a sign of a good adventure. I think we’re looking at about seven creature encounters on this level, not counting wanderers, and about the same number of puzzle like things or specials or whatever. Not really situations and, in spite of the theming in each, maybe a little disconnected, feeling like separate encounters. 

Descriptions are decent in the dungeon. That first room is pretty good, and “Plucked giant cranes hang from hooks. Barrels contain white wine, smoked hare meat, dried persimmons, pickled tomatoes and salted dwarf bits. “ is nothing to slouch at, to mix sayings 😉

I’m not unhappy with this. But, also, I think it suffers as a part of ts origin story. Given some more time to work it, the dungeon encounters, the locales before the main dungeon level and so on, I thin it could have turned in to something rather decent.

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | Leave a comment

No Art Punks

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 

By Peter Mullen
No Artpunk #3
AD&
Levels 4-6

The wanted Poster hung outside the Village trading post and fish market door by the town deputy confirms the identity of that bearded Vagabond you saw rowing into the Sea Cave just south of town four days ago. More importantly, it states that Darvel the Dashing is worth 5000 GP* Dead or Alive!

This fourteen page dungeon has about 43 rooms in a vaguely sea save environment. A straightup dungeon with no pretense, it’s encounters go the extra mile to add just that little bit more that keeps the entries short but with extra flavour. And a delightfully painful map to use with no real evocative descriptions. A dungeons dungeon.

Man, the map on this one. It’s wonderful and painful at the same time. Some kind of hand-drawn isometric that looks machine drawn. Like some mobius puzzle full of rooms, halls, and rivers. And then with light pencil marks on it to indicate the room numbers, barely visible. And then it looks like someone took a photo of it on their phone, after folding it up like a real map, so creases added to it. (Which are actually the pages … it’s done over eight 11×8 pages and “taped” together, it looks like.) It’s fucking great. Lots of branches, lots of variety in elevation and terrain. And I have no fucking idea at all how you would EVER be able to look at it during play. Formatting it single column, which, while I’m not a fan of, the shorter entries for the room keys keeps thing generally manageable … although double column still would have worked better. (You can read some scholarly articles about the eye traveling longer distances over single column and its impacts.) And the rooms descriptions, in terms of evocative writing, are generally not present. “This larger cave has a stalagmite and stalactite curtain wall to the south end.” It basically has very little to no descriptions of the actual room environments. You’re on your own buddy.

But the rest is pretty chill.

Ain’t a lot of fucking around with this one. It’s just a dungeon and it stays focused on being a dungeon, to its credit. We get a page of complications, in the form of others also entering the dungeon for various reasons … including some suspect potential hirelings. And then there’s a page or so of wanderers to keep you on your toes, The stirge sit on stalactites, the fire beetles eat algae form the walls. It’s not much, but its doing ok in my book. Maybe a bit heavy on the “lying in wait” for some entries, but it’s got that few extra words to help get the DM juices going during the wanderer encounter. Which is what the extra on the wanderers table should be doing. It doesn’t need a paragraph, just like in this adventure you just need a couple of extra words. The mermen-like dudes are cautiously exploring the dry caves in their bubble helmets. Great!

The actual encounters here are pretty focused. You get maybe two or three sentences per encounter, for the most part, with a few going on for a paragraph or so. 

What sets this apart though it the extra bit that is added on to each encounter. There’s this larger for the bugbears. “The sub-chief and two helpers are selecting a barrel of ale to roll out to their crew.” Or, on a ledge of stone gargoyles, if you drop them in to the water they r-hydrate to be the mermen-like dudes they always were. A room has a giant stone face in it, a shadow hiding the nostril to stalk the party until they are weakened. And, if you crawl through a nose, being the correct size to do so, you get somewhere else. It’s just that little bit more to an otherwise mostly minimally keyed (or minimally adjacent) adventure. It is, essentially, the same thing Gygax did in his better moments in B2 and G1. The orcs playing knucklebones or the Bree-yark shit. Just a little bit more to help get the DM going for the encounter. It adds a whole lotta life, beyond a true minimally keying, without having to go on and on and on. It sets up a SITUATION, which is so much better than an encounter, without it being a set piece. And that’s what you want. A situation that you can grok quickly during play. You can glance at the text to run the room immediately AND it inspires you to run something fun. When it’s done well, anyway.

The longer encounters tend to have someone or something you can talk to, hence their longer nature. An ogre running a rat kabob thing, grilling them. And he does a good job! Or a leprechaun running a con, the way leprechauns should. And, a talking spider, willing to let go with some of his information, the sly old devil. You didn’t REALLY need that halfling that’s with you, did you?

This is a straight up dungeon. It would not be out of place as a level in The Darkness Beneath, as one of the better levels. And I don’t know how I can give higher praise than comparing someone to David Bowman. Yeah, yeah, the room descriptions are lacking, in their evocative nature, making this essentially a B2-like thing. And I might like a little bit more both with monster descriptions (again evocative) and treasure detail. But you can’t fault this thing for giving you that old school dungeon flavour … something that it, strangely, missing from the VAST majority of old school adventures. Which is as true today as it has been since the late 1e days. 

I can’t best this, especially with the map, but the fucking thing is close.

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 26 Comments

Stirring of the Slumbering God

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ethan B
No Artpunk #2
OSE
Levels 3-5

The frontier town of Vacuous Hollow is on a precipice of chaos. Wizards of some kind are digging in places they should not, trying to be sneaky about it.

This 28 page adventure is bat shit crazy. A couple of dungeon locations, flavour out the ass in every aspect of the adventure/ The rantings of the deluded entice for those who can withstand studying them. A mess. A glorious glorious mess.

Humite! Humite! Humite! Kumite! Oh, wait, no, it’s the Black Lotus Society in this adventure, not the Black Dragon Society. Shit. Anyway, I gave my only skillet away yesterday, so this morning I got nothing to cook an egg in. So, it’s back to breakfast Chartreuse. 

Ethan B has got it going on. A HUGE number of elements are present in this adventure. Everything every adventure has ever, in the history of the world, included is also included in this adventure. You want an intro? You got a short little intro that ends with “Don’t despair for the future. Like plagues and famines, an ancient chaos god is just another disaster. The world has seen worse apocalypses. It always recovers.” You want rumours? You got rumors. “The Green Dragon of Viper Rock has stopped demanding whiskey, and it’s piling up. (T) The thing must be dead (F) but nobody has been brave enough to check (T).” Fucking flavour man.  You want hooks? You got some fucking hooks. A madman with ten rings to give, a wizard who encourages you to throw a broick through a window or something to fuck with his buddies digging up the god. Timeline? Sure. It includes a nice blood rain and meat spoiling under starlight. Oh, and the chais god waking up. “Or you can just ignore him. He won’t be a problem in your lifetime. Unless you’re an elf.” The wizards in question who are digging dude up like to do a horoscope once a week to determine their actions. One of the portents? “A group of killers with no home will raid your domain and ruin your plans.” Sometimes it rains. How about some changing shit in one of the caves, it flooding. Are we are the blood rain level yet? “After the first flooding from blood, the floor will have an inch of congealed blood crawling with maggots and flies and ghastly beetles” There’s a little regional encounter things. There’s wanderers. A couple of dungeons. A little town of, like three businesses described, just the shit you need. Dude in the church can “provide healing services at a generous rate of 5000gp and a Geas … usually a forbiddance from harming snakes.” That’s all you’re fucking getting, besides a little price list and name. Fucking A man, that’s what ytou need from the church in town and the dude delivers it  PERFECTLY. It’s aimed at actual play in so many ways. Just enough to bring the encounter to life with the name and the geas shit … I can riff the shit out of that. And a little nod to the mechanics of play with the price list and utility of wanting/needing a healer in town. The town has “enough industry to equip an expedition in to the dungeon.” YUpyup. 

Dude has packed a bunch of shit in to this adventure. It’s mostly a disorganized mess, or, close to being so anyway. But man, that fucking content is wonderful isn’t it? Dude is delivering the flavour. The specificity that brings something to life, that inspires the DM so that they can riff on it. He’s delivering it, page after page. Never baroque, but delivering just enough stabs of it to run a mother fucking game of Dungeon and fucking Dragons man! A beatutful woman, appearing as a blue misty form … as she gets closer it turns to a black mist and an ugly hag. Know what that is? It’s a wraith. Fuck you, every single one of you pieces of shit that have described a wraith as “a wraith.” Fucking delivers man, just like this dude has. Angrily weedeater giant wasps. Good descriptions. These descriptions are specific. It delivers a sentence that is specific and moves on. It doesn’t pile on with line after line of overwrought description. Here’s your specificity, here’s your mechanics. Here’s your oob. Lets keep this thing moving along. It’s very good in this respect. The specificity, and thus ability to inspire the DM with a single line of description, is among the best I’ve seen. Hey, man, also, I learned, from this adventure that people without a face have a CHA of 3.. Sly little comments. Great little encounters. I’m in LUV.

Well, mostly. 

Thing is a mess. I’m being more than a little hyperbolic here, but still. I can, perhaps, forgive the timeline, weather, regions, town, rumors, etc. All the extra shit, not being the best organized and integrated. That’s a tough thing to get right for a DM to run during play. I am less forgiving on actual encounters. Scattering important description elements throughout the encounter. What room am I in? It’s in the second paragraph. How many things are trying to eat me? It’s at the end of the description. It’s not so much excess words. I think the adventure does a good job of keeping things relatively tight. But it is the order in which those words appear. A good rewrite here would help a lot in the individual encounters.

But this isn’t enough to make you turn away from the adventure. It’s got a love of D&D written all over it. The tough of absurdity that makes a good D&D adventure, without it being gonzo or a jokey adventure. Great encounters. Great detail. Maybe the last few encounters on the last level of the dungeon are a little weak. But otherwise full of gold. I’m drinking at 7:30am on a Monday morning, your adventure doesn’t make me hate my life, and I no longer own a skillet. Have a Best and do better next time.

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments

Ship of Fate

Posted on July 19, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jonathan Becker
No Artpunk #2
1e
Levels 10-14

Vast beyond reason, the DUNKLE ZEE stretches beneath skies of perpetual twilight, its inky depths reflecting not a single star but only the occasional lantern of a passing ship. Yet few ships sail the black waters of this ocean between worlds, a measureless sea that connects every coastline from every time period and alternate dimension that ever was.

This 24 page adventure details a 36 room set of caverns housing a couple of wizzos and crew  bent on destroying the multiverse. Good encounters, decent imagery in places and a straightforward formatting style that doesn’t have encounters overstaying with extra text. It’s a straight up dungeoncrawl for high levels with no gimmicks.

High level adventures can be rough. By the time your’s fourteens you should have domains and be involved in your own worlds goings on. Fitting a published adventure in to your own world is going to be a problem. A good one anyway; once with nuance and depth to it. Something more than the simple smash and grabs of your level fours. The nuance is depth is generally required to keep the party from just smashing and burning everything in their path to their goal. IE: you force them to gimp themselves because of the consequences instead of Ye Olde 863 wishes to keep the party from passwalling the whole adventure. 

None of that here though. This is just a smash and grab. The only gimps are no spell recovery, which is fine. It’s a time pressure mechanic, replacing the standard wandering monster rolls. Two wizards want to destroy the multiverse and you’re off to the multiplaner nexus to do a little stabbin. You got a decent caverns map, and some high level characters and their henchmen. Don’t waste your spells and get in to fuck some dudes up! 

And fucking em up you will to! One room has 24 ochre jellies. Another has 36 giant constrictor naked. Another has 96 stirge. All in the relatively confined space of a cavern complex. The scale is a little larger than normal, but, still, load up on those mass kill spells kids, loaded for bear! The smaller scale stuff is rough also. The usual mirror of opposition so you’re all fighting yourselves. Both types of Gith. Tentacle beasts, a good rot grub encounter (perfect for this level!) , a mind flay, and the wizzos with some great use of black puddings as a stand in for spheres of annihilation. This is all pretty much straight up fights. They generally have something a little extra to them to help bring them alive. Needlemen that are trees, the black pudding thing, as floating blobs, the ochres suck the walls and detach like some bad horror movie. Just enough there to help give the DM something to make shit a little more interesting than an “you enter the room and are attacked.” 

I really can’t enough good things about the encounters here. They really hit that sweet spot I am looking for. Maybe just a little more would have been nice, for them, but they are what I think makes a good encounter for the DM. The black puddings. There’s a wizzo, mediating in a room, in front of two giant black blob in the air. Wammao! Two black puddings to add to the fray. The red ochres, throbbing, attached to the walls, kind of flying off or dropping on the players. One of the gith wears a ring of delusion, thinking, and acting, like he’s a lawful good paladin. Until he sees the flayer. It doesn’t require a lot to add just that little extra to your encounters, and the designer does this well. 

Descriptions are hit and miss. A magic shield covered in ape filth and a magic axe with a gnawed wooden handle. Or “A dull red light illuminates this cavern, emanating from a huge serpentine mound of mottled crimson heaped against the far wall. The glow is visible as characters approach the cavern from any direction. The mound pulses gently, perhaps in slumber.” Again, nothing too much to these, but hitting at just about the right level of detail to turn something standard in to something that comes to life a little, just waiting for the DM to bring more to it, inspired. But, for every bit of interesting description there’s also an empty room with a simple bed in it. Or a “refuse pit for the trogs”, with nothing more added to it. And, glowing runes is a description fit for a large room. Both overdone and needing to be echoeing and pulsating. The bottom of The Bone Pit is “Many humanoid bones litter the floor. Few are human.” Not exactly the highlight of my year, month, or even week.

So,it’s pretty straight up thing. No real gimping, just a dungeon full of shit to stab, letting the party run wild with their magic. Divination, location, mass kills, and bypass spells, all put in to play. And, light on the tricks and traps, but, also, I’m not sure how you do that in something like this. Anyway, decent hack for those looking for a simple high level affair.

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

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The Lair of the Brain Eaters

Posted on July 17, 2023 by Bryce Lynch

By DM Ritzlin

No Artpunk #2

1e

Levels 1-3

The secret caves beneath the necropoli of Desazu are riddled with danger and nefarious evil. A bizarre cult led by a perverse necromancer has been desecrating graves and plundering corpses for their own foul uses. Who will put an end to their heinous deeds? Only those brave enough to venture into… THE LAIR OF THE BRAIN EATERS

This 13 page bonze-agy dungeon is set in tunnels under a cemetery. Sub-humans, undead, and rats combine with some leftover temple elements to give a straightforward crawl with utilitarian descriptions. It’s heart is in the right place, but comes off staid.

This has some good things going for it. You’ve got some great in-voice rumors and non-standard potions (eat some brains!) and descriptive treasures. Who doesn’t want The Nycoptic Manuscripts, (unless you’re looking for the unabridged edition?)  Or, to eat the brain of a giant to get giant strength?  Or, a skill with a gold tooth? Nothing like doing a little desecration when you’re in the tunnels under the cemetery. It’s also got some decent interactivity … in place. A wooden plank laid out on the floor in an empty room … why is that there? That’s weird. Except it runs over a pit hidden by an illusionary floor. Pay the fuck attention, kiddos, or suffer for it. Several of the monsters get a retheme. Humans get to be shaggy subhumans, mutated by eating diseased brains (a nod to our British games?) while rats, in places, breathe fire. When this thing hits it hits well. A giant venus flytrap with little buds that look like brains. “The Yoinog do not find these “impossible brains” nearly as savory as the real thing, but a man’s gotta eat…” A sly little comment like that warms my heart. And the fact that it manages to take a standard monster, tweak it a bit, and then make it fit perfectly in to the adventure? Gold. We get a rough little order of battle in places and a decent number of traps and specials without it seeming like that’s all the dungeon it.

And yet I’m left feeling more than a little disappointed in it. The descriptions of the rooms are very workmanlike. Not much imagery to be found, and an emphasis on … I don’t know … the facts of the room? It tells you, matter of factly, what is in the room, without embellishment or joy. A main room has a couple of statues in it “On either side of the wall separating the two rooms is a statue of Veshakul-a, the goddess of death, similar to the one in area 19, although these are 5½’ tall.” And, there’s a gotcha or two, like a room whose doors swing shut and wizard lock. *sigh*. 

I get it that writing a good description is hard, but thats what sets an plain adventure apart from a good one. You gotta work this shit. And “This colony of rats made its way into Obb

Nyreb’s enchanted brain supply.” ain’t gonna do it for me. You want to describe the smell, the crunchy floor, and so on. Give them DM something to work with to riff on. The encounters don’t overstay their welcome, but in many cases they don’t really provide much in the way of that vibe that can turn a book roll on a table in to something that really hits home. 

This needs to be tightened up. The room descriptions need a good edit. Both to remove filler word and place important things first, and to amp up the room environments a bit. I’m not talking set piece shit, and there’s always a place for an empty chamber with just a spiral staircase in it, but rooms like the rats nest are a good example of what is just expanded minimalism. Which I do not like. And, once you look at that room and make it better, why not do the main rooms also?

Before I regert this one, I want to touch on the entrances to the dungeon. There are two. The main entrance is in a mausoleum in the cemetery. It’s got nothing special to it on the outside and the inside entrance is well hidden. It’s not gonna be easy for the party to find. And, the lead in to this adventure is nothing special either. What this means is there’s some implied work for the DM to do. The DM is going to have to conjure up a stake out in the cemetery, maybe some tracks, or the party following people at night. I like this. I know, I know, I usually bitch about the adventure supporting the DM. But, this doesn’t mean that we need to spoon feed the DM. You can absolutely leave things for the DM to embellish and build on. As long as you do it well. And I think this does. It uses only a sentence or two, if that, to set things up. But, once combined with the rumours table, the party is heading in the right direction and the DM can fill in this little bit, just as the DM might fill in an inn or town or hook to get the rumours from. The second entrance is in the woods behind the cemetery, which a certain rumour might lead the party to. Good job on the entrances, and the mausoleum especially, feels like your entering in to a dungeon.

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

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The Arcane Font of Hranadd-Zul

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Daedalus
No Artpunk #2
1e
Levels 2-4

A MAGIC POOL grants knowledge of arcane spells to anyone who bathes at the full moon but in exchange, the bather’s physical and mental abilities are slowly depleted.

This 25 page adventure uses about nine pages to describe a dungeon with about 25 rooms. Good interactivity, for its size, with smatterings of good descriptions are detracted by a large amount of whitespace. Packs a decent punch in a wrapping that only a mother could love.

So, what do I mean by all of that? What we have here is what could be called, in Bryce jargon, a real dungeon. It’s got creatures, tricks, traps, and secrets to unlock. Interactivity, factions, and varied terrain. All of the great elements that surround and contribute to a great dungeon crawl. It’s got one of the better Dyson maps. Caves, rooms, same level stairs, a bridge over a chasm to cross, secret doors and statues all show up on the map, contributing to a vibe that is more than a simple map. And it noted major features on the map, along with a wanderers table, to help support the DM in play. My only complaint here, with the map, is that it feels rather constrained. As if the dungeon should be a bit larger. It’s not like the rooms are on top of each other, generally, but that it feels like it needs one more breathe ot two to really give it the expanse that a good dungeon needs. 25 rooms is no slouch of a five roomer, but the size makes it feel more like a good dungeon at the end of an investigation, rather than something that stands on its own.

I’m a big fan of the interactivity in this one. The place is chock full of stuff without it seeming like its full of set pieces. You’ve got a statue, pointing, in one of the first rooms. There’s a double dose here. Not only does the pointing statue involve some interaction, but, it also provides a hint to puzzles deeper in the dungeon. Another room, full of broken up furniture has an intact weapons rack in remarkably good shape. A mimic. And that’s something this dungeon does very well indeed: providing clues for the player that is paying attention. Bodies and abandoned campsites provide clues and hints as to what is going on. It ramps up the tension to find a dead body, and what killed it. The players get a bit worried. And are prepared for whats coming  … if they care to pay attention. And this dungeon does that over and over again. It’s never hitting you over the head with it, but it seems natural. Really well done.

And the other encounters, not falling in to this category of hints and puzzles/traps, tend to the more interesting side as well. Ye Olde Bridge Over The Chasm has spiders in webs, high above, providing a nice little encounter. And the creatures in the dungeon, the intelligent ones, have some goals an motivations. SOme things going on with them that the players could exploit. Never going too far, and not really forcing that interactivity on to the players, but it’s there for the DM, in their motivations, should the players try and do a good job of not just stabbing. 

Descriptions are hit or miss. Out first room is the entrance, of course, an opening in a low escarpment outside. A simple worked limestone post and lintel frame without a door. Weathered carvings on it. A dark cool and silent interior. That’s not bad. It’s also, I think, one of the best descriptions. So, good job with your mythic underworld entrance, but, things do tend to fall down after that. Simple facts with few appeals to imagery. It really needs more in this area. 

And it’s not helped by the god awful formatting. Two column, with a lot of the rooms taking a full column. This isn’t necessarily wordiness, but rather large margins and line spacing. There’s too much in the wat ot bolding, underlines, and bullets. It’s too much to take in at once. There’s an attempt to follow a rough outline for a room, noting general features up front and then going in to more detail in the bullets, but the spacing, and degree of formatting, is just too much to follow easily. 

This is a real dungeon. Or, at least as much as one can say that in 25 rooms. I’m not find of the lack of interesting descriptions, and the format is a mess to comprehend text with. But, the interactivity here, the understanding of what a dungeon should and should not be, is all here. That is pretty rare, indeed. But these days you don’t get to the Bryce Best list unless you’re firing on all chambers. (Which is a lie, I’m a hypocrite, but, whatever.) Nice to see this one. 

https://princeofnothing.itch.io/no-artpunk-ii

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