A barge of Lizardfolk from a distant land has crashed upon the shores of a local river. The good natured Lizardfolk speak in a language so strange and foreign than many mistake their friendly diplomats for viscous raiders. They now guard their crash site while they lick their wounds.
This adventure is on a river barge, with three levels and nineteen rooms, full of good lizardmen. It’s formatted ok, I guess, but is essentially a non-adventure since everyone is good.
You know, I’m rethinking the review I gave of the Orchid adventure. That one was fun, at least, in parts. This is your usual “oh no! The monsters are really good guys!” adventure. Our enemy roster is a bunch of good lizaermen who dont speak common, but rather communicate in colors, and so get confused and get slaughtered by the party. The pother enemies are the usual beasties, like rats and crabs and the like. The wandering Locath ar goodies also, but the pirates and bandits are evil. Go figure. King Dipshit, the head lizardman, when you reach him in the last room, understands how they were misunderstood and forgives you for slaughtering every last one of his good aligned lizardman crew. Yousee, they were just here to share their treasure with the locals. Seriously.
It’s a fucking game, people. It’s ok to stab shit. At this point, I’m surprised, in a review, when the humanoids ARE evil. Sure, go ahead, do something different, make then eat babies or some shit. Yum! Delicious human babies! Oh, look, the princess is evil and dragon is good. *Yawn*
So, theres a grounded barge on the riverbank. There are lizardmen on it, with sacks of loot, and mumble mumble mumble, go get em tiger! If you try to esp their asses then all you get is flashes of color, since the adventure relies on the party thinking they are evil.
I don’t know, what else? They got some geckos, and alizing statue and a paint golem. Also they have a museum on board. I don’t know, because they do.
There is nothing going on ere. You go in a room, stab some good aligned lizardmen in a colossal mistake, and get some loot. Sometimes it’s a giant gecko you stab. Also, the wandering table is a d6, but the designer left the 1-6 off the text, by mistake I assume. Whoopsie.
I don’t really know what else to say. “The room has recently been cleaned and sited.” Ok.There’s an Art Supply room. I guess for the paint golem? Or to show they are refined creatures?
Does any of it really matter? I mean, just stab them and stake their loot. LG, LE, who cares. They got loot and the designer wants you to stab them, so go ahead them.
Today, the ennui is winning. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll take a chanc eon something that might be good.
By Cameron Shanton
Shanton Productions
OSE
Level 3?
Beneath the paved roads of Kargeviste, a great staircase bores deep into the endless labyrinthine caverns of the Underworld and punctures through the very roof of Hell. Miles above the burning eternal lakes of flame, there is an empty warren. Almost all find their end there on the damp stone bathed in pale blue fungal lights. A creature, 40 feet in length and covered with tumorous sores from which tendrils burst and flail, has earned a name amongst those who escape it: Lazhir. Mountains of treasure, taken as meaningless nothings by Lazhir who seeks the greater prize of flesh, are rumored to be somewhere within the monster’s lair. A local merchant has sent word that he seeks brave adventurers, so that they might slay the creature and secure a delivery that never arrived.
This twelve page adventure contains about seventeen rooms in a pointcrawl dungeon. It’s got some interesting encounters in it, suitably bizarre for an underworld, but suffers a great deal from the usage of a pointcrawl rather than a traditional dungeon map. An updated map would probably fix most of the problems and turn it in to something interesting, but the cognitive burden currently present isn’t something I wish to tangle with.
Fair Warning: this adventure uses the house OSE style. Some people (Yes, you!) do not find this style as impactful as I do. It should come as no surprise, or maybe it does, that I don’t really care what the style is. All I care about is that it can effectively convey information to the DM in a manner conducive to running the adventure. And, as with all styes, it depends a great deal on the designer and their ability to make their format do that.
The house OSE style uses bullet points and keywords and bolding. An initial description may be something like “Collapsing Causeway – Elevated Bridge (cut stone, crumbling pillars into darkness), Vault Door (torn asunder and tossed, boken 60’ wide entry). Damp (stagnant lingering humidity) Blue Light (dim, pulsating, radiating from fungal growth)” and then some bullet points, again with the first word bolded, to help follow up on the more pertinent and interactive portions of the room. It follows the less is more philosophy, letting the DMs mind wander and fill in the gaps, and I’m a big believer in that, either by this format or a more traditional one.
Interactivity is ok … within some constraints I’m going to point out later. We’ve got a Flesh Gate to deal with, and a bone golem living inside of it … nice use of that golem type given the mass of flesh it pulls itself out of. Made of piled, rotting flesh with digested faces, some connected, and reaching arms, skin falling from meat. Groovy! The bone golem works well here, just as the Beak monsters did in Gann. There are a number of hazards, like crumbling bridges and rivers to cross, as well as gas pockets and the ilk. And the creatures, even the undead, are not always immediately hostile. And, for a change of pace, I’m not upset with having the room exits in the descriptions since they tend to provide hints like “you can hear rushing water from the eastern hallway” sorts of things.
I am, however, notably disappointed with the map. To a degree that I seldom am in an adventure. I have railed against not having a map and using the room text to “Describe” the map. That’s fucking bad. Or rooms without numbers that the text tries to describe. BAD! In this case, though, I’m going to complain about the very format, the pointcrawl.
It sucks shit. Or, maybe better, said, it does NOT work with the OSE format … or at least the OSE format as implemented here. What we get for the map is a series of circles connected by lines. Black and white with no detail beyond that. And what this means is that the OSE house style, with evocative rather than factual descriptions, is used to try and describe the layout of a room. A room with a river in it, for example. Is it the river flowing out the other exits? Does the river bisect the room? How does crossing the river work … in terms of DO we need to cross it? And this happens over and over again int he adventure. Any but the most BASIC of rooms leaves you with trying to puzzle out how the fucking thing relates, spatially, to the other rooms on the map. It fucking sucks ass and, I think, is essentially related to not having a map at all. One of those adventure that doesn’t have one and just tries to describe the layout. But, in this case, it’s trying to do that with the keyword style. And it is the OPPOSITE of Clear and Easy to Understand. I’m sure that in the designers mind it all makes sense, but, I’m not the designer. I’m trying to figure out the layout and spatial orientation through a textual keyword format. And, as most of you know, I’m a fucking idiot.
So, are you will to tear throgh the map and keys and maybe make your own map, sketching things out, to a format in which you can understand at a glance? I’m not. And, on top of that, I would suggest, perhaps, that the keyword descriptions could be a bit more robust. They get a little long in a few places, with phrases, and the things selected to highlight don’t make the most evocative sense in terms of inspiring the dm, who translates to the description, who then feeds more to the players. A weakness of this style, I think, is that the keywords, playing such a key component, have to be fretted over a bit more, I think, than a normal textual description.
So, no joy from me on this one. IF the map were replaced by a decent one that made fucking sense then I might bump this up to at least a No Regerts level, if not higher. As is its an abstraction on top of an abstraction. Quick! Call the Pragmatic Squad! And the magic items are book. Bleach!
This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and shows you lots of the rooms, so a good preview thats you decide if you want to buy it or not. But, no fucking level range anywhere, in the blurb, cover, etc. Not cool dude!
A washed out temple resurfaces baring secrets of the Deep. The promise of knowledge and treasure is tempting, but perhaps it is better to let some things stay hidden…
This nine page adventure features a simple six room dungeon in an once under the sea temple. Theming is generally light, the dungeon small, and encounters sparse. While not odious, it doesn’t present something very worthwhile either, for more interesting play.
It’s been a long day, living in Reseda, after a short night. Multiple trips to the impound lot, BMV, and lots of pets to take care of, all for others. So, we’re gonna do something light seeing it’s not 7am but rather 10pm.
We’ve got a temple, once under water and now surfaced again. The general overview text presents us with “Its decorative columns are tangled with seaweed and the roof is a mess of barnacles and fish detritus. Carved above the open entryway in the common tongue is the word: Septulus. The walls surrounding the structure are carved with graffiti depicting headless men, flying spheres of light, and humans consorting with demons.” Along with “the stink of mire and rotten fish.” So far so good, right? Other highlights of the writing include the ground littered with fish carcasses and mud, and broken bottles and rusted sconces and rotten squid carcass sprawled across a wine rack. Sprawled is a good word choice here. We’re painting a pretty good picture, in general.
This combines with a relatively decent format of bullet points, nested at times to provide additional information, in an order that is general ‘important things first.” Maybe a little overly generous with the white space, especially to get a six room dungeon to nine pages, but, her, better that than the alternatives, right?
Generally, though, you’re only getting one sentence for each room with any sort of evocative writing, the first, overview of the room sentence. After that the writing becomes a little more literal and fact based. This doesn’t have to be bad, but, in a dungeon with so few rooms and given the sparseness of the interactivity, it comes across as a less than stellar effort. Meaning, i think, that more effort in this area may have uplifted my final verdict of the adventure.
You get four zombies and one ghoulin this. That’s it. That’s your interactivity. Oh, I supposed uncorking a basin to get a magic potion can be thrown in also. Eh, and I guess a forcefield you have to find a way through, OSR style with freeform play. So what there is is decent.
But there’s not nearly enough here. Just as with this review, there is a sparseness to the place, both in descriptive text and in interactivity, that I’m having a very hard time with.
I find this to be the case with many smaller, lair dungeons. The small environment doesn’t really allow the adventure to breathe at all. As one tomb, among a valley of them, this might be ok. Combine that with a valley full of rovers or other hazards, to explore as you go, and perhaps some faction play then you might have a decent little play area.
But as a stand alone adventure I find myself not enjoying this much. I get it, one night of play, blah blah blah. But it feels shallow, and empty. As if there should be more. As if the play of the thing is unsatisfying. Could it be the opposite? Sure. But ultimately i think what consumers are looking for are things that help facilitate that satisfying play, and I just don’t see that from this.
Is it BAD? No. Not at all. Is it GOOD? No, I don’t think that’s true also. And in a world in which everything is available, from the beginning of the hobby, you have to ask yourself why choose this? Why.
The village of Exile is starving and desperate. Can your heroic characters save their village from ruin by braving the terrors of Castle Agremoth and plundering its riches?
This 28 page adventure features a ruined castle, with dungeon , with around thirty rooms. It’s your standard Gamme World intro adventure, but in fantasy form. Which is kind of charming, in a 5th grade kind of way?
So, what’s the Standard Gamma World level one adventure? You start as fuckwiths in your local dirt farm village and the village elders send you out in to the wide wide world to solve some problem as your Rite Of Passage. I don’t know when, where or how the Rite of Passage things became a thing, but it certainly is. The whole thing is a bit surreal. A bit like the Giver series of novels. A moron, gaining knowledge of the world. Which is weird, cause I kind of like the post-apoc genre. It’s one of my favs. But, man o man o man, the Rite of Passage adventure is a rough one.
Your village is starving. It starves every year. So, every year, before winter, the village edge sends a group of kiddos out to the ruins of the local death keep to collect some loot. You need to grab at least 1500gp worth of loot and bring it back. Then the village can sell it to get the supplies they need to make it through winter. Sending your kids to the death keep seems weird. Especially since the DM is encouraged to send them with just the most simple weapons and armor. Leather and hide armor. Look, man, I don’t want to criticize, but, maybe sending your kids off to die every winter with shitty gear isn’t the best sustainable model for the future? If your village is so wretched that you can’t make it then perhaps there are some structural things, from a societal standpoint, that could be done? I mean, also, if you don’t run out of kids then one day death keep will run out of loot? Or, someone will loot the entire keep and therefore remove it, ala overfishing, from the resource pool you can harvest?
Also, did I note that the villages name was Exile? Our village home is described as “The village consists of a mix of races and peoples of many backgrounds. It was founded several generations previous by a small group of people who were looking to start a new life, away from the politics and greed in the larger cities. It is a point of pride that they do not turn away anyone in need, and over time many wanderers seeking a peaceful life have found their way there. The village is run by an Elder, current Alfred the Crooked (on account of his bad leg) and a small Council chosen by the villagers.” Look, man, I’m pretty liberal, but, when the official political philosophy is that the old send the young out to die then maybe we can rethink a few of the base assumptions we’re making in our self-governance? Likewise the whole Prove Yourself to the Gods things. Have you heard about the new guy? Yeah, seems chill. Kind of like the old guy but doesn’t require us to sometimes kill our kids. I was thinking of checking him out this Sunday …
All righty! Let’s dig in to the adventure!
With a three paragraph read-aloud. *sigh*
We get a pretty decent castle grounds, with a few ruined buildings to dig through the rubble of, as well as an actual multi-level keep and some towers. And a great gaping pit in the grounds …. Rumors, from the table, say that “No one who has gone into the keep or the pit has returned to tell the tale.” Sound slike my kind of guy! There’s a kind of throw-back charm to this map. The completeness of the castle grounds being include, the towers, and so on, with a few extra features like the pit or rubble to dig through. This charm extends a bit to the monsters. The skeleton bros are in rusted and decrepit armor, armed with rusted axes, spears and short swords. But of course! Giant rats, spiders, snakes and beetles. And a Mounted skeleton on a skeletal warhorse. You get it right? Something out of 78 or 79. And this extends further to a monster summary page, with all of the stats on it that you probably need for everything you’ll encounter. Almost like an old Judges Guild adventure was used as inspiration.
DId I mention the woods? The castle lies in the woods. The Wailing Woods. “A perpetual fog
surrounds and fills the wood. Under the dense canopy, the fog dims the light, and makes it hard to see clearly” This is the way. The entrance to the mythic underworld.
Ok, so, I’m done being nice. The rest of this is for a ten year old.
The wanderers tell us, in a wolf encounter with 1d6+2 wolves, that “If the party is very unlucky, the encounter may attract the attention of a dire wolf, as a number have made their home in the Wood.” I think, perhaps, it is the designers job to help us do that, though? And the designer does not.
The read-aloud, ever present, reveals too much. Like “Inscribed into the table is a map of the area from when the castle was still in use.” This is not how we do read-aloud. Read-alou dis a teaser. It is meant to get the party going and invite further inquiry and investigation from them. To ask the DM questions. “Oh, I look at the table” “oh, what is carved in to it?” “oh, does it look like this castle?” Not telling us everything there is to know about a room.
A typical room is “Sitting Room. There is a writing desk, a chair and a table against the walls. The floor is entirely covered in mouldering fabrics. It appears to be a pile of sheets, clothing, and tapestries. A rat swarm and a giant rat will be unleashed from the piles of fabric if it is disturbed.” So, some padding there“it appears”, but generally just a sentence or two, sometimes over revealing. It’s all pretty straightforward. “Sitting Room. This is an empty room with two closed wooden doors. If the doors are opened, they will close on their own.” Nothing to see, move along, move along. It’s a long, slow burn. A crawl and investigation the like of which is seldom seen, with the usual book monsters.
It is, I think, both charming, in a throw-back kind of way, and also simultaneously uninteresting. It’s not exactly well done, for the year 2022. The descriptions are rather basic and while not overly padded, it doers tend to the minimalistic side of the description spectrum but a fair bit … the side of minimalism that is not A Good Thing(™.) You could, I think, turn back time and go look at a dozen or so products that do essentially the same thing as thing one, but do the descriptions better and perhaps set up a few larger things on the grounds/castle without is becoming a burden. So, not bad, just nothing to distinguish it.
This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. Only page six and seven show actual content, and none show encounters, so, not a very good preview.
The Rocky Road is a wind-swept taiga sixteen days north from the alkali scrublands of the southern Golden Empire of Enen and a fortnight west of the topless towers of the snow elfs. This is a vast, sprawling wilderness of rolling hills, of snow-capped peaks, of lush, verdant forests of larchwood and stately pine, and of cool, dark streams. This is not a land people travel willingly, and you are likely no exception; said to contain treasures mysterious and magical from before the Great Thaw, when the snow elfs ruled everything north of the Great Swamp, it has become a haunt of dwimmer and worse things. Few caravans travel this far north; those that do are rare and expensive to secure passage. To find the treasures of the Rocky Road, you must travel where the caravans do not.
This eighteen page adventure professes to be a hexcrawl but is actually just a series of, essentially, wandering monster tables. Evocative writing elevates what content that IS present, but it lacks anything beyond just being a place to travel through.
Something strikes me as WRONG about this thing, but, in thinking deeper about it, I’m not so sure. It has to do with the nature of a hex crawl. You traveling through hexes, perhaps with some purpose, and having adventures/encounters over and above the wanderers you meet along the way. But … what if we tweaked that formula a little? What if the hexes had no fixed encounters? What if EVERY hex was just was simply governed by randomness, the randomness generated by rolling on a table. DM rolls for wanderers, gets a 1, and rolls on a table. “Ok, this event/thing is taking place” and runs it. It is, essentially, a hex crawl with nothing in the hexes but with above average wandering monster encounters. Is that a hex crawl? It is the lack of fixed encounters that is bugging me here. Can it be an adventure if all there is contains a wandering monster table? What if it’s a GOOD wandering table? It seems WRONG to me. Like, I took one of those “1001 adventure hooks” books and included a map and said “Ok, this is a hex crawl.” Yeah …. Ok …. Sure. But, also, No?
Making things worse is the addition of landmarks on the map. The hex map has no scale … so I’m not even sure we can call it a map. There’s a great “West to the great swamp” and “east to the topless towers of the snow elfs” sort of compass on it. And, also, some other features. A cabin. Some ruins. Some megaliths. The megaliths span five hexes! But, wha scale? What adventure do they hold? Better hope the DM rolls a 1. I guess it’s just a source of inspiration for the DM to riff off of? And did I mention the DM is rolling every turn for wanderers/events?
But, also, the content is pretty good! On the job board (six entries offered) we get things like “Church of the Brass Sun: The Hierarch has commanded you to recover a fallen crusader’s body, so they might be offered properly to the pyre. Last seen investigating a barrow-downs.” Or “Thieves’ Guild: You have debts, and they have come to collect. Naught will spare your flesh from their hungry knives but an equal offering – a foreigner, hidden among the Hill-Folk, wanted for crimes greater than yours.”Great little things! The local hill folk are described as “Thick of neck, broad of shoulder; hard lands produce hard folk. They stink of elk-milk and campfire-smoke and wear their wealth in their ears and noses, on their beards and braids, about their ankles and wrists. There are no villages – it is unsafe to dwell in one place for long.” Rock on, I can run that! When the fey come to you in your dreams you get “white face, black eyes, fixed porcelain smile” Freaky deaky!
And then there are the wanderers. Twenty for each terrain type. “9. Smoke on the horizon. A solemn pyre, and hill-folk funerary hymns.” or “Cassocked pilgrims, roped together, intoning a prayer in deep baritones as they trudge. They look badly dehydrated, but will refuse all aid.” There are things to riff on here. But, all, without purpose. Even more so than the usual hex crawls.
It strikes me not as a hex crawl but rather just a wandering monster table of unusually large size. There’s nothing of a larger context really going on in the tables. There are no fixed sites. With a few fixed locations, nothing more than perhaps whats on the tables but tailored to a single site, along with perhaps some kind of over-arching met, then I can see this being an actual hex crawl. As is, though, it’s really just a wandering monster table. Too bad; the entries are good.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. The preview is six pages. You can see the job board and the caravan generator, which gives you an idea of the evocative nature, but the actual nature of the product is not revealed.
The Demon Tower of Valdig Fel is an ancient, much-storied flying citadel in the shape of a demon’s head. Since the death of its creator during the Wars of Succession following the Fall of Eldisor, it has passed through the hands of countless villains, who have used the flying tower to raid, pillage, and enslave the peoples of the Ivory Plains and beyond. Terrible tales of wizards, demons, and dragons follow in its wake. And now it has drifted into a tree-lined ridge near Wulf’s Ferry… right in your own backyard! What are the inhabitants up to? Are they here to raid or to trade? What of the rumors of centuries of treasure hidden within? Are you brave or foolish enough to find out?
This 24 page adventure features nineteen rooms inside a stone demon head fortress that can fly around all Zardoz style. Good vibe going on here, but linear, cramped, and the designer needs to learn to how to write not just with specificity but with intent.
Ok kiddos, so, a giant floating zardoz head has grounded itself in the hills nearby. “The adventure begins when a local rancher bursts into the common room of the inn at Wulf’s Ferry (Hex 3821), crying “The Demon Tower! The Demon Tower has landed over on the east ridge!” Of course, locals know full well what this could mean, as raiders from the Demon Tower have hit the region numerous times over the years. Everyone scrambles to go to defend their own. The player characters should of course have no idea what the fuss is all about, being strangers to the Isle.”
And that little hooky paragraph should be able to tell you almost everything you need to know about the adventure. It’s a good intro. Hanging out, a rancher rushes inn. A panic. “The east ridge” is how real people talk. Every runs out to defend their own. Right on man! You got the vibe down! And, also … it’s a little padded out. And this is very hard. Because the padding it more natural than the padding in a lot of adventures. A little more conversational. A little more in the way of creating a vibe, which I think is super critical in an adventure. But, also, hey, kind of pain to navigate. And that is this adventure. Repeat, over and over again, to varying degrees, and you got the adventure, the good and the bad.
There’s specificity here. “Ilse the Barmaid says, “My man is a Dodsspyd, he says that the Demon Tower has eaten more clans than the feuds put together!” Note the use of my man. Kurt-Dan of the Death-spears says …. That’s what we’re looking for in a rumor table. The nake, the brief blurb, the writing of the actual rumor. That’s an in-voice rumor!
And there’s a kind of weird wizard-logic in this thing. Detail that makes sense, in a weird way. Only the dead wizard who made the place can control it. So his apprentices grabbed his head, enchanted it, and stuffed his spirit back in it so they can control the flying demon head. Uh … Fuck yeah! That’s a wizard baby! Or, the create food and water spell of a tribe of cannibalistic cavemen … “actually summons forth a living human sacrifice that was made to Yog-Sothoth elsewhere in time and space.” Yessssssss! THAT is what is good! The adventure revels in detail after detail like that, which sets a vibe that is magnificent.
And then there’s the rest of what the adventure does.
It’s wordy. In a conversational style. I’m not going to bitch about its paragraph layout, but, I am about the choices made in implementing it. It focuses, quite a bit in some cases, on backstory and explanations and WHY something is, rather than the immediacy of what going on RIGHT NOW as the party enters. And it’s spread out, over multiple paragraphs, the details of the room. So you either highlight or read and digest the entire thing when the party enters … which takes time. Here in tenfootpole we believe in scanning for details to relate to the party, which means the text MUST be laid out to support a DM quickly relating information to the party.
For every description that is decent, like “He lairs in this room, in the far back alcove, in a nest made of the rotting corpses of his erstwhile companions, plus bones of victims from their raids and from the internecine war between the factions.” we also get a description, multiple paragraphs in, that starts with “the door to #11 is concealed behind a large tapestry made of human skin, painted to depict a vile necromantic rite” Ok, sure, great specificity. And, also, maybe that could have gone WAY up higher when we’re detailing what the room looks like? At one point we get a LENGTHY paragraph on the history of a wight, his hopes and dreams and a youngster and his rise to power, etc. Which, I must say, is appealing. But, also, useless for running the adventure. Specially in an inline fashion. Stick it in the fucking appendix if you feel you need to include it. Otherwise, the text should be focused on play at the table, and supporting that.
Sure, we could use maybe al little more in the order of battle, and reactions, and sights and lights coming from other rooms. But, also, cavemen who fail their morale roll believe they have failed yog-sohoth and throw themselves off the floating head, out of the mouth hole. Right on man!
So yeah. This is the swords and sorcery adventure you are looking for. Weird ass wizards, freaky wizard shit. Floating heads. Flesh-eating cavemen. Sign me up papi! But, also … it’s small. It’s linear. And you gotta fight the text to run it. And, man, the truth ofthe matter is that I don’t have to do that. I can go select any of a dozen other adventures and run that instead … and not fight the text in them. And it s the VERY rare text, indeed, that I would be willing to fight the text for. Interestingly, after reviewing the Tavern from Hell I had kind of mentally put Mishler in to a little box in my head where Starry Knight and a few others live. “Ok, so, maybe … but probably not …” This adventure clearly tells me I was wrong. If Mishler can trim the fat and put important things first then this might be a very series of adventures coming. On the plu side I think tha this, the thing that I harp on the most, is actually the easiest thing to improve. So, fingers crossed!
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. It does’t really show you any of the encounters, so, not a very good preview at all. The last page, though, goes in to details of the wizards head, and that does, I think, give you a good taste of the ability of Mishler to put something together that is interesting.
The party meets a weird young messenger boy who tells the party a team of weird foreign diplomats are heading into the recently conquered Orc lands and are offering a whopping 1000 Gold EACH to help rescue some Orphaned Children. Being that the evil Orcs were completely routed and slaughtered last week, this should be an easy adventure!
This sixteen page adventure features a seven room orc cave lair, full or orc kids. It is absurd in a way that only I could love. Seriously. A total fucking mess and absofuckinglutly wonderful!
Ok man, Eldrads got my number. This adventure is full of charming hand drawn maps and illustrations, as done by an eight year old. (Which is still better than I could do.) It’s an absolute disaster in terms of formatting. Just single column paragraphs of text with nothing else to break things up. A whole lot of “and then this happens …” goes on. Even the monster stats, inline, are nothing but a wall of numbers. And I don’t give a FLYING FUCK.
The conceit of the adventure is Orc Babies.
On our charming hand drawn map we have the humans lands, and then a line demarcating The Orc lands. Right nearby is an orphanage, just outside of The Blood Forest. Did I mention The Gore Fields just over the border in the orc lands? After all, the orcs were just comp[letely wiped out, so there must be gore fields, right? Whoever the fuck put tha orphanage there … man.
The actual orc lair is a kind of mini-Tucker. It’s full of orc kids, only. The door slams shut and is smeared with carrion crawler poison to paralyze. The kids throw jars of rot grubs at you if you fall in a pit. They have greased up a slope and wear spiked shoes so they can walk … and set their spears against you. They release an Owl Bear (!) at you. They jump in to hidden cubbies and throw jars of paralysis gas. And if they capture you they take you to a room and torture you to death over four rounds. So, yeah, a little absurdist. I love the “and then they torture the fuck out of you and kill you” bit. They are fucking evil. It’s going a little hard down the “too prepared” path for my tastes. Make them little shits in another way. Maybe keep the rot grubs though. 🙂 Shanking and biting out throats, maybe? Whatever. I get where dude is going. The fucking cave is shit. Formatted to shit, shitty descriptions and too prepared orc kids.
How Now Brown Cow? Why fore liketh this thing, Bryce? Cause of the absurdity of the premise. And while I loathe comedy in an adventure I LUV the absurd!
Normally, I want the world to be the straight man. The party is a group of fucking morons engaged in some power fantasy shit and the world around them reacts logically. This SHOULD be Paranoia: a straight world with the fucking morons adventureing in it. ZAP sucks ass. There is, however, room in my heart for the absurd in the world. The village where no one looks left. Or, perhaps better, The City of Ankh-Morpork. Something taken to its logical extreme.
What we got right here folks are some foreigh diplomats! They are paying 1000gp to EACH party member for a journey in to the orc lands to save the orphans! The orc orphans.
Three fops in outlandish dress. Our primary diplo states “Who will rescue the orchish children left from the imperialist invasion of their lands? Is it not dishonor to leave orchish children to die of starvation? We lovingly call them Orchids! Special flowers yes? After all, are they not people too?” Diplo two states “These lands of men are so ignorant! We know Orcs are intelligent humanoids with fashion, feelings and dreams! Your foolish leaders should have started a discourse to see if they had been harmed by your nation. Yet you sent armies forth to kill them. Did you not see if your simple, stupid and primitive farmers didn’t first draw first blood against a normally peaceful race? Orcs can be a good and peaceful people if just given a chance!”
Oh holy fuck, I am in LUUUUUUUVVVVVVVVVVV! The dress outrageously. They are insanely wealthy. They have servants, waxy skinned, that when killed “a 2ft giant green worm scuttles out of the skull and spine area screaming and disappears into the dirt.” That’s how you bring the fucking specificity! You KNOW how to run this shit. You KNOW how to push it!
And, the best part? They have a bag of 7000gp and have 1 HD each. BRING THE NOISE!
If they diplos manage to survive the adventurethey charge the characters for everything they did for them, the food, the parties, etc. “If the party refuses their pay, the surviving diplomats will bring them to court and sue them for 2000+ gold each person plus another 1000-6000 gp in emotional damage.” YESSSSSS!!!!! DId I mention the text that says, after a very special encounter with a raiding orc band: “If the party doesn’t kill the Diplomatic team, they continue down the road.” Uh huh uh huh. Da Da Da!
Yes folks, LE foppish diplomats. The best choice is to just murder them and take their loot and avoid the orc lair entirely. Murder hobo’ing at its finest!
This is a shit adventure. It is formatted like shit. But god, how I love those diplomats and their retainers! This could almost be a starter adventure for players transitioning from 5e to OSR. “This is how you play …”
This is $1 at DriveThru. Check out pages four through six of the preview! It doesn’t show the caves, so bad preview, orthe overland that is a FUCKING MESS, but the diplos, man, that’s FUCKING GOLD!
By Joseph R Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSR
Levels 6-7
I’m popping this one earlier in the queue, cause it deserves it!
This morning, the forces of Law and Chaos clashed at Castle Yennagor. The battle raged all day, but as darkness fell, a cataclysmic explosion destroyed most of the castle and leveled both armies. Now, as night claims the vale, flickers of life return. Survivors make camp, flee the field, or continue the fight. Scavengers creep over the dead. And one question remains unanswered: what happened inside the castle?
This 37 page adventure details the parties journey through 28 possible vignettes in the aftermath of a battle between law and chaos. A rollicking good time full of situations that are full of gameable content supporting by a useful format and great writing. This is the level 6 adventure you were looking for!
Ok, so, you know all of those adventures in a ruined castle that was the result of the forces of law and chaos fighting a climactic battle? Well, this is one of those. EXCEPT, this one is on the battlefield right out front and the castle JUST exploded (as they are want to do when Law & Chaos clash in a fantasy setting.) What this gives us is a kind of point-crawl around the battlefield, with the castle at the center, and lots and LOTS of bad shit going down all Deep Carbon Intro style. And I fucking LUV it!
This uses the Dungeon Age style, which I find quite effective. It’s triple column, and easy to read. We get a brief title for each “encounter”/vignette, like “Tattered Shipwreck” or “Weeping Women” and then a little section of descriptive text. A sentence or two that relates the general scene that could be read-aloud. After that we get bullets, with bolded keywords starting them, describing the major points and a few sentences elaborating, perhaps with some of those words bolded as well for more follow up information. A separate section details treasures. It’s an effective style which makes it easy to scan the text and pull out information, and is relatively dense, using the three column format, with about three “situations” per page, sometimes less with artwork. NPC’s and some monsters get a few words of disposition (alien, playful, hungry for flesh) or (critical, judgemental, impatient, hungry) to help the DM with their personalities during the encounter. This is the less is more philosophy, that I love so much, but with enough text that the DM is not fighting through an abstraction, as , I think, the OSE house style is sometimes criticized for.
Writing here is very good. Here’s the entry for Screaming Men. “Screams echo across the smooth, glistening mud. A huge well with slick vertical walls descends into the soft wet earth. At the bottom, a dozen people battle against a writhing mass of red tentacles and golden eyes. A dozen corpses lie trampled at their feet.” Note the use of adjectives and adverbs. Echo. Smooth, glistening. slick & vertical, wet earth, golden eyes. You really get quite the evocative scene description for so few words. It springs to life, framing the rest of the encounter in everyones head, DM and players alike, for the scene to come. This happens over and over again, with Lewis doing a fantastic job of painting these pictures in so few words. And then switching over to a little more direct writing, with less descriptive text, for the follow up information. You’ve already got it by that point.
And then there’s the encounters proper. Or, situations, I think, is a better term. In that above example we’ve got soldiers from both sides fighting that thing. Of course! The two forces, the common soldiers, working together against a common threat to ALL men! It’s a classic set up. And I do love me some classics when well done. Oh, and one group is mercenaries in the service of the chaos side and the other common soldiers of the law side. So the chaos dudes attack the law dudes when the horror dies. They’ve got a contract and reputation to uphold! And the horror is … well, a horror, with a great attack and his eyeball can serve as a magic item! Yeah! That’s all i want in life!
And this goes on, in encounter after encounters. Dudes getting impaled on stakes. Old women piling up corpses. Thieves looting bodies. Dudes fighting over a knife. There’s supporting material for travelling and a good wanderers table th tmakes sens, both of whic hare handled breezily and effectively. I’m down man!
And then there’s the castle. Where the paladin dude is rolling around on the floor fighting the chaos wizard dude, both struggling over the golden skull of a saint. And pleading for help, making promises. As does the skull … if you kill them both then he’ll make you a saint … with appropriate powers! An appropriate reward, I think! So much here is sooooo good. A necromancer constructing a body horror from the dead. A angel of battle come down to looky loo, as a golden ball of light. Slithering half-vampires crawling over the dead and dying sucking dead, while an aristo one looks on and offers to turn you in return for some services. Win friends. Make enemies.
AND PLAY EITHER SIDE! You can be in the service of law or chaos when the thing starts. There’s a roll to see where you start out on the battlefield, on the outskirts, to add some fun!
This entire fucking thing is BAD ASS and exactly what you want for an adventure like this. Level fucking six babbbbby! You’re a big boy, time to put on your big boy pants and figure the fuck out what you’re gonna do!
This is $4 at DriveThru. A fucking steal! The preview is twenty pages, more than enough to get a good look at the format and encounters and tell if you want to buy it.
By Adventure Bundles
Adventure Bundles
OSE
Level 1
There is a kobold clan living in an abandoned dwarven mine. They call themselves, Iga Shuvne, which loosely translates in common to The Big Ones in the Mines. The name is new. The kobold chieftain changed it after the discovery of a wand, as he thought it better describes what the clan now resembles. It was about a month ago, when a scouting group of kobolds exited the mines to patrol the surrounding cliffside and desert. There, on the ground, near a patch of dried bushes, they found a wand which allowed them to change their size. Although they have made themselves smaller while testing the wand, the actual interest was on the property that allowed them to enlarge themselves. They brought the item back to their chieftain, and since then, he boasts with confidence, pride and has even started declaring dangerous ideas about attacking the nearby villages of men.
This eighteen page adventure features a two level mostly linear dungeon with about sixteen rooms. It is the usual 5e take on kobolds, but in OSE. IE: dumb, comwardly, and with some silly traps. It lacks strong descriptive text and is pretty straightforward. The single exception is a Drowned Maiden, that shows potential, but suffers the same.
We’ve got some light hooks around behind hired because the kobolds are getting more uppity and hanging around and stealing things and such. Off you go the old dwarf mine (don’t humans and elves ever mine?) and journey three days up the mountain/desert with a few wanderers. A colorful little 5e-style map has two levels, mostly linear, with some water features in it. And kobolds.
Modern kobolds.
We wanna be dragons and we make traps like we’re tinker gnomes. I loathe tinker gnomes, and modern gnome culture. And modern kobolds. Your mileage may vary. But, they are weird rube goldberg trap heavy. Vats of molten honey. A wire from a fake gem to a dropping killer bee hive. (Save vs death.) A compressed elk bladder that contains a mixture of snake poisons. A charming little feature is the inclusion of Grimtooth style drawings for the trap; an appeal to the nostalgia of the olden days. As things go, I’m rather fond of bee hives, and even snake venom. The more rube goldberg nature of the traps is a bit of a let down, as is the somewhat heavy nature of the traps, in quantity. It approaches a schtick. I’m open to being called prejudicial here, for while I find them charming I also sigh more than a little bit. Anyway, a lot of traps to go with your “i wear dragon wings and a dragon mask” chief. And vats of molten honey to fall on you. And weak floorboards. And …
The text is a little on the nose for me. Mechanical minded and to the point without much charm to it, or evocative writing. I can’t say it’s BAD, but … the read-aloud is short and the text well formatted for quick play. There may be a thing or two out of order (if the trips is first then the tripwire should be first) Rooms with read-aloud do a decent job, but that’s not all of them The egg room, for example, is just DM text “There are 5 nests here, containing all current kobold eggs of the tribe. There are green, red and black eggs at the moment, and all contain little kobolds in the early stages of development. If the kobolds in Area 4a, Kobold Living Area have been alarmed, then some will be waiting here to defend the eggs.
Otherwise the chamber has no enemies” Like I said, devoid of life and a little too mechanical minded. Compare this to a room WITh read-aloud “The sound of waterfalls feeding the underground lake emanates around the cavern. A couple rock pla?orms with jagged edges protrude from the crystal clear water, while makeshift bridges made of ropen rope and planks extend to connect them.” That’s from room three, a particularly well done/formatted room. Maybe the read-aloud could be a little more active in it’s verb use, but it’s ok.
You’re gonna get traps and fighting. There is a shaman that might get you to go kill the chief, and vicey versey, but only if you don’t make omelets in the egg room. There IS the inclusion of a Drowned Maiden, which I take it is a 5e thing. I love the concept, it being a classic. The description, though, is “As soon as the party approaches or comes out of the water, a drowned maiden named Drowned Constance will emerge from the water. She has ventured too far away from her lair that connects to these underground rivers and is lost and hungry. She will ask the party to bring her an egg of the “scaly little ones” to feast upon so that she can return to her lair.” Not very evocative at all and a little boring and one dimensional, but, it’s not fighting. More thought, going in to this, could have really elevated it, and the design … which I think is pretty much the same with the entire adventure.
As a 5e adventure this is probably pretty standard, or even much above the usual quality levels. I can’t say though that it seems like a good OSE adventure. A little linear and prone to fighting. Maybe a better kobold cave than B2, but, also, maybe not. It’s needs a text uplift, and a rethink of of the overall design and situation within the cavern.
Oh, the delusion is tha the chief has a wind that makes him/kobolds bigger or smaller. It shows up on the chief, probably in the last room, and is not really handled at all. Not so great for the main gimmick/title gimmick.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThrue with a suggested price of $3. Le Preview is the entire thing. I suggest checking out room three on page seven of the preview. I think it does a good job of showing all of the good with the formatting/read-aloud as well as the more difficult parts of the design.
By Joseph Mohr
Old School Role Playing
OSRIC
Level 1
Lord Huet was once a powerful warrior who slayed dragons and explored dungeons with other adventurers. Recently news of his untimely demise has come to the village near his keep. Adventurers are gathering to explore this keep as the retainers of the lord have now run off with everything that they could carry. What treasures might still remain?
This 28 page single column adventure features three levels of a linear dungeon with about 33 rooms. It’s using the “populate yourself” mechanism from b1.
I am, I guess, a sucker. Most of you know this by now. But, man, Mohr knows how to suck me in with his marketing! I see the cover, I see the description, I buy the thing, and then I look at the designer. Rought Roh Raggy! Remarkable, though, in getting me to buy it! Dude has the Make It Appealing part down pat.
The rest, not so much.
The maps are three Dyson affairs, essentially small cramped linear things. Text is single column to pad the page count out. And, of course, it’s b1. Except it doesn’t DISCLOSE it’s B1 until you’re purchased the fucking thing. Ug! Had I know I wouldn’t have bought it. Of course, it also says MOHR on the DriveThru page and I was clearly able to ignore that, so, who knows.
The text is shitty. Recall one of my favorite room description examples from Dungeon Magazine? The trophy room that went to great length to describe it, only to end with “but that was long ago and it is all looted now?” Yeah? Remember that one?
“Entry Hall – Those who enter the keep must enter here or through the secret tunnel
leading to area 14 of the dungeon level. This area was once ornately decorated with
tapestries and golden candlesticks. Someone has run off with most of the valuables.
The heavy reinforced door has been left unlocked as the servants and retainers took off
with much of the treasures that remained here.”
Great, so, we’re told what the map shows. Then we’re told what the room once looked like. Then we’re told why the door is unlocked. Is there an actual description of this room? Of course not! Why bother with something like that?
Sometimes, I like to engage in a little game called Thing Explainer. When having a conversation with someone I like to take something they’ve said and define it for them. So, if they say “pants” in some conversation we are having, then I will say something like “Oh, the things you wear on your legs that have pockets that you can hold things in!” It works remarkably well to alleviate my boredom with the moron I am currently talking to. Let’s look at the Guard Post description: “Guard Post/Barracks – This area has several bunk beds. There are empty trunks at the
end of each bed on each side so that each guard could store their clothes and valuables” Mohr has done an excellent job playing the Bryce game. He’s defined what a footlocker is.
Linear map. Nonexistent room descriptions. A b1 clone, down to fountain rooms and hidden things in statues. And, i’m a sucker for marketing.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. Preview is six pages, but you only get to see one sentence of one room. Bad preview, not giving you an idea what to expect. But, I mean, great job in running a business. You don’t need to do anything like have a good product to sell things!
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.
