THE MARTIAL CULT OF BLOOD KNIGHT GAIUS is a 20-page dungeon crawl about a religious order of vampires who deny their feeding urges, instead only drinking the blood of those whom they have given a formal chance to defend themselves.
There’s a reason I have not gotten to the things on my list. Calling your adventure “The Martial
This 20 page dungeon is about a dragon that is actually good. Oh, wait no, it’s about a captured princess who is actually evil. Oh, wait, no, it’s about vampires that don’t drink blood. Unless they defeat you in honorable combat. Which means they cheat. It’s one encounter and not an adventure.
Cult of Blood Knight Gaius” and the marketing saying its about a cult of honorable vampires that don’t drink blood … well … as much as some things turn me on and get me excited, other things, like scat, turn me off. And that marketing is one of them. I mean, I’m not a pretentious fellow. Yes, I am having a bloody mary before work this morning. But that’s more to deal with the terrible ennui.
So, yeah, honorable vampires in a monastery. Their leader, Gaius, fight you one on one in an arena. There’s a magic circle that heats up your metal items, so, you’re gimped. And if he starts to lose then he switches from bitch slapping you to using a staff and then spells and then a blade.
This is, essentially, the only thing to do. You can wander around the nine rooms (ten if you count the arena!) and poke your fucking head in and look at shit.; But none of hte vampires fight you. There’s no real interactivity. Vampire mass involves you falling asleep until someone wakes you up. They get pissed at you if you steal their candlesticks that are covered in wax, but they don’t attack. Not honorable. SO, wander the fuck around and get bored and then someone in the party fights Gaius.
Oh shit! Oh shot! I forgot! They got some machinery that milks people of blood. SO, throw in some lame ass techno shit in that room only, also.
Ok, so, you’ve decided to fight some vampires. Good fucking luck! I mean, vampires, right? Well …. They are 2HD. Except for Gaius who is 3 HD. And really all they can do is maybe hypnotize you. This was, I think, for me the most disappointing aspect of 5e, as a system. The dumbing down of the HD of classic creatures. Look, you can’t put in a 15HD orc. You can’t mix him in to a bunch of 1HD orc. The players need to be able to make choices for their characters and dumping in rando HD defeats their ability to do that. The game is no longer about choices, or pushing your luck, but just about rando shit. And rando shit like that aint fun. Vampires have more HD and have more abilities. They are fearsome opponents. They are not your first level adventure and pussy ass motherfuckers, like they are portrayed here. Yes, sure, you can have a non-traditional monster. And not every adventure has to be a dungeon to explore. But, also, if you’re gonna put in a twist its gonna have to be a real twist and not some hackneyed BS.
Let’s see. SOmoene feeds a captive vampire a bowl of porridge. SO, there’s that. The vampires standing guard outside wear heavy felt garments and veils so they can stand in the sun. And they all like to hold garlic cloves as penance. The wanderer table has some vampires who get after you if you are snooping hwre you shouldnt be, but, there’s no real indication of what that means. In the entry or in the rooms. The map is a symmetrical fuckfest, the worst kind of map. Why not just make it a dwarven temple to boot? Oh, wait, it’s a monastery, so, the meme continues unabated.
I don’t know. The designer dumps in random text before a couple of room, so, you think you’re at the end of the room descriptions but then you get another room after the long section about some NPC found in the next room. SO, yeah, I understand WHY the decision was made, even though it’s a BAD decision.
SO, not an adventure. It’s a side-trek, from Dungeon. Kill the vampire and win 500gp! Heh. I think the fuck not. One encounter, some nosing around. No real role-play notes to drag it out in a fun and memorable evening. Cause if you’re gonna do this then you need something else also and roleplay seems to the easiest thing to dump in to something like this. SO, notes for the DM on building tension, some shit that can happen, and so on, some better NPC”s. SOme faction play. Maybe. But it’s still just gonna be one fucking fight after poking your nose around. This is the kind of shit I throw in a town between games, not something to buy from Exalted.
This is $5 at DriveThru. You get a nine page preview, which is enough to show the writing style and get the vibe for the adventure, so, good job with that.
By Adamo Dagradi
Mountains of Weirdness blog
OSE
Levels 2-4
Partially collapsed 400 years ago, during a massive earthquake that completely destroyed the
surrounding city of Spina. Empty since a few days after the cataclysm, when the city was abandoned by the few survivors.Only the Incarnate of the Goddess Pulchra Morte (N – Female) remains, a girl named Dafne, chosen since before birth to be the God’s representative on earth and granted immortality by Morte, until a sign showed the arrival of the next Incarnate. The sign which heralded her coming was the apparent death and resuscitation of her mother, while pregnant, in front of Morte’s altar. Dafne looks like a 17 years old girl and usually wears makeup that makes her face look like a skull, she dresses in red robes taken from the ancient clergy’s apparel
This eight page adventure details four levels of a temple with about fifty rooms. As the ration would tend to indicate, this is a relatively minimally keyed based adventure. Full of loot, and mostly devoid of creatures (only four fixed encounters?) it also tends to lack in evocative descriptions and interactivity. A weird one, that seems to mimic form but without its function?
Request-a-thon continues with this quirky thing. You get four pages of hand-drawn maps, that have all the quaintness one could desire in a (relatively) small map. Not exactly linear but also not exactly looping, we get a kind of star shape out of them, with rooms hanging off of loop corridors. Wanderers, 1 in 6 checked each turn, seem to be the major enemy here. For there are only four listed encounters in the text? And they all occur on the last level, mostly beasts. A tiger, a bear, a nymph, and a ghost. This gives the thing a kind of empty feel to it. Almost haunting, I guess? Or, as a player, something less than haunting. Combining that sparseness of encounters with the lack of interactivity produces a weird sort of thing where you just wander around and loot the rooms? You walk in, search the place, take your jug or urine or silver hairpin, and move on the next room? There’s a pool or two where you can heal, but that seems less than fulfilling for a fifty room dungeon?
Descriptions tend HEAVILY toward minimalism. “Ex-storeroom, now museum. Dafne gathers here everything that she finds in the city’s ruins and that sparks her interest. Dolls. Tools. Trinkets” This is one of the longer descriptions. The rooms don’t really get much of a description at all, in fact. You get a room name, like “Female Temple Area” and in the description “In good shape but otherwise empty.” Uh. Ok. Or a storage room that just lists the contents. There’s a lack of overall vibe for the rooms. No real effort to bring them alive that is consistent throughout the work. One of the best is “Stone steps, sleek with humidity . Smell of burned herbs and fat from below.” Which is pretty good for stairs, but, that description, the first encounter area, is by no means an example. “Round room with stone bleachers on the sides and a pool in the middle. The water is murky, but clearer and colder on the bottom, 2 meters down” That’s more typical, and, even tending towards the more descriptive for the rooms in this.
I’m not really sure what to make of this. “. In a hole on the third northmost column a rotten leather patch is stuck and contains a gold ring with the sigil of the Malaterra family (70 gp – 300 if returned to the heirs).” That’s typical of the treasures … something interesting about them being hidden with a little description of them. And, I’d say that’s the best part of this, along with the maps and, perhaps, the wanderers table. But, I don’t really see how you can sustain that?
And the formatting? Font sizes change. Some monsters are bolded on some levels and on other levels they are not. (Pixies on the first level, for example.) A kind of sloppiness in the formatting. I guess it works, as an example of just writing things down and pushing it out the door. Yeah, you gotta publish and real artists ship. But, also, you gotta make it a kind of cohesive whole. And that’s missing from the formatting of this, which is all over the place. Almost like the manually set literal mimeograph and pastups of the olden days. Almost.
There’s a certain degree of promise here, I think. You can see the designer is kind of on the right track with things. Almost as if they are playing Fake It Until You Make It. Which is fine; it’s how you get better. But, the lack of interactivity is rough, as is the soreness of both encounter and description. The lack of consistent formatting it just the final bit of straw.
But, hey, it’s free on the designers blog! It looks like it may be the designers first dungeon, so, hey, Congrats Man! But do a lot better next time.
By Michael Grayson S
Mapmaster Battlemaps
2e
Level 1
And in the middle of this vast sky, there sits an impressive palace of scattered towers and keeps. They hang suspended amidst the clouds from which they rise, as though the pillowy vapors support them, sometimes separated from each other by a mile or more of distance. The architecture is varied, as if erected by different builders of different times, some of them perhaps even alien to the observer. To the east might sit some great ziggurat and to the west something more akin to a tudor castle. Pyramids, obelisks, towers and even mammoth copper domes all stand perplexingly arrayed at dizzying heights. In the darker depths an observer might catch a glimpse of some, strange non-euclidean structure for a moment before the mists swallowed it.
This 113 page dungeon is the first 100 rooms of a 1001 room dungeon. It’s essentially Dragons Lair, the adventure,maybe mashed up with Myst, with the party teleporting from one rando room to another and having a little isolated adventure piece. The encounters are interesting enough. Although the evocative nature of the rooms comes not from the text but from the rendered 3d pictures of each.
Woah, boy, where to start with this one? This is the first booklet in a series, each of the booklets describing the next 100 rooms in the Palace of 1001 Rooms. That’s a kind of mythical place. As the intro says: one of the first doors in Sigil leads to it. A place beyond the edge of the world. I saw one of the later. Looks like the latest kickstarter was for chapter 7, so, rooms 700-800 … and thus dude has delivered 800 rooms so far of his 1001. That’s a feat in and of itself! Each section looks themed, and this one, the first one, is the Gatehouse. The “end” room of each section leads to the next section, with the claim that the challenge level increases in each booklet. This, a kind of campaign.
Now, you got to hang in there with me … there is no map. Some of the room have descriptions that say that a certain tradoor or some such leads to room 6 or something like that. But that’s not why there isn’t a map. Instead, every time you use a door it leads somewhere new. You see, each room number corresponds to a page number. So, when the party goes through a door you roll and see which room they end up in. A significant number of pages is spent describing how this works and nerfing any magic spells, etc, that could let the party dig through a wall, Wizard Eye and so on, as is traditional in one of these teleport door adventures. I don’t really get why the fuck the designer did this? And I don’t buy the “magical nature of the mythic location!” nonsense. Just put in a fucking map man. This is what contributes, among other things, to the Dragon’s Lair vibe it’s got going on.
But, that’s not the major deviation from the norm with this. There is, as mentioned, one room to a page. And each room has a rendered art piece for the room, , taking up about half the page, showing it and the major features. This is where the Myst reference comes in, among other place. You get this kind of view in to the room, as the DM. The little art piece has some numbers on it and the room text has notes related to those numbers. The chamber pot and cutlery, tapestry, an unseen servant washing dishes, and hand towel. This is the feature that attracted me to review this, for you all know how I am drawn to folk trying to experiment. I really like the little art pieces as a way to visualize the room. And the little numbers, referring back to the text are interesting. Oh, yeah, and I don’t think it works well.
The renders are all samey in their art style, as one would expect, but, I think the vibe of the rooms are different. There really is something to the Less Is More style of describing rooms. Little brief and evocative vignettes let your mind fill things in, but leaves the edges fuzzy. There’s something immensely appealing about the renders, and, yet, I don’t think they work as well as just an evocative room description would.it’s too concrete. And, because it’s visual, there’s no “room”, inside your brain, to fill things in, with the result being it looks a little dull … at least as compared to THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION! [Insert rainbow emoji)
Read aloud is a little TOO terse. “You emerge from the portal into the bottom landing of a
cool spiral staircase.” Uh, sure. “The room smells of machine oil. A series of vaulted arches run against one wall.” And that’s for a relatively complex room with pillars, arches, stairs, tradoor, weapon racks and the like. Which, I must say, I can describe from the render. But, idk. It feels disconnected from the read-aloud.
And then there’s weird randomness in the descriptions which don’t seem to make sense. I can’t figure out if I’m not getting something or if it’s dungeon dressing or just filler background. “The Builders prepared this room with a special wax and a broken clay ziggurat, which was mixed with the mortar” and “Someone has chalked an arrow on the wall pointing to the farthest portal down the wall in a vain attempt to leave a trail for others to follow later. A few feet away, the same chalk has scratched out 7 straight lines. AFAIK, nothing is done with either of these. The first is maybe just background padding? Or maybe background padding and dungeon dressing? The second is either dungeon dressing or a clue to a puzzle? But the rooms are so disjointed, (Dragon’s Lair!) that I don’t see it making sense?
And then there’s this kind of abstracted description thing it does in places. “A tribe of goblins live here.” Sure. It’s stabbing time. How many? No clue. None at ALL. A few? A bajillion? IDK. And this sort of thing is all over the place
But, the variety of room, and things to do in them, is quite nice. One room is a pillared rotunda. Archways. Gargoyles looking down, a dozen or so. A mosaic on the floor, and in the middle of it a slate pedestal with glowing runes on it reading, in Sylvan Elf “Run of Mind Shielding”. Maybe a little on the nose, but, also, a nice little puzzle and atmospheric for an IDENTIFY pedestal.
I know the renders are the gimmick here. But I can’t help thinking that a more traditional format would have suited this better. Nuke the render. Spend the render time instead on working those evocative & terse room descriptions HARD. Did things get better in the later volumes? Idk. The first one is usually either the best of the nearly the worst in a collected volume, in my experience.
Waking up confused and disoriented in a dungeon cell surrounded by strangers, you are beleaguered by monstrous enemies and vicious traps. Who among you has the strength and guile to escape the Vault of the Blood Mage?
This 56 page dungeon has four levels with about 35 rooms. It’s a funhouse dungeon, in which you collect “petrified demon eyes” in order to escape. Meh. I think it’s random and not overly well organized. Also, this type of shit is totally NOT my thing, so, keep that in mind.
Our first words in the adventure are: Although having long ago shed any trace of humanity, the Blood Mage was once a mortal wizard named Sanguis. Not a very promising start. Eventually we learn he turned evil and got a demon army and invaded the world. And he won! That’s a fun bit! I wish Shadow, or whatever the fuck that setting was called, made more sense in sense of the everyday world. Anyway. He now travels the multiverse invading people. And, now, in this adventure … Ready?! Ready?! “Seeking a worthy apprentice from the ranks of mortal-kind, the Blood Mage has constructed an insidious vault filled with heinous tricks, traps, and horrors to test the mettle and guile of a hand-picked group of mortal champions.” Jesus H Fucking Christ. One of those things. I guess if you label it a tournament module its a little better. But, still. UG!
“They find themselves locked in a dungeon room with no memory of how they got there. Inflicted with a magical disease that is slowly turning them into mindless zombies, the dungeoneers have to work quickly to find the antidote and escape the vault before succumbing to the deadly affliction.” Ok, so, the standard set up. Locked in. No memory. I guess you’ve got all your shit though. So, anyway, you make a con check every hour of real-time, or during a short rest, of 8 in a row if taking a long rest, or you progress on the zombie table. Miss four and you’re dead. So, pregens, one-shot I guess?
The start is wonderful. You wake up in a chamber and a mist forms and tells you you hes the blood mage and you have to escape his deathtrap dungeon. *sigh* Ok, ok, ok, it comes with the territory. You review something like this then you have too live with the tropes, I guess. I just wish there was a little more effort and things were a tad less perfunctory.
Each room starts with as little section in italics. Read-aloud, if you will. Except it’s not. “The dungeoneeers wake up in a modest stone chamber stained with blood” Hmmm, so, not read-aloud. “The chamber contains an impressive vault door guarding the dungeoneers’ only means of escape” So, absolutely not read-aloud. A room summary, I guess? It’s pretty meaningless. From there it has some bullets with major features and then a bunch of words (at least a page per room) describing whatever is going on. I guess it’s ok. I would prefer a summary of the room contents, for the players, especially ina one-shot tourney adventure, but, whatever.
Each room, or, most of them anyway, is a little puzzle thing. Some come right out of Grimtooth. One room has a bunch of colored statues in it and and you have to replace a missing gemstone. Did you use a gemstone the colour of the statue? WRONG! It looks random to me. A green stone goes in the red one. A blue in the orange one. It just seems like trial and error. Random. And a lot of this seems like that. There’s a certain open-ended nature of a lot of the rooms. One has a wall of force holding back a bunch of acid, with a petrified demon eye floating on top … and a tall well structure you can climb down to get in to the acid. Fuck around and find out how to get the eye; there is no solution presented. That’s chill with me, as along as the rooms are not prescriptive in disallowing things … and they are not. So, random challenges, but, also, open ended ones? It could be worse. They do, in places, hit funhouse in nature, with things like a demonic slot machine.
So, do you want to play a deathtrap dungeon? Do you want rooms with random trial and error elements that remove player agency by their very nature? Do you want rather bland room descriptions? (Which, I guess, I shouldn’t complain about. It’s a tourney adventure, which is not something one enjoys but rather suffers through?) So, if you want that stuff then here you go. The formatting could be better, a lot better, but it’s not impossible.
I don’t know why people request things like this? You really wanted to see a review of it?
This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. You get to see the first room, which shows you the format but not the puzzle/encounter style.
By Maciej Krzyzynski
Sex Legs Games
Generic/Universal
Level 1
People are missing, people change. Some of them are coming back decades after their last contact with their friends, while others dream about being a slimey slug. One can blame the aliens, one can blame the goverment. One can even blame the shrooms, but are they really what they seem?
This 28 page adventure features a linear cave with ten rooms and some fungus skeletons/theme. Not evocative. Not interactive. Linear.
Email, email, what what the email! Email, email, what what the email! Email, email, what what the email! We’re on to email requests! And more of the same. The Manifestus Omnivorous, which seems inspiring and like a good idea but turns out crap. And the Generic/Universal adventure … which seems like a good idea but turns out crap. And, really, all D&D adventures, which seem like a good idea but turn out crap. Is it, really, the case that generic/universal, or art punk, or [Punching bag system THIS week] is really that much worse than everything else? Or is it simply the case that everything sucks? And, what is suck? Is 80% from a bygone age now 50% today, because of the middle-class’s competitive nature, trying to desperately hold on to the gains that they’ve made? Whatever, my fucking blog and therefore my meaningless screaming against the encroaching void. Sisyphus is happy.
L’dungeon is a cave. It’s got that freaky deaky “hanging fungus’ thing going on, much more Stranger Things in vibe than muchroomy from 1e/BX. It’s also fucking linear. So, no real exploration, just walking down the corridor from one cave to another and poking at something and going to the next room. I’m guessing you don’t even need a map. Linear adventures don’t need a map, at all? Or, could be pointcrawl. Or, a simple line with dots on it, all modern arty? GO TO THE NEXT ROOM.
The text is padded in a conversational way. “When they ask the inhabitants about it, they will answer that …” Fun. You don’t need to do this. The world is not full of if/then statements. Don’t do this. It pads out your writing. It makes it hard to follow. Write sentences with the important parts at the start of the sentence, to make information easier to locate. Blah blah blah blah. Same old Bryce.
I guess I should actually talk about the adventure. It’s strange things. It’s set in the 80’s. But, yeah, you could set it in any time period or genre pretty easy. There’s a long backstory that means there’s a cave full of fungus/mushrooms. And the fungus shit kills people in the cave. And then it kind of pod persons them sometimes, and sometimes they return to the real world and think they are a real person. What’s that movie called? Anyway it’s that movie. No biggie its an “inspired by”, everything is, after all. So, sme vague “time travel” elements when people return to town after a hundred years or so, except, not really time travel.
“The cavern seems to be really small.” We don’t use seems or appears in room descriptions. We dont use “Really” or “small”, we select more evocative word choices.
In one room, you get to it through a small hallway (the only room that is NOT linear on the map) and we’re told “It will most likely turn out that the PCs will not profit from returning to the previous room, because of the narrow corridor covered with the rhizomorphs.” and thus they will tunnel out through the ceiling. I don’t understand that sentence? Yes, it’s an EASL adventure, but, I really don’t understand that sentence? Why are they not returning the way they came and instead tunneling out through the ceiling?
In town, before you search the caves, you can talk to some people, while looking for the “missing kid” that serves as the hook. If you talk to Miss Crowley then “In the cave, the Heroes will be able to stumble upon the skeletons of a fox [chamber 5] and a bird [chamber 8]. They are already in a very bad condition and do not come to life at night.” AGain, I have no fucking idea what this means. She’s a vegetarian and serves them mushroom meatball sandwiches. And then we learn about the fox and bat. Huh?
So, it’s a mess, right? Did I mention the ship that you can find in one of the cave rooms? I don’t know either.
Long paragraphs, making information hard to find. Writing that is all added aout and uses boring word choices. Interactivity that mainly consists of “find the next exit door” and an overall “point” of the adventure that … doesn’t appear to have one? You just wander around? Where “wander” means “go in a straight line until the last chamber explains everything to you in a letter.” We don’t explain things in letters and journals. We explain things in the play of the game.
This was clearly a labour of love by the designer. Just like the ashtray my kid made when they were two.
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is one page, showing just the map. So…. not realy a preview of the adventure then? And not showing us the writing so we can make an informed decision before purchasing … which is the point of a preview?
By Carl Ellis
Broken Arch Publishing
OSE
Levels 1-3
A Scriveners Guild. Seemingly a place of quiet work and contemplation, however its Guild Master is a Wizard of mighty repute and holds many treasures. Recently, they have gained possession of a rare and sought after tome. Plan, cheat, or lie your way into the organisation and, perhaps, make away with the prize.
This 24 page digest adventure uses about eleven pages to describe 38 rooms in a scriveners guild. It’s not a dungeon. It’s not a heist. I don’t know what the fuck it is. Incomplete?
I don’t know what the fuck a heist is. You’re robbing some shit? Ok, I went and read the SLy Flourish article. And this thing ain’t that.
Let’s see here … “Heists have multiple potential entrances.” This adventure has one. The front door. It’s set in a manor home, according to all the art and text, but there’s only one door. The front one. No root celler. No back door. The generic overview text says the rooms have long tall windows, but we never hear of that again, or see it on the map. So, no, there are not multiple potential entrances.
Hmmm … “Have multiple paths within the location’ says the flourish of sly’s. Nope. Just your standard corridor with doors on it. One stairway up to the second floor. One stairway down to the basement. One down to the secret basement. No balconies or shit. So, not multiple paths to be found.
Hmmm ‘Has secret paths and shortcuts to discover.” None of those. Well, one secret door, to the secret stairs to the secret dungeon level.
Hmmm “Inhabitants.” Who are the guards, how many, what is their behaviour, etc. Nope, none of that. Well, there is a guard mentioned in room two. It says he guards room one at night at sometimes comes in to room two to tend the fire. THEN YOU PUT THAT FUCKING INFORMATION IN ROOM ONE!!!!!!!!!! Seriously, man, the number of times I see “the monsters here in room thirteen react to noises in room seven” is unreal. You put that fucking shit in room seven, the room where the DM needs the information. Fucking christ …
So, no grounds for the manor. No multiple entrances. No real NPC’s to interact with. Aggressively generic content like “The Guild Master has received a secret Grimoire that outside forces desperately want.” And I’m not fucking around here. Thats the extent of it. Or “Within the Secret Study is an ancient shrine to an unknown God.” Or “A false bottom in a desk draw has a cipher book and coded correspondence.” That’s it. Nothing more. “The kitchen staff takes pride in their work” … but no other mention of them at all.
No guards, just the one in room two. Nothing mentioned about any more at all. So, non order of battle or how the scribes react to a incursion. Oh, the treasurer is a 7HD fighting man. So, there’s that I guess. The guildmaster just sits in thee final room guarding his book.
It’s not a fucking dungeon because there is nothing to interact with … not even creatures (ok, there are 3 … in 36 rooms: the guard, the treasurer and the guildmaster.) Walk in a room, and walk out again. It’s not a heist because it’s not written like one. There are no resources to take advantage of for an infiltration, sneaking in, or roleplaying in. It’s aggressively generic.
THERE’S NOTHING HERE. it’s just a generic description of a scribe guild.
This is $5.50 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Buy is sight unseen, sucker.
By Jokin Andersson, Johan Nordinge, Olav Nygard
Cyclopean Games
S&W
Level 2? They never say ... ?
There once lived a Moon Sage in a wondrous palace. Dilimbabbar—for such was his name—was a leader of armies and a scholar of the night sky. In his palace, he collected wondrous things and hoarded riches beyond belief. He summoned servants from the ether and demons from the earth to bring treasures no mortal eyes had ever seen. But that was long ago, before the flood washed over the lands. Now, the Sage is lost to an unknown fate, his powers having faltered. Yet his palace remains, brimming with wealth locked away in the vacant halls. …or so travelers say, telling tales to each other under starlit skies.
This sixteen page adventure uses five pages to describe sixteen rooms in an arabian nights/sumerian type setting. Decent interactivity, but a shit way of presenting it that I’m not gonna dig through in order to run it.
Seems unfair, right? I mean, you come up with an ok adventure and then it gets ignored because you wrote it in Basque in iambic pentameter. Cause there’s 600 hundred other adventures that are ok, or better, and easier to use.
Let’s cover some random encounters! I fucking love them in this, and when I saw them I was cautiously optimistic about the adventure to come. “The warm wind brings the laughing voices of a group of women, bathing in an azure pond of remarkable depth.” Hey, man, that will get some players attention! And, for once, they ain’t Oh Brother sirens! Or, how about “A long line of prisoners of war are being escorted to Sippar by a troop of well-armed soldiers. One of the prisoners is an Akkadian prince, promising a bountiful reward if he were to be freed and brought to his kinfolks in Ashur”. Where “troop” is define as “74” … which seems a little large to get up to some fun, but, still … that’s a great concept! And the random encounters on the way to dungeon are pretty much all like this. A bolded sentence that grabs you and a follow up sentence that only adds to it. Really top notch chance encounters. In contrast to the actual wanderers in the dungeon, which are, like “1d10 centipedes.” Meh. Ok, then how about “1d6 skeletons”? No. Yeah, me neither. A real disappointment after those desert encounters. (Which, I will continue to praise on, are REALLY fucking good for their size. Like, hex crawl good.)
Ok, so, you’re going on The Wonderous Hoard adventure and you’re hired to go to the dungeon and bring back this mask. And told you can only take two things from the dungeon or you’ll be cursed or something. Grrrr … ok. I’m not sure I’m down with that. It absolutely fits the theme of the arabian nights/folklore thing this adventure has going on. Almost every creature is a person or demon or insect/animal, so, it’s got the human-centric/realism thing down pat, which I groove on, and the “only take two each” fits in with that. And if you do take more than two then theres this chance of not escaping the dungeon and being cursed afterwards … more for each thing beyond two each. So. Ok. It’s a different vibe, I guess, which is ok.
Ok, so, the actual adventure. It’s ok. The rooms have some decent things in them to interact with. A hallway in tiles of glazed clay in blue and black … the severed corpse of an adventurer in the middle of it. That’s fun! And the man, dressed as if from Sippar, carries a healing potion of the sort sometimes sold in the foreigners district – in a small leather pouch. That’s hw you integrate extra fucking information. Not quite the usual evocative writing, but something behind it. Or, how about the Moon Beasts room! “A giant centipede lies coiled in the middle of the lower room, preternatural frost radiating from its body. It is chained by silver shackles to a large meteoric rock that prevents it from climbing the balcony, but not from moving freely—albeit with some effort—across the rest of the room.” I love a truly giant centipede … especially as a moon beast!
And then the magic items are great also. The Bone Crown brings back to life anyone who wears it. Until they take it off and they drop dead again. How fun! The “mundane’ magic items gets a little bit of fun to them and a large percentage are non-standard. A good mix, with everything done well.
But man, that fucking text is a fucking mess. “It was here that the moon sage rested between his campaigns.” So the fuck what? How does that contribute to play at the table? More importantly, lets look at the COMPLETE CHAOS that is the room organization in this. I present room two.
Taking up a column (not unusual here, for the text to stretch out that far in this adventure), we get a room with walls covered with shelves stacked with cuneiform tablets. Which contain astrological calculations and formulas. Then we get notes about a secret door in the room. THen the same paragraph tells us about glass vials and amphorea with strange infusions scattered on the floor, some broken. Then what in the vials. Then that there’s a robe in the corner of the room. Then a paragraph break to tell us about the robe. Then another paragraph to tell us about a big round rock sitting in one of the wall.
It’s almost a stream of consciousness writing style, for organizing the text. SOmething gets mentioned, then some details about that. Then something else gets mentioned in the same paragraph. With details about that. Thus, any overview of the room requires a full on grokking of the room. You can’t scan the text, at least not easily. And then shit just shows up elsewhere in the room descriptions, in other paragraphs, There seems to be no overarching format at all other than “I guess I’ll put this here now.” And that’s not cool.
Either giove an overview of everything in the room, up front, that the players will notice, or separate them out in to separate paragraphs, Or put them in bullets. Or something. But I, as the DM, need to be able, when the party enters the room, relate to obvious contents in split second. A second, maybe two, that’s how long I have to glance at the text Before I start relating shit. And the format chosen needs to support that.
And this don’t do that. You have to dig. You have to read the entire thing, slowing down the game. You have to hunt for information. I missed the secret door location TWICE in room two, while scanning the room description. That’s not cool. The descriptions are long. They pad out with useless information, and they are arranged in a manner not conducive to running it at the table. Uncool man. Uncool.
But man, those random desert encounters … In the middle of the desert, a city of tents has sprung up. Here, a drunken revelry is held to the deafening sounds of countless cicadas. The ecstatic festivities culminates in an ancient ritual—led by Tuol Aham, a copper skinned priest from Borsippa—where two teenage boys are sacrificed to summon the vile cockroach demon Bahaga.
Also, when you call your adventure The Wonderous Hoard, then, maybe, you should have a wonderous hoard in it? “There are plenty of precious things in here for example …” (gives three examples …) Hmmm, so, not so much wonderous?
This is $3 at DriveThru.The preview is five pages. You get to see a good portion of those desert encounters, ad well as the intro. Meh. Show us a fucking room man! Or three! So we can make a real purchasing decision.
By Christian Blair
Self Published
Generic/Universal
Low levels
The adventure is themed around exploring an ancient temple in the middle of the desert, hiding dark powers and amazing treasure beneath the sand. Danger awaits around the corner, and the players must be wary of the wandering shadows lurking beneath their feet. While their mission may seem simple, and their reward great, the possibilities of certain death are always following close by.
This nine page adventure has nine rooms. Non specific, abstracted text. Boring. Generic/Universal is a warning sign: Stay Far Away.
Man, I don’t know what it is. Every time I see a Generic/Universal adventure I know it’s not going to be any good. They are all written the same way, as if being being specific about something will somehow make it specific to a system and therefore not Generic/universal anymore. Heavens to murgatroyd! Not that!There’s this abstracted way of writing that prevails in these. It seems universal. Get it?! Get it?! Universal?! What did you expect when you asked me to review this?
You approach THE SAND TEMPLE. After ten minutes you have an encounter and then explore the rest of the temple and actually start it. Your encounter is determined by rolling a d4.
We don’t do this. This is not a random encounter. This is not a table that you could pick multiple items from at some point in the future, like a wandering monster table. This is not the purpose of a random table. There will ever only be one encounter in that temple. So why the fuck have you put in a random table? Just fucking stat out an encounter. “A small room crumbles, revealing useful items.” This is what I’ve come to expect from Generic/Universal. “Useful items” What if, instead, you had just, as the designer, rolled on that table and instead spent a paragraph describing what happens? You know, actually creating an interesting encounter? Wouldn’t that have been better? FAR better? The use of randomness in an adventure, when it’s not called for, remains a pet peeve of mine. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what randomness is used for, and, a lack of understanding of what IS important … the fucking encounter.
Ok, so, we’re in a temple. There’s absolutely no description. All we get is “sunken a quarter of its size into the sand.” That’s in … a couple of paragraphs of text? We get generic background text on everything, and I do mean generic, but no temple description. Ok, sure, how about you wing it? Except for this “the entrance is found beneath an old carpet in the center of the temple.” Uh. Ok. So, I guess there’s furniture and stuff in this abandoned temple a quarter buried in the sand? It’s fucking weird. Toss the carpet in the corner, torn and fucked up. Or half buried outside. Or it’s what you buy from some dude in town or something. It just doesn’t fit, the juxtaposition of ruined and “everything here is normal!”
Ok, so, like, a column of text later we’re past the entrance puzzle and canget to the nine room dungeon, proper. But first we have some generic dungeon description. Like “Now, turned into a tomb
for eternity, this dungeon houses the memories of forgotten times, under the unbreakable will of forbidden magic.” That text is fucking useless. It does nothing. And, yet, text like that ABOUNDS in this adventure. In fact, that’s what makes up at least 50% of the adventure text. And, frankly, I think I’m lowballing things. It feels like 80 to 90% of the text is that kind of aggressively generic overview description shit. I’m not even sure you can call it an overview description. Abstracted background?
Let’s get on to the rooms!
“This corridor leads to the only exit of the dungeon. There’s no light at all here,” Yes, the fucking map shows that. And, yes, we all expect there to be no light in the fucking dungeon. Useless description. Useless padding.
“This is the only known exit out of the dungeon, other than the entrance. The exit is actually blocked by a massive pile of sand, which can only be removed in the presence of the Sun Engine. When the relic is nearby, the sand automatically makes way for the players to exit. This dark cave is inhabited by various Giant Scorpions (2-4). These are strong and deadly creatures. They can’t resist much damage but their natural armor means they can tank most hits. While they don’t deal a lot of damage on their own, their sting has a deadly poison that can kill easily.” So, again with the random number of monsters. Just stick a fucking number in, man. The only known exit. Great. Again,m useless overview/padding. It’s actually blocked by sand. Perfect. More padding. How about “Blocked by sand that parts automatically in the presence of the Sun Engine.” That’s fucking boring, but, also, I did it in FAR fewer words. And then the fucking monsters. We don’t say that the cave is inhabited by the monsters. We know that already. That’s why the monsters are there. And then this garbage description of them.. Just say Giant Scorpions and move on. Tell us about the cave. Give us something interesting about it. Or the scorpions. Or how they attack. Or how one of them looks like Nobboc. (That’s your reward for writing multiple examples of how room text could be laid out 🙂 Just do SOMETHING to rock me like a hurricane. Just something.
But, alas, no, that is not to be. Aggressively generic text. I repeat again, for those in the back: specificity is the soul of the narrative. You don’t have to do this with everything, but you need SOMETHING to hang your hat on. To spark the imagination.
This is Pay What you Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $3. The preview is three pages and shows you absolutely nothing of the adventure. Leroy Brown preview.
By Monte Cook
Monte Cook Games
System Agnostic (Uh uh. Sure.)
That house on the outskirts of town, sitting empty behind a crumbling wall. The one people whisper about. The one that has gone unlived in for years. Sometimes a few hearty souls creep in, it is said, to see what treasures or secrets they can find. Most find nothing—just an empty old house. Some return shaken. A few don’t return at all. You’ve seen this house before. If not in this city, then in some other. You’ve heard the rumors—and if not, well, someday they’ll find you. What happens to a house when it sits alone for so many long years? What jealousies and hatreds does it quietly nurture? What whispers echo through its empty hallways? What waits, crouched within its dark rooms, hungering for the return of life? For you?
(I just yanked a quote of the Mel Brooks Stand Up Philosopher bit. Which shows you where my thinking was going)
This is 150 pages of pretension fronting about seventy rooms/pages in a haunted house. It’s been designed for online play and has some interesting themes. Atmospheric, but, ultimately, an empty experience for most I’d guess. Actual adult themes inside. Seriously.
This thing is basically a computer program that you run, on your MAC or PC. It’s optimized for online play, although I believe a print version is available as well. I don’t think online play works well, ever, but, I’m open to the position that the tools and style of play still haven’t caught up with it. IE: We’re trying to emulate a tabletop experience when we should we looking to facilitate something a bit different. Vassal vs Unreal. So, Monte is trying, with this, to handle the online play environment. A page with everything the DM needs on it. Descriptions for the players, DM notes, a map, some artwork for the room to share with them, and for the monsters if they are present. And some “collapsible” bullet points that you can expand when the major room elements are explore. “I look in the chest” results in the DM expanding the “chest” section for the details relevant to it. It seems like a little more clicking, which I don’t think is good, but, also, that’s probably not meaningful given that the online game does tend to be a bit slower paced. Hyperlinked to fuck and back, it’s an ok effort in the core formatting. There IS a decent amount of red/maroon text on black background. OOOO!!!! How fancy! And also unreadable. I keep finding myself having to highlight, as if to copy/paste, in order to read it. That’s not good Monte. I don’t know how the fuck anyone involved thought it WAS a good idea. Anyway. Decent cross-references and core presentation. Elements the room descriptions are done well, for scanning purposes. Bullets, whitespace, and so on. But, then, also, some rooms have PARAGRAPHS of text for the expanded bullets. And in a room with a dozen sections to expand, with long paragraphs in some of them … these seems like a miss. It’s amiss both in editing, to make the descriptions shorter and more scannable, and in formatting … following your own innovations to perhaps embed more information in deeper levels of the “tree.” I really, really, really want to hate this just for the illegality of the red on black text. I shall not though
Shall I hate thee for a summer breeze? No, shall I for the 150 pages of pretension that contain “The GM’s secrets of the house.? IE: the GM guide. It has no secrets. It does not tell you, the DM, what is going on in the house. I don’t know, maybe, four pages have some info on running the house? Some themes in the five sections of the house and what happens when the house gets mad at you. The rest of it? Bullshit.
Monte spends a decent amount of time explaining a new RPG system that he wants you to use. So you can concentrate on “the story.” Shove it up your ass man. Your system aint better or worse than anything else. Credit where its due, you’re not shoving a plot down on our throats, imposing the designers Story on the party and DM, but, also, your system aint better or worse than D&D or CoC. He does spend a LARGE number of pages defending choices made and so on, trying to undercut the nerdrage that all of the fanboys feel for their home systems. I can only imagine what its like having everyones targets on you all the time. Anyway, this entire GM book is bullshit. The house can whatever it wants. “The mystical tools disappear lost in the house again, hidden in different places now because the house hates you” or “This essentially means that time works exactly how you, the GM, wants it to. If you don’t want to pay attention to the passage of time and then suddenly say, “It’s been a long time since you have eaten anything. Your stomach is growling,” that’s fine. If you want to keep closer track than that, that’s fine too.” So, basically, do whatever you want, as a DM. This is bullshit and when I, as a player, detect a DM doing this then I tune the fuck out. So, 150 pages of bullshit that appraches indie garbage. LIke “Have each player think of a truth and a lie that is true for them. A truth is something tha player and character believe and the lie is something that the character believes but the players does not.” Uh huh. You see where this is going, right? Yeah, telling the DM to challenge the players, character growth, blah blah blah. Fuck off with that pretension man. Anyway, like I said, you can just throw this entire thing out. All 150 pages. It’s pretty much useless.
The house isn’t really system agnostic, as it claims. First, it wants you to convert to his system, and second, its clearly a CoC/modern horror setting. Telephones, etc are in the game. And in fact, a rining phone is a big theme. Blah blah blah “fit it in” blah blah blah. Monte handwaves this shit in order to say its system agnostic/any system, when he should really just lean the fuck in to that fact that its a horror game in semi-modern times. (Conspiracy X bitches!)
His advice to the DM can be terribly non-specific. If you anger the house you are inflicting with a DOOM when you leave it. DOOMS such as “Terrible nightmares and night terrors” and “A physical malady, such as a limp that impedes quick movement, a back injury that flares up at the worst times, or a prominent—perhaps even animate—and disturbing scar, OR a mental malady, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome that incapacitates in moments of stress, a terrible paranoia, or a serious and lengthy bout of depression.” THis whole DOOM shit is supposed to be a major theme, selling your soul to the house for success, but its impacts are, again, just hand waved. Wrong decision. POh, oh, and lets not forget those rooms that “are placed to build dread.” Blah blah blah “its the house fucking with you” explains why you hear footsteps walking upstairs. Ok, sure, It’s horror. So Maybe. But, fuck your handwaving explanations.
The actual rooms don’t tend to be bad. And, in fact, I’d say the theming is pretty damn good. In the first section of the house The Father roams about. His description is “He appears impossibly tall, with a dark face and yellow eyes, and usually carries a massive leather belt as a weapon. He’s always angry and violent.” I’m not one for that consent checklist/trigger shit at the table, but this is bordering on needing that. Especially once Mom shows up. We gonna assume you didn’t just drop this on the players out of the blue. That would be rude of you to inflict actual adult themes in a game. So, if you can handle that … then this is well done. And I don’t say that lightly. Its got more its fair share of crappy rooms. But also its got a lot of decent puzzley rooms that dont feel too much like a puzzle. And then when the themes show up … The closest analog, I think, might be those 90’s horror games. Maybe crossed with a little Myst. The rooms are very atmospheric. The art contributes to this. The read-aloud borders on being a sentence or two too long, but it not terrible. And the actual challenges are pretty decent.
You’re gonna have to help sell the horror, as the DM (I’m thinking specifically of the second room, a completely dark one, and the third one, with a potential ghost.) The format can be clunky at times. The GM’s guide should just be thrown away. I’m only looking at the electronic version, I have no idea how a print version would pull this off. Whoever decided on Red Text On Black should be banned forever from ever being able to share an opinion or doing design. Otherwise … if you’re cool with some adult themes, not a bad effort. Which, frankly, is NOT the conclusion I though I was going to come to when I started this review. This may be Monte’s best work in a LONG time.
I might run this. If I were looking for something to run for a few sessions, Horror Related, then I might do this. Man, I really don’t like online play. But, if I were to do it I might use this. It brnngs down some of the highbrow theme shit present in the Indie press while still retaining some of it.
Jesus fucking help me, I think I’m giving this a No Regerts. You gotta go in to it ignoring a bunch of shit. And you gotta wanna run online. And be a good DM to convert this to your system and bring the atmosphere to life. That’s a lot of requirements.
This is $45 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. The DriveThru page gives you an idea of the artwork to be shared with the players. And the youtube video shows you a little of the “room page’ layout, with the map, art, DM text, expanding bullets, etc. Also, if you read through the product description you can get a feel for the kind of pretension you have to deal with in that book you are going to throw away. There’s nothing, though, to give you the vibe of themes, which is really too bad. That description of The Father? Go with that. You chill with that in your game?
By Stephen Grodzicki
Pickpocket Press
OSR
No Levels
Armed with this compilation, filling your sandbox with small – medium sized adventures has never been easier. Browse the collection, throw out a few hooks, and let the players bite where they may. Whichever direction they take, you’ll be ready to handle it with aplomb.
This 245(!) page volume compiles 22 of the adventures released by the designer. As with all compilations, it can be hit or miss. Themes emerge, with great wanderer encounters and room descriptions that need trimmed with the writing beefed up to be more evocative. This work, in particular, has more than a few “gimmick” adventures. I don’t know that I would ever buy a compilation?
Yeah yeah, it says “framework” and not “adventure.” But I think they are adventures, not frameworks, so I’m reviewing them like adventures.
Two of the works in this, Fane of the Frog God and Whitestone Tower, have been previously reviewed by me. Go check them out if you want a more in-depth covering of the adventures. They are decent enough reviews of decent enough adventures and the commentary there holds well for this volume. I’m going to do a bad job in this review.
I’d like to cover two highlights of the adventures: the art and the wanderers. I seldom comment on art; I find most art in adventures worthless. Ideally, it would compliment the adventure, helping to bring it to life, as everything in an adventure should. The art credits in this are all over the place, but, there are some highlights. The monster art tends to be quite good, really bringing them to life. It does what good art should, helping bring the adventure to life for the DM, contributing to the evocative nature aspect of the adventure needed for the DM to convey things effectively to the players. To a lesser extent the “general scene” art does this as well in this collection. Ruins, a tree with a skeleton on it … it helps convey a mood and they range from ok to excellent. The rest of the art tends to be the throw away stuff you see in every adventure.
The designers wanderer tables are pretty fcking good as well. Soldiers shooting dice in an alley, An injured bear near death and not really a fighter. A beggar, getting a chamberpot dumped on his head. Even a stray cat encounter is a good one here. The energy in these little vignettes are something that I wish would also be found in the designers actual rooms/encounters.
There are bits and pieces of other things I could talk about. NPC descriptions tend to be short and relatively good, following the three word system. In one adventure there’s a throw-away line about being hired by The Crone of Sumptown, and in another your shadows slip away from you … letting you know that things are about to get weird. These little bits and pieces, details and specificity, do wonders to bring an adventure to life. Most designers don’t come anywhere near this, and this designer sprinkles them in but a little too sparsely.
The issue with these s that tend to be wordy. The individual rooms and encounters blow up the word count, for no good reason. In fact, The evocative writing seems to go down, quite a bit, when the rooms and encounters appear. “The face of the fortress is carved from the
mountainside, expertly cut and fashioned by the dwarven masons of old.” This is the entrance to a dungeon. It’s boring. It’s written like we’re reading a novel or series guidelines. There’s nothing useful about this description at all, for running the adventure at the table. It’s just padding. Parts of the adventures have some good bits to them. You can see them in descriptions like this one: “The tree at the centre has a skeleton nailed to it, wooden stakes hammered into the hands and forearms pinning it upright. Over time, vines have grown up around the bones, further securing them in place.” That description could be better, but its also supplemented by an good art piece. There’s this padding, and an abstraction of detail. A use of boring adjectives and adverbs, quite noticeable in the rooms proper. There are two issues here: the need to prune back the padding and the need to amp up the evocative nature of the descriptions. I will fully admit that evocative writing is hard … the hardest part of adventure design, I think. But it should be possible to prune these descriptions way back and get rid of the fluff that detracts from the good bits.
Collections are rough, because of the mish mash of adventures. This one seems particularly full of idiosyncratic adventures. One in which you play the monsters. A fey picks on the party. A zero level adventure. A roman gladiator/chariot racing one, a gang war hiring, a rooftop chase. There are some delights to be held though, or, perhaps, some better than others. An adventure involving a missing orphan and a town investigation, a couple of adventures sprinkled with the more alien of the D&D creatures … though eaters and the like. And a lot of fucking adventures where the party gets hired to escort someone to explore something. I guess its inevitable, when you’re producing so much, so reach a bit in the easy bucket.
I’m not a fan of the abstracted treasure used in these. “Roll twice on the moderate valuables table.” This is not the evocative treasure that appeals to the PLAYERS that I’m looking for. The designer does the work. That’s the rule. If I did the work then we wouldn’t need the designer.
Cultists in Crows Keep, Folds Between Worlds, Red Moon Harvest … these are some of the more appealing ones to me. Mostly because they break away from the “Stark Dwarven Halls” that are impossible to do well … figuratively or literal stark dwarven halls, that is … 😉
This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is thirteen pages. You get to see an overview of the adventures and part of the first one … which has that pretty nifty crucifixion tree that I liked so much … even in its iffy form.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
