The Caper of Lanjin Kettlespin

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Malrex
The Merciless Merchants
For Gold & Glory
Levels 1-3

War in the tunnels below the dwarven city of Axeholme has kept the city guard busy. This caused the Constable to close down the Axeholme Museum in frustration and until further notice!! Why? Due to ‘hauntings’! Rumors have spread through the streets that locals have witnessed strange lights, noises, and normal objects that move on their own accord! Sounds like the usual to a group of adventurers such as yourselves. The Constable seeks adventurers to figure out the mystery of these hauntings….and you are hoping the reward will just be some of that sweet, sweet dwarven beer! 

This 21 page adventure details a three level dwarf museum with about 35 rooms. It’s probably fine. But I hate dwarf adventures and I hate museum adventures. Yes, I am a hater. The worst thing I’ve seen from MM, and Mr Bad King? Probably.

Let’s see here, plant room? Check. Statues that come to life? Check. Things coming out of paintings? Check. Animated things? Check. Earth plane creatures? Check. Some kind of forge thing? Check. Some kind of mine thing? Check. “Bryce, stop being so cynical!” Well, stop making it so easy! Sure, a museum is going to have those things. Sure a dwarf adventure is going to have those things. Just like an exploratory adventure will have a secret door and a chasm room. 

But I don’t care. I hate the implications. Museums. Phooey! And the dwarves here are nothing but a pretext. It could be a human museumfor all the theming. Yeah yeah. Bar in the museum. Mining exhibit. Whatever the nature of dwarves is, it’s not present in the adventure. And if you figure out what the nature of dwarves is let me know. That does seem to be the problem with all these dwarf adventures. No one seems to know what the vibe is. Including me? Anyway, museums suck in D&D, just like archeologists do. There are, of course, the required continual light lamps throughout the museum. Joy. Did I mention the legendary gnomish artist thing? No? I’m just ranting and rambling at the beginning of a review? 

Ok, so, the dwarf museum is haunted. Everyone is too busy so you get to go look in to it. What does haunted mean? No clue. Nothing provided. The curator opens the doors for you. What can the curator tell you? No clue. Nothing provided. Yeah, sure, you don’t have to. But, also, one fucking sentence would be nice. One sentence to communicate the curators vibe? Nope. I guess the intro says the constable is looking for volunteers, and the intro in the adventure says Balgor the curator is looking for volunteers. Whatever. There’s 35 rooms. Lets get in to it. Oh, shit, I forgot. You get 300gp each and please don’t steal.

Room one. Giant closed doors with a dwarf face on eit. Got it. Room two. Statues. One of them comes alive. Starting strong, I guess. “Three dwarven statues and one gnome statue stand in alcoves lining the walls, each graffitied with colorful war paint. The statues are expertly crafted with name plates. Each statue holds the tools of their particular trade.” *YAWN* Room three, Foyer, with “gigantic thich multi-hued glowing crysta;s emerging from the ceiling, floor, and walls.” *yawn*. Room four, Trophies. Statues of monsters. That have … come to life. Seven kobolds, five goblins and an ogre. Enjoy. Room five, mining exhibit. “Various sized lanterns hang from the walls emitting a glow on stone tablets of cartographic information. Wheelbarrows are half-filled with bits of golden and copper ore chunks and in-between piles of rubble. A few empty bird cages, expertly crafted hang from the north wall.”

Is this what you want from D&D?

The adventure is not badly done. You can understand what is written and follow along. I just have no idea WHY you would to do so. For a generic description? For seeing a trope that has been done a hundred, if not thousand, times before done in exactly the same way it was done those previous times? For a plot driven by a gnome illusionists search fo a book of literature about his dad. A BOOK OF LITERATURE?!  

I fucking hate magical society adventures. Just as I hate hell and all Montagues. 

Enjoy this, plebiscite. I trust you’re all comfy on your tacky sofas from Rooms-to-Go, lots of nibbles close at hand? Well, tuck in! And why not smoke between gobbles? Yes, go for the gusto America!

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, so you get to see everything. There’s no faulting that! Just the way things should be.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/422993/The-Caper-of-Lanjin-Kettlespin?1892600

It’s Tuesday, as I write this. I leave Thursday night to go live on a commune.

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 28 Comments

Milk and Blood

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Cunningham
SBM Press
OSR & Dark Albion
Levels 1-2

… in the village of Bacton in Herefordshire in 15th Century England, but can easily translate into any fanasy setting. The PCs are called upon to investigate the disappearance of a child amidst a rising tide of pranks and odd goings-on that has caused the local priest to beg for help.

This eleven page adventure details a small “investigation” in a village with an imp in it. Oops, gave it away. Now you wont be able to enjoy this outline of an idea for an adventure.

Well to do chick wants to marry a petty aristo kid. But her parents die, so shes sent to the country to live with granpappy orchard man, who is a bit of an ignorant lout. And now shes too low to marry the aristo, so, to improve the orchard she gets the local wisewoman to tell her how to summon brownie, and is wanted against mixing in blood to the milk becauseit will summon too powerful an entity. She wants a great orchard, so she adds some blood and get, unknown to her, an imp. Who is doing shit around the village. And eventually convinces her to get it a baby for its more powerful blood. Oops. 

The editing here is not great. The opening paragraph is immediately duplicated as the second paragraph. The imp is noted as a Imp of Desire. And then an Imp of Conceit. These are, of course, minor issues, and only stand out as witness to the more serious affair.

It’s an outline. You get a VERY basic list of major NPC’s. With descriptions that focus on background rather than the bits you need to run them. Griff and acerbic. Clever and oddly charismatic. I’m a fan of these sorts of quick hit descriptions for an NPC, but these don’t cut it. They are too abstracted and need supported by more, and I don’t mean their character history.
And then, as the main part of the adventure, you get a list, in bullet form, that takes up about two pages. This is, essentially, a list of 24 things that the party can learn as they investigate the village and ask about after the missing child. It is, essentially, a rumor list. Mixed in to it, though, are a few things to learn is you talk to NPC Frank, Sur, or Mary. And they all start with “If you talk to Sue then you will earn that … “ or something like that. Obviously, not the best presentation for information. You can’t make the DM hunt for things. It should be easy to locate the specific NPC and what they know. 

And, I should note, most of the rumors are from a rando villager. As in “There’s a Full Moon in a few nights, best to be indoors that night if you know what’s good for you!” or “Another villager complains their cow has run dry.” We don’t get these villagers. Just the core NPC’s. 

On top of that are the consequences for what’s going on. We get a couple of paragraphs describing complications. “they must realize that if Annes dies or is executed for witchcraft the High Sheriff will be angered, as will the Talbots when Humphrey holds them to blame.” Will they, though? Has the adventure done ANYTHING to help the DM communicate this AT ALL? No. Gonna blame the wise woman? She aligned with the House of York. Ok. And? I get it, War of the Roses, but, …. And? How does the party know this? How are the consequences made clear to the party? 

I could be missing something here. The main rulebook for Dark ALbion could have a great villager generator and make it clear all the consequences. But, even if it does, that’s no excuse for the information presented in this adventure. It is a rough outline of an adventure. A rumor table. A list of bullets that an adventure would then be designed around. It’s missing EVERYTHIGN that a modern adventure should have, meaning, supporting the DM in the play of the game. Theres none of that here.

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You get to see all of the major NPC”s and all of the adventure bullet points. ALl that’s missing is that short consequences section … Good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/437300/Milk–Blood–an-OSR-and-Dark-Albion-Adventure-12-Level?1892600

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

Odious Uplands

Posted on May 24, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jason Sholtis
Hydra Cooperative
S&W
Level ... 1-?

SO YOU SURVIVED OPERATION UNFATHOMABLE? The Odious Uplands await! You and your brave companions, fresh from their terrible sojourn into the Underworld emerge into the untamed wilds of Stonespear Province, crushed for an eon beneath towering glaciers until a sudden thaw, and bathed in the dim radiance and ineffable influence of the Chaos Aurora! A land home to all manner of unique megafauna, vicious saber-toothed apes, Woolly Neanderthal rangers, scarcely describable entities staggering forth from the Underworld, and of course other adventurers seeking their fortunes.

This 170 page setting/hexcrawl features a home base as well as “upper mastodonia”; a weirdo OD&D locale that tends towards the primitive, imagined as only Sholtis could. Evocative beyond reproach, if you can hang with the Dungeon Dozen and handle some sticky descriptions then you’ve got a winner here. 

I should mention, up front, that I like this designers work. I think his website, Dungeon Dozen, is one of the best D&D resources available. Operation Unfathomable is one of my very favorite adventures. It’s one of the few I own in hardcopy. It is the ONLY adventure I have ever gifted someone. I like his brand of genre.

We have to cover the weirdness thing first, since I feel like that’s going to be the thing that the stick-up-their-asses crowd focuses on. There’s always been weirdness in D&D. From your black monoliths and fish-people, to Wilderlands to ASE1. Scholtis leans weird. Not gonzo. Weird. Yup, there’s a dude riding a giant preying mantis. If you’ve got giant preying mantii then it makes sense that someone would eventually ride one, correct? (Not shown: the 100,000 idiots who tried, failed, and died) And, perhaps, that “Not shown” is the key to this. We’re not talking about a magical ren faire. No Continual Light street lights and blackhole garbage disposals. It’s not commoditized. Life is still strange and risky. As if the conditions in the dungeon, which might give you a +1 STR or might turn your head in to an insects, are shown, in society. Yup, there’s the dude at the bar with the insect head. No, we don’t ask about that. But it’s all firmly rooted in the normal world. There’s a lot of weirdness floating around, but the world is not weird … even though it is. A part of this is the relatable conditions that Sholtis works in. You can understand what’s going on. One dude thinks that the local indigenous people, hippy cavemen are “better people than humans (he’s not wrong!) and resents them accordingly.” Comeone now. That’s one of the most human things I’ve seen written down about human nature and it’s in a D&D adventure. The adventure, most of the NPC motivations, and monsters for that matter, make sense. Things are relatable, even though weird. It’s not generic. It’s not abstract. It’s relatable. 

Present, here, is a town. A starting base. Fort Enterprise. The last of civilization, slightly outside the bounds of the civilized lands, in the wild north. Run by a King Conan, barbarian gone to lard, but still believing in the nurturing power of the wildlands. Ready to tame the surrounding lands of monsters. And make some loot. And a bunch of degenerates hanging about ready to farm, fish, timer, and exploit the environment. You’ve got a great home base. It’s absolutely an adventurers town. Weirdo wizards. Weird tax rules. Idiosyncratic clerics. People (and giant slugs …) out to make a buck. That slug? An effete emissary from the underworld, a trader, hole up out of sight as a guest in the Governor/Barbarians manor. Yup, an effete slug trader hawking underworld ale. Did I mention that the God-Kings emissary in town is a lich? Just there to make sure the Gvernor/Barbarian pays his taxes. Yup, the empire has Citizen Lich’s. And more than a couple are present in town. As is a local troop of the empires soldiers, looking for miscreants outside of town, searching people, especially adventurers, confiscating interesting things found. Gotta keep the party on their toes and this does that. A shanty town, a lake full of monsters. A couple of godlings hanging around. This club has it all! A great starter town. And EVERYTHING aimed at interacting with the party and inciting adventures and presenting great situations to explore with them. Rocking place.

There are about forty or so described location scattered around the Upper Mastadonia map, along with numerous other “generic sites”, meaning “you find a corpse here” or “you find a fungal thing here.” Something akin to the “pit traps” on a map, these have tables that you can use to expand on the encounter, providing for a constant background of themes popping up. Some of those fourty or so locations are also mini-dungeons or a few rooms. 

Sholtis writes ‘sticky’ descriptions. The locales are memorable. You ran riff on the information present, make it your own, expand on it. You understand what the core concept is and have enough to run with it. Evocative. It’s really quite a skill to be able to produce locale after locale like this. But, that should be no surprise given the Dungeon Dozen. What they are not are terse. We’re looking a couple of paragraphs for most places with some bullet points. This is augmented by offset boxes and other formatting, that helps bring clarity to specific things, but, I’m talking about the main concept/description/idea. The communication of that core overview. The one that I say is sticky and helps you run the area. Yeah … that one is a little long. This is a prime case of needing a highlighter. You’re gonna need to read everything, at least once, in prep and then maybe highlight about two words in each area. That, combined with the art, should let you recall enough to run the place almost on the fly. Sure, you might miss a detail or two, but the locales really are pretty sticky. The dungeons, and other locations, tend to fare a bit better in terms of “easier to scan”, but the scannability is an issue in most areas and with most people, places and things. We’re not talking pages and pages of text here. But there will absolutely be agame pause while you absorb for a couple of minutes.

Otherwise, great setting. Lots going on. Lots of ways for the party to get in to trouble. Perfect for making friends, and pitting them against each other for fun and profit. Really a great setting if you can roll with the given genre. It’s not gonzo. It’s not ASE1. But it’s more than, sy, Xyntillian.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. And it suuuuuucccccckkkkkkkssss! Showing you nothing of import. The art, though, implies whats to come.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/421504/Odious-Uplands?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 36 Comments

Hard Ticket to Lud

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Noora Rose
Monkey's Paw Games
OSR
Level 1

In the Long-Ago, this was not a marsh but a rugged mountain, ruled by a fierce people of stone with singular, burning eyes. The remains of their Empire lie scattered about the marsh, in places called taboo by the Luds.

This 42 page adventure is a hex crawl with about eighteen hexes detailed. The hexes are decent enough situations. There is a distinct lack of adventure motivation, though, and a descriptive style that meanders a little too much for my tastes. It’s a decent idea for an adventure that is not executed as well as it could be.

Ok, so, You’re staying a little village town one night and it gets attacked by four titans. This is a level one adventure, so, they are more environmental than creature. Anyway, they destroy the place. Ok. So. Now what? *twiddles thumbs* Oh, they attacked another place in the swamp also and destroyed it. Ok. And ….? I guess the party looks in to things on their own or some such? There’s really no motivation for the party to do anything in this adventure, and there’s no advice to the DM to get things moving or the party involved. What’s actually happening is that an escalade slave was in town with an artifact and the titans are showing up to get it back. The dude wanders the hex map and the titans show up wherever he is to destroy it. There’s supposed to be, I think, this great refugee clogged area, in a swamp, and so on. 

Each location has a little blurb about it. They are generally decent with some situation going on interesting enough for the party to interact or poke around in, for the most part. There are a few too many “ruined city” locales with rado destroyed building searches, but, whatever. Those are always a pain to handle well and never are anyway, in any adventure. Wanna get rich in the OSR? Figure that out and make $5. Anyway, each location finishes up with two little sections: one details what is going on if the escaped slave is there and the other details what happened/location changes if the titans have been through. Nice enough. The dude wanders around randomly but the text tells us that “there’s always some clue as to which way he went.” Which is hanging statement if I’ve ever read one. There is no advice to the DM to keep these clues  fresh and interesting. So, good luck.

The rumor table is ok, as if the wanderers table, who are doing things. Good things? Meh. “A swirling, buzzing cloud of mosquitoes. Perched over a corpse.” Ok, sure.. Not really a situation. The NPCs present are fairly well described. Some sentences that give their appearance and motivations/quicks  pretty well. Something short to hang your hat on when running them. Three asshole soldiers from a nearby Baddy Empire will  “At the first sign of trouble all three will don conical bronze helms with chain veils and flee, stabbing anyone who steps in their way” Yeah, I can run that. And, all of the descriptions in the adventure are fairly well done. They do have enough specificity to start brining the area to life without really going on too long. 

But there’s a caveat to that statement. ALl of the descriptions are also too long. Padded out. How can it be both? Well if you just deleted the padding then you’d have a pretty focused and decent description. “There are ancient etchings upon the dolmens, their meaning lost to the elements and the Long-Ago, but each standing stone bears a small stone votive-bowl at the base” So, if I just deleted the “their meaning lost to the elements and the Long-Ago,” then it would be a decent description. Terse, with some decent specificity. Dolmens. Moss-covered. The etchings are ancient. Stone votive-bowls. Not bad. Not rock star, but not bad. 

And thus it is with just about everything in this. It’s ok. Those wanderers are better than most adventures use, but really still not great. The hex descriptions are ok, better than a decent number of adventure in giving us situations for the party to work through or use to their advantage. But, still, padded out and you have to dig through them to run them, as with the NPC’s. Monster descriptions are almost there, almost giving a description of the monster instead of their society, etc. Everything int he adventure is almost where. 

Just like the core concept idea. Sure, you’re chasing this dude through the swamps, I guess, while the four titans follow behind with their destruction. But there’s no real motivation to do so. Why not just move on? And if it is a more typical hex crawl, with just the slave and titans as window dressing … I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like there’s enough here to take advantage of. 

I think the entire thing just needed a little bit more work. A little bit more trimming/focus. A little bit more on the chase/motivations, and the window dressing of the refugees. A little bit more, in just about every single aspect of the adventure. It is interesting to see, though, something come so close in so many different areas.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You get to see the first hex location, Lud proper, but it’s not really a great indication of the hex situations to come. The descriptive style, both positive and negative, are fully on display though.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397329/Hard-Ticket-to-Lud?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 10 Comments

A Green and Dead Sea

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Battle
Self Published
OSR
Level ? Fuck you for wanting a level, plebiscite!

The curse left behind by the shells of gods has turned the canopy of this forest into a fungal carpet. It’s tangled so thick that it can be skiffed across like a green and dead sea, on wood and steel barges, frigates, and scooters. Bismark’s Guild of Hooligans has spare cash to throw to adventurers who climb down below the canopy and pilfer the pre-war tech that’s probably still down there.

This thirteen page hexcrawl in a post-apoc/fantasy/bio/retro setting is the usual for this style: more ideas than adventure and a lack of understanding of what “Situations” means.

How disappointing. I reviewed a decent adventure by this designer a few weeks ago. It was artpunky, but, was substantially longer and with more substance. A rarity among the artpunk crowd. So I sought out another one. That was a mistake. 

So, hex crawl. Three hexes “on top of the trees” and five underneath it that have encounters. A small rando table for each that has Other Things that happen while traveling. Bismarck has an airship, there are biotech giant mech wreckage (“the gods”, I think?) and so on. Kind of an interesting setting; maybe a little anime for my tastes with the appeal to Bismark and airships, but, sure, I could do this. 

The descriptions suck. “A sac of lifeforce wrapped in now-sentient fungus which fights to protect itself.” Great. I am inspired. Can we pulsate? Can it be ghostly lifeforce? A translucent purple sac? A fungus full of fave with only mouths? I don’t know. SOMETHING?  Everything is like this. This is the core conceit of these types of adventures. Just toss out an idea of something and put all of the work on the DM. This fucking shit does this enough that I hesitate to even call them adventures. “99 adventure ideas within a fungus forest” might be a better idea. Except there are far fewer than 99 ideas.

Stats are few and far between. That lifeforce fungus shit gets some. 5HD. But thats the heart of the adventure. The Big Bad. Most things don’t get stats. And most treasure is not detailed. You do get a treasure table at the end, ala the Gamma World junk tables. “A broken AI chip.” Wonderful.

As with most of these, it’s just ideas. It doesn’t understand the difference between an idea and a situation. “A still living war machine is impaled on a fungal thorn tree, made of red, bleeding fungus and 6ft spikes. Its battery can charge two disintegration rays.” Great. “Spiced Pear Pirates are arming a car-sized bomb to blow a hole in the canopy.” Wonderful. These are, I admit, wanderers, but, the hex locations have much the same energy. 

You need to do a mission for someone, in one of the hexes. You need a pre-war cape, the blood of a god, a vial of time and the “final’ mushroom. I get that a large part of D&D is improv. A large part is people making shit up. But, too much reliance on this and you fall in to story game territory. That’s not OSR D&D. Let’s look at this comment, in the description for the sinkhole that leads you from the upper canopy to the ground beneath things “I don’t know how they could get down this, so just ask them how they’d like to avoid being crushed by the sands and what they plan to do about the fall. They’ll think of something.” Or this commentary for a treasure item “The sand is crystalized Time and can be used for many interesting purposes (I’m sure).” 

I get shit sometimes for wanting things a little more loosy goosy and less mechanistic, but this is just insanity. This is just the typical artpunk collection of ideas. This is a story game. Perhaps, I guess, this is what happens when the OSR won. The story gamers, the people who hate the D&D mechanics, are still around. They just call themselves D&D players and continue to play, and produce, story games. 

Quite the disappointment.

And, to out ArtPunk friends … be happy that you have an identity. From high fantasy railroads in 2e to 1e stick-in-the-ass, to the sublime perfection of B/X and the New SHovelWare of The Hotness, at least you got a brand also. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Of course. No doubt there are Communty Copies on itch or something like that. I don’t know. I don’t really give a fuck.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/321686/A-Green-and-Dead-Sea?1892600

Posted in ArtPunk Shovelware, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 19 Comments

The Caverns of Steel

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nickolas Zachary Brown
Five Cataclysms
OSR
Levels: Mid to High?

This place sits on the border between the mundane world and the world of machines. It is a horrendous mishmash of metal mechanical components, contorted and broken and pressed to form this recognizable-but-alien cavern reeking of oil. This is a place where machine life is the norm, and biological meatbags are unwelcome, prone to a toxic demise. Many creatures found here are parodies of biological life, while yet others have discarded all such trappings for a pure mechanical state. Terrible screeches and clanking and whirring of horrible entities echo through these cavernous chambers. In these twisting halls of metal, there are treasures to be plundered, for where metal abounds, there’s sure to be gold.

This 57 page adventure presents a dungeon sub-level for the Descent into Madness, machine themed, with around 130 rooms(!) It recreates the bizarro vibe of a megadungeon sub-level perfectly. I wish there were more of this in my life.

First off, the keys on this thing start on page seven and run till the end. Absofuckinglutly! Not counting the cover, there are two pages of bs in this: the “how to read a monster stat block” and an overview/pretexts for visiting page. What’s that? You wanted to buy a dungeon adventure, not a belly itcher? Well congratulations, this fucking thing is a dungeon. The designer is NOT fucking around. The keys start almost immediately, after a robust wanderers table. WHo are doing things. What sorts of things? Well, three busty steel crustations challenge the party to a dance off, by pointing at them with a claw and then doing a little dance. If you win, you get a loyal metal-crab follower.  Uh, ok. How about s party of robots, cosplaying as adventurers? Including healer and torchbearer, all dressed up? 

Oh, I’m sorry Mr Hoity Toity stick-up-your-ass D&D player, is that too farcical for you? First, maybe go play Harn. Second, I cherry picked a couple of examples. This is not a joke adventure, or weird for the sake of being weird. The weirdness here is that of the megadungeon sub-level, which has, I think, always been allowed a little room for farce. Mostly, this is a pretty normal dungeon level, albeit machine themed, with a little farce tossed in. Anyone who has spent a lot of hours writing knows how things can get a little crazy sometimes, in your head, and sometimes that translates to the page. That’s what’s going on here. 

Mostly, though, this is a metal and oil sublevel. With a decent number of fleshy folks hanging out. And by flesh folks I mean a wizard in a gemstone, all magic jar style. And a level 20 wizard with a sawed off shotgun. And a whole host of others gathered round for good time. 

There’s a little robo-town, with mostly friendly robots in it. And, a carousing table. A CUSTOM carousing failure table. Something that I’m convinced, now, having seen it in this adventure, needs to be in every adventure with a decently weird town. You ate some rusty gears. They were probably soaked in buffalo sauce. Ill for a couple of days. I love this. It really brings tha added flavour of the site. 

And, that’s what you’re after, right? An adventure that really leans in to the flavour of a site? That makes it come alive? That makes you feel it? And this one kind of does that. The encounters are all delightfull. The initial descriptions terse and, while not award winning, decent enough. Generally. I could do with fewer “appears to be “ and “you see”, ut, they ARE few and far between. Each entry gets a line or two. A few words will be bolded in it and there will bebolded section headings under that to detail those things. Effective enough. The descriptions, proper, are ok. “Metal crabs clamber over the floors and the walls, tending to their little eggs in little pools in craters throughout the room. The corpse of some metallic creature, likely a fish, sits in the middle of the room. Something strange is attached to its head, tube shaped with a crystal tip.” So, ok. Not great, but ok. I do think it falls down in “general vibes.” Like a lot of adventures it has a section up front that says something like “walls are made of metal, full of studs and rivits, with the smell of oil and dripping” or something similar. Meh. I don’t think hat really ends up working, room after room, to convey hte vibe. I’m not mad at it, but I don’t think it helps much either. A stronger room description, or putting things on the map page, would be in order, I think. Or in the margins? SOmething to help bring the window dressing more forward. 

I’m a fan of this. Interactivity is solid. Things to stab, talk to, and interact with. Pools to be drained. Monoliths to fuck with. And situations to be puzzled out, hopefully to the parties advantage. “Rhudahn – An armored angry entity of fire, kept suppressed in a nitrogen prison.” Hope you play that one right, Mr Party. Or, how about “In the center of this triangular room is a red- metal altar, covered in all sorts of barbs and hooks. Atop it is a bloody-red orb, an indentation within suited for a hand to lay upon. Hanging from the walls are more hooks, barbs, spikes, and other instruments of flagellation.” Who wants to fuck with that thing? (Me, I do. I’m DYING to!) 

This really conjures the charm of old school D&D. Deadly, interesting. Varied. A little weird. This is what D&D is made of. Sure, it could be a lot more polished. But, also, that content is GOLD.

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, the preview is broken 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/425543/The-Caverns-of-Steel?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 30 Comments

Cult of Ankh-Ra

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nova Yttrium
Self Published
Shadowdark
Levels 1-3

In this adventure, the PCs are hired to find the missing daughter Kyla of a wealthy merchant that has been kidnapped by acolytes of a cult that recently plagues the land and abducts women and men alike. The Cult of Ankh-Ra, as they call themselves, is trying to revive the forgotten goddess Ankh-Ra by sacrificing humans and performing an ancient ritual that they found on an old scroll in a former temple of Ankh-Ra that lies in ruins nowadays. Once the PCs reach the temple, they witness the result of the ritual: The soul of Ankh-Ra has been resurrected and takes possession of Kyla’s body. She then uses her magical powers to transport her temple from one thousand years ago into the current time along with all creatures that lived in her temple all those years ago. Can the PCs stop Ankh-Ra, banish her soul and rescue Kyla from the grasp of the cultists? [Ed: One hopes not …]

This nineteen page digest adventure uses about eight pages to describe about thirty rooms. It’s one step removed from minimally keyed. So, you know, at least it’s overwritten. It also lacks just about everything that actually brings a D&D adventure to life.

There is one nice thing. You enter a room, a guard shouts that he’s willing to die for his god and pulls a lever, locking the doors and causing the ceiling to lower, classic trap style. Ten rounds to get out, with a dude in the room. Nice twist.   

Frank the merchant hires you to go get his daughter back, who was abducted for sacrifice “a few days ago.” Nice job Frank. You’re father of the year for that one. You approach the ruined temple the cult uses and there’s a flash of light and the temple repairs itself. Looks like In Media Res is the new hotness. Anyway, there’s no pretext before the actual room keys. Yeah, there’s eleven pages of intro, but none of it is about Frank, the abduction, the journey to the temple or anything else. It’s just mostly creature stat blocks, up front instead of behind in an appendix. Not that there has to be more. But, you know, an order of battle for the temple would have been nice, instead of everyone just staying in their rooms and ying, the way they do. Or, even, sticking monsters on the map for reaction purposes. Whatever.

Here’s a kitchen: “This big kitchen spans the whole room and is used to prepare various meals for the entire temple.” Yes, kitchens usually look like a kitchen. I would want to know if it ididn’t, and don’t want to know if it does. How about a dorm? “More than 20 simple beds are in this room.” Now, why would you say that? Why would you say “More than 20?” 6000 beds? 21 beds? Presumably the DM should know? No? It’s not important? Then why the fuck mention it? And why put it in such imprecise language for the DM? “The pit is more than 10 feet deep.” Uh huh. In other places guards “performing an obscure ritual”. Or “One giant scorpion is being trained by a jackal guard.”

This is just minimal keying. It’s one step removed from just listing “1 scorpion, 1 jackal guard.” There’s no value in that. There’s no language being used to bring the environment to life. To create a dynamic situation to be excited about. There’s no thrill. There’s jus a grind. One room after the next.

The resurrected queen, Ankh-Ra, is in Kyla’s body at the end. Dressed in yellow and blue silks and covered head to toe in jewelry. Which is some nice imagery. That’s what you do to your sacrificial victim to bring back your god. But, once you gack her, that’s it. We never learn anything about the jewelry. You see, it doesn’t matter. There was no thought about this. Fuck D&D. And so it goes, even with the puzzles. “Give your goddess an offering and bow down or face her wrath! Also, put it in the bowl, at least 10cp worth, preferably in cash. No checks. ApplePay accepted. Exchange rate set by the latest edition of The Times.”

Oh, hey, did I mention there’s not actually a cult? They don’t appear. Just the guards and shit, transported from back in time. This is just more garbage being churned out.

I’m done with Shadowdark for awhile. To my readers great joy and mine own further cynicism. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. Preview is six pages. You get to see nine rooms at the end of it, so, decent preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/435860/Cult-of-AnkhRa–An-Adventure-for-Shadowdark-RPG?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 19 Comments

Pan, His Majesty in Yellow

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By Wayne Robert
Wyrd Valley Press
OSE
Level ?

Pan, His Majesty in Yellow is a fairy tale cosmic horror sandbox campaign setting that combines the lore of Peter Pan, Hastur, Neverland, and Carcosa into a strange and unique experience.

This 76 page supplement is a setting guide fo a Neverland that is mashed up with Carcosa. Maybe it does that well? But the hex crawl sucks ass.

This isn’t a real review because I screwed up. But, I do talk about hex encounters. I don’t know why I thought this was hex crawl, but I did. Anyway, it uses about ten pages to describe 38 locations on the Never Island chain. The rest of the pages are creatures and the general vibe of the place.

And, as far as Peter Pan settings go, this one is ok, I guess. It expands on the genre (or, maybe there are more books? I’m too lazy to find out) and then mashes the entire thing up with some Hastur/Carcosa shit. Which, kind of makes perfect sense. There’s the usual stuff, with a new pirate in town, the faeries, the lost boys and so on. And then there’s a Carcosa-like dream city full of nightmares from beyond that melts in. There’s a continual theme of Pans capriciousness, and the consequences of it. There were Wendy’s before Wendy and Wendy’s after Wendy. What becomes of them? Hence The Old Ladies, appearing in the adventure. Other items are expanded upon as well. And almost everything has this slightly dark twist to it. What appears to be the frivolity of Peter Pan and the environment has dark undertones and origins. And it all works out pretty good, as a theme. It’s not my thing, but it brings the weird … never in your face but hiding as origin stories and in deep dark caves.

The hex crawl is, well, not a hex crawl. In several aspects. First, the hex map has no keys. The map WITH the keys, more artistic, has no hex boundaries. In spite of a big deal being made of wanderers and travel times. So, good luck with that.

Ten pages for 38 locations isn’t much space. It is certain hex energy in that respect. But the encounters would have to be more Gazetteer in flavour. Both because it’s not a hex crawl and therefore a setting and therefore a Gazetteer, and in their details. 

You’ve got three old men who live in a little hut. “Hank PuddingbottomsS regrets the capitol S he once acquired in trade to add to his name and would like to trade it in for an o. Or, from those same three, an elephant shows up and they can’t agree on the nature of it and its causing an awful ruckus during their breakfast. The absurdism comes through well, as is befitting a Pan setting. But they are only ideas, with nothing to carry them along. Go Forth and figure out a way. This borders on some of the artifact destruction themes in the 1e DMG. Or a site where “Something” has begun hunting inhabitants of the island. They are looking for help in hunting it. The IT is not expanded upon. None of the ideas are. Not even outlines, these are mere thoughts. Disconnected from most of the rest of the entries (usually) and given not much to help the DM breathe life in to it. This is much closer to the Isle of the Unknown. 

There is a big purple bird here. It sings to the sun.” [My example] Ok. And? Why do I care? There’s no real reason to gain an ally for most folks. And therefore there’s no real reason to interact. Except, in your quixotic tasks for the sake of tasks. 

And, perhaps, this is what makes a setting The DM must put something together to tie everything together and use this booklet to help inspire that. 

Meh.

This is $20 at DriveThru. Only a quick preview. Boo! Hiss!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/420759/Pan-His-Majesty-in-Yellow-OSE?1892600

If I didn’t want to know where you were April 29th then I wouldn’t have asked, now would I?

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 10 Comments

Demon Bone Sarcophagus

Posted on May 10, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess
False Machine Publishing
D&D
Level 1?

A pile of dead bodies in the desert! Results of a triple-cross! The PC’s investigate! Glass Women! Tunnels in the Earth! A scrap of torn paper in a dead hand, only one fragment of a plan to rob an evil corporation of incalculable wealth! A mysterious tomb beneath!What strange drama lead to this catastrophe? What secrets of primeval forgotten history will be revealed beneath in the tomb of the First Queen of Fire? Will they all interrelate in the (hopefully) third book of the series? Explore the tomb! Meet survivors of the battle above! Make choices between factions that will (hopefully) influence your journey through the next two books! (Hopefully) recover the Heist Plans!

This 144 page adventure uses about sixty five pages to describe a dungeon with about sixty five rooms. It is a rich experience, with evocative writing and great situations, a true dungeon delve worth exploring. It is also overly written with some confusing layout and dubious choices made in presentation and detail. Absolutely not something to pick up and run with minimal prep, but, also, almost certainly rewarding if you’re willing to study the text. A lot.

The situation here is that a lot of people from different factions met up/encountered each other on a plain and they got in to it, in a big way. A big battle ensued, which was complicated further by a creature popping up from underground. Turns out that the plain/spot of the inciting incident was directly over a big tomb complex. A slaughter ensues, and several of the people end up in the tomb, through various holes in the ground/collapsing sections of the plain. The party stumbles upon the plain/battle just after shit goes down. They investigate the battle remnants and then head down in to the to to encounter the shit down there, both the NPC’s from the battle that have fled there/fallen in and then also the tomb stuff.

Everything here, EVERYTHING, is non-trivial. Everything is fleshed out. The NPC’s are all fully detailed with wants, goals and little snippets to help you run them. It’s done in a good way, meaning that the content is directed towards the party interacting with them and them interacting with the adventure. Everything in the tomb is don in exactly the same way. Richly described. Interactive. Situations. Room after room does this. Encounter after encounter. “Naked girls of glass wander in the chaos, smiling absently at nothing at all.” or “A Man Hangs in the Claws of the gigantic HYPER-SLOTH! He is alive. Eyes fixed on a woman, she has been eviscerated and drags her body across the ground smearing blood, holding an obsidian knife. She is CRAWLING TOWARDS the hanging man.” Your soul is dead if you can’t something of those things, while running them. Those description, in particular, are rather short and get the point across in a magnificent manner. And that’s what you can expect here. Sentence after sentence of things of this rich tapestry. All perfect for running. Dudes wearing dark masks, difficult to pull away from their faces as if the mask were resisting more than they should. Their faces covered by back scabs once you do. That’s good. And the interactivity here is spot on. From things to talk to, ally with, things to stab, and a rich amount of interactivity beyond that. Shit to fuck with, and non-standard treasures. You couldn’t ask for more. “Crystal shards scatter the floor making it a blinding starfield. A cracked porcelain woman sits upon a crystal demon skull.”

Except …

This thing got issues. Hella issues.

Ignoring the backstory/flufl up front we get to the maps and the description of the battle. This is a mess. The maps are a pain. It feels like there wasn an attempt to overload then with information and make them somewhat artistic also. But these choices end up, I think, confusing the maps more and subtracting from the primary purpose that the maps are supposed to provide. There’s a db UI overhaul at work. The overhaul makes it easier to support the code in the long term, a lot easier to support. And the UI proper is more than a little outdated. But, also, the UI overhaul has negatively impacted the primary use case: the ability to locate and analyze massive amounts of data at a glance. The font, colo choice, kerning, line spacing .. it’s not substantially less easy to look at a massive amount of data at once and get what you need out of it. The cognitive burden is much, much higher. Which is the primary purpose of the UI, in this case. Thus the secondary and tertiary goals have, seemingly, trumped that primary goal. And that’s what it feels like is going on here with the maps. The map layout is a bit unusual, a giant triangle made up of smaller triangles that represent the individual rooms. That’s a choice. But I’ll go with it as a mythic destination. But the map choices, the detail added, from color scheme to in-room details, seem to detract from the overall primary purpose of the map. That could have been a lot better.

And that is a theme of the presentation of the entire adventure. Those wonderfully rich NPC’s, focused on actual play? There’s just too much to them. You can’t grok the NPC in a few second,s you’ve got to absorb A LOT of information about them. All play oriented, but there’s too much. Even with the formatting, a clear effort was made to help the DM. HERE”S WHERE YOU LOOK FOR WHAT THEY SAY WHEN YOU QUESTION THEM. The headings are all there. But there’s just A LOT.

And that rich tapestry for the rooms, their contents and descriptions. Sentence after sentence richly described. There’s just a lot to wade through. The most simple of rooms is going to get a column of information. All wonderful. But way too much to ever use. I absolutely fucking love ALL of the contents. But I can’t use it all. And it detracts from my ability to run it. 

You get a page on locked doors and tomb keys. You get a page on unlocked doors and combination doors. You get a page on wall murals. You get a page on Darkness, and dimensional tears. You get a page on the tunnel descriptions. You get a page on trap maintenance tunnels. You get a page on … You get the idea. It’s all wonderful content. But there is no fucking way in hell I’m holding all of that in my head. And I don’t think there’s any way I’m paging through to look up the information as I run this. And then flip to the rooms NPC’s. And then flip to the treasure. And then flip to the …

This may be one of the most richly described, effectively richly described, environments ever produced for D&D. But this is not a Tuesday night gaming location. This is something that the DM is going to have rto pour over, time and again. Note taking. Cross-references, and so on. You are gonna have to put in work. A LOT of work, in order to prep to run this.

And I have a lot of misgivings about that. I love this. I love the descriptions. I love the interactivity. I love the richness. But there’s only so much foie gras I can eat in one setting. It ends up detracting the whole. A god strong edit was needed on this one (in more ways than one), but in particular to focus the rooms down, focus the NPC’s down. Or, maybe, a few more pages, to summative the NPC’s in to a form more readily usable, with extra detail present elsewhere for those that want it. 

I’m regerting this. I’m going to study it much much more. 

This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is thirty pages. You get to see the battle remains location, which is one of the more … complex portions of the adventure, in terms of layout, presentation, and detail. It’s wonderful, I think you’ll agree. But also it’s A LOT, and could be presented much much better. The rooms are laid out much better and thus the battle scene is not the best representation of the core of the adventure but does, perhaps, serve to illustrate the difficulties in grokking whats going on to run it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/407992/DemonBone-Sarcophagus?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 25 Comments

The Sun King’s Palace

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Battle
Self Published
OSR
Level ? - 7, maybe? High, that's for sure.

A crumbling tower hides on the Sunbroke Sea. The last relic of the second sun in our world. Sail out on the full moon and reflect its light with a golden mirror. Follow the trail to its end and enter the Sun King’s Palace.

This 192 page digest adventure contains … the Sun Kings palace with about ninety four rooms. Talking, stabbing, and fetch quests abound in this ethereal-like location. Perfect for those of you looking to replace any darker tinted maze adventures. It is, I think, the longer ArtPunk adventure that has been missing.

Well, that intro certainly describes the entrance to the mythic underworld, doesn’t it? And that’s what we’ve got here: a mythic locale. This successfully brings that vibe of etherealness, of unrealness and slight detachment that gives something an otherworldly quality. That, and the mad, aloof, and detached NPC’s. Not since Blue Medusa has there been something like this.

So, we’ve got these biomechanical giant thingies. Think of the greek titans. The Sun and the Moon build a palace. They ignore eclipse (who doesn’t really appear in this adventure) who gets pissy and sets The Abyss on the place. The palace sinks in to darkness, there’s a coup inside, people go mad, blah blah blah. You can bring the place back though and rise it from the abyss. Get it? Eclipse. Sink in to darkness. Rise again. Sure. But it’s well done and really just a pretext. You travel through the place, through different zones (yeah!) and slowly accumulate “stain”, which causes you to mark shit off your character sheet. IE: you become like the palace folks; a one dimensional person, figuratively. You can remove stain. And/or remove it from people in the palace. In one room an angel has risen from the abyss, picking petals from a rose playing Love Me Not. “What make you guilty? Tell me your sins.” And no more stain. (And, let us not read too much in to my use of that example, in terms of pretension. It is, by far, the most pretentious of the things in th e adventure, and thus unfair that i use it without saying so. Also, it’s a fucking angel, what do you expect from it?)

It’s a single level map, with zones. At ninety-ish pages I’d not call it a megadungeon, but, perhaps it is by the typical five room extravaganzas that abound today. Layout of both the map and text is straightforward. Nothing really special on the map, but very serviceable. Book layout uses cross-references for monster stats with creature bolding and a little “what you see” when looking through doorways in to the next room. Not the best for creature reactions, but nicely done for a place with a lot of open doors in it. 

But, let’s talk encounters. And, more specifically, encounter descriptions, something this adventure does fairly well. I’ve written quite a bit that the encounter text should be on the terse side, for scanning purposes, and yet be evocative and interesting. Here’s that angel room: “Circular and made of star-speckled obsidian, floored with dancing daisies. A stone well in the center leads out into the Abyss.” Two sentences. 21 words. The image comes to mind immediately. And note the nons-standard word usage. FLOORED with DANCING daisies. That’s quite good. There’s another two sentences with the angel in it, picking petals, and covering the “looking for worship and allows those who do so to give up their stain. “What makes you guilty? Tell me your sins.” We’ve got a terse description that’s easy to scan with good usage of line breaks and bolding. We’ve got a great description that jab the room vibe in to your brain to expand upon. And we’ve got an encounter with something going on, something for the party to interact with. The writing is focusing on setting the scene and some interaction, not a static laundry list of room contents. The room right before this is Mothers Garden: “An open garden bleeding into the abyss. Graves of various sizes dot the field. Rusted weapons stabbed in the ground, and molding banners blooming with moon rot.” The garden BLEEDS in to the abyss. Rusted weapons STAB in to the ground. Banners are MOLDED and BLOOMING. AGonoize over your word choice and feel free to twist the language to your own needs and wants; it is yours to command to bring an evocative scene to light in the DMs mind.

The adventure does this over and over ad over again. Various areas of the dungeon, the zones get a little description up front, to help portray the vibe, the window dressing in which the various rooms take place. I could quibble; these deserve to be on the zone mini-maps so they are always in front of the DM. 

Magic items, and the creatures are unique. A spear that extends until it reaches something solid, sister of the unmovable rod … which are two parts of a great artifact. Of course; that makes perfect sense. This is much the opposite of the NoArtpunk contest (which, the second of which, is quite good; I’m only about halfway through looking at them and they are running to a very high quality. I encourage you to check them out!) 

And yet …

There are a couple of things wrong here, or, at least not good enough to make me overly excited about this. First, the encounters to tend to the combat or talking. There is an occasional fetch quest, much of it of the “get the red key to open the red door” variety. Interactivity, beyond the talk and combat pillars, is somewhat limited. As such the exploration environment is somewhat limited. In addition the situation within the palace is somewhat static and/or localized. The encounters in the various rooms feel somewhat disconnected to each other. You don’t get the coup vibe, or a dynamic vibe from the overall effect of the dungeon. It’s not of the self-contained set-piece variety, but, rather, that the encounters seem somewhat disinterested in their own fates, beyond the room proper. I wouldn’t want to be mistaken that this is too much of a statement, but rather the tendency is in that direction, by a great deal. Thus the overall effect of the palace is that the encounter in one room is not really connected to the one in the next, in terms of the overall dungeon.

This is not a terrible adventure. In fact, its fine, especially if you’re doing something like a Polaris/Though are but a warrior vibe. The melancholy of the palace comes through great. 

This is $10 at DriveThru.The preview is 21 pages and you get to see lots of the rooms, so, great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397508/The-Sun-Kings-Palace?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 5 Comments