tenfootpole.org

By Sean Morris
Galfinor Art
OSRIC
Level 1

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.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/382982/DI1–Castle-Agremoth-in-the-Wailing-Wood?1892600

By Noora Rose
Monkey's Paw Games
OSR
Level 1

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.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397490/A-Rocky-Road?1892600

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.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/401027/Delusions-of-Grandeur-OSE?1892600

By Lucian Correa
Antigona404
OSE
Levels 1-3

Once upon a time, long before the heyday of the plains folk and the inevitable fall of their empire, deep within the forest, there was a mythical creature that stood upon all the others. Some of the old and forgotten tales, only remembered by the eldest roots, refer to this creature as an implacable tyrant who ruled with an iron fist. There are songs that birds keep secret that speak about the benevolence of this colossal presence, who supposedly wandered through the forest transforming every inch of soil into blooming life. Truth is The Giant King didn’t seem to welcome the arrival of foreigners, and soon enough, a war happened.

This 32 page island has about six locations, each with about six places at them. It’s myconid heavy, and a little weird without being gonzo, with a fairytale lean. It’s ok, with strong strong anchoring elements in most locations, but a little abstracted for my tastes. You gonna Wing It a lot … in a hex crawl kind of way.

The core of this is an island, surrounded by fog. Once on you can’t get off. Somewhere, on the island, is the body of a mythic giant, dead a long time. His rotting body has caused a lot of myconids to pop up, with their goofy society. The island has six pretty iconic location. A town built from wrecked ships, a wizards house, a ship cemetery, ancient ruins, the cave that has the giants heart (and a cult) and a fairy wood with essentially an ent. These each get a little three sentence summary that is pretty good. “The only town on the island, built from whatever finds its way on the shore.” or “A cursed seashore where Fog Spirits mourn their past lives, wander- ing the wreckage of their stranded ships. The vessels come from different places and times,”  Not bad fo a kind of foundational framing of the various locations. 

Each location then gets its own little section of a couple of pages, enough for around six places at each, give or take. And, each of these generally has a little detail that you hang your hat on. In the meeting house in town we get “Clathrus the Shaman lives on the second floor, surrounded by old roots that contain the history of his people …” Sure, old roots and a shaman. Or, in the tavern, a weird foods table “two stone floating on wine.” or a gray mushroom covered in moss. (It is, after all, mostly mushroom people in town.) 

It’s the iconic locations, a ship graveyard, the myconids, the town of leftover parts, that give it the kind of fairytale bend. And then there’s the wizard. On an island full of mushroom people and faeries there lived an wizard. An evil wizard. In his own hut. Doing his experiments. Feared by all. Who wants to live forever. Yup, hitting all of the checkboxes, in a good way! Likewise the magic items are a little unusual, well described in a terse but evocative manner, and come with limited charges, usually, and some mythic way to recharge them that is both unusual and not impossible. 

The only real downside/problem is the wanderers table. A little short, at six entries, and mostly a “they attack” theme. Wandering around the island will get you repeats and the encounters themselves are boring. This could be beefed up. A lot. For any setting which you are traveling you’re gonna need some wanderer variety. And, hopefully, more than just “they run at you and attack”, which, while not entirely true here, is the energy the encounters are putting out. Oh, also, the level range is not in the product description or on the cover. Don’t be a tool. Put the level range somewhere obvious.

But, the main differentiator in wanting this, I think, is going to be your feelings about hex crawls. Do you like a hex crawl? To be clear, this ISNT a hex crawl, but the level or description for the various locations, both the major ones, like the town, and the minor ones like the sixish places in town, are at a hex crawl level, with hex crawl energy. 

A little open ended in a way that is unusual for an adventure but de rigueur for a hex crawl. Let’s look at an example, the gate of the wizards house:

The Gates
A wall of sharpened branches blocks the road to the house. A living vine entangled in the gate asks for proof of the wizard’s presence to enter. It can be easily destroyed or burned, although that alerts Uprix in his quarters.
• Following the wall into the woods leads to a tunnel into the fields, dug by starving Moss Beasts

Maybe not the best of examples, since gate is pretty sparse place. Hmmm, lets just use that as an example of the descriptive syle/format, which is generally good and at least a little evocative. Ok, how about a wrecked pirate ship, The Bloody Heart: “An old caravel trapped in the seashore since a long time ago. There is a rope ladder that goes up to the deck, and a hole full of eels in the hull that leads to the Captain Quarters.” and then a couple of bullets about some fog spirits guarding the deck that don’t know they are dead and a half-closed rusty door to the captains cabin. 

It’s all got a very … abstracted kind of vibe. But not in a generic way. There’s always something there to inspire, much in the way a hex crawl description (a good one anyway) should have. Kind of a Heres a very general description of something and something weird to kind of base riffing this encounter off of, but, also, nothing overly specific about the place or whats going on. And that’s totally a hex crawl description. 

And I’m a little put off by it. It’s not what I was expecting. It’s not what I want in an adventure like this, one that contains some specific rooms? Sure, for something like a tavern, or the stores in town, I can get behind this. And for a kind of summary of location “this is what the caves are like” then, also, I can get behind it. But, when it comes to “the first floor of the house” or “The pirate ship” then I get a little … perturbed. I’m expecting a location based thing and instead of a cave encounter I’m getting a more abstracted cave thing. I’m not sure I’m in the mood? 

I feel shitty about this? Usually I’m ok with slamming an adventure. Hey, you write a bad thing. But this isn’t exactly a bad adventure. Except maybe for the wanderers, it’s not bad, when seen through the light of one of a “hex Crawl Adventure But Not a Hex Crawl” framing. There MUST be room in the taxonomy for something like this. It’s not your typical location based adventure and not a hex crawl and not a setting.  A small region, maybe, with adventure sites? It’s enough of an adventure for me to be ok calling it An Adventure, but energy is hex crawl. And that has to be ok, as a specific type of product. It’s just that type of product is rarely seen and thus can come as a surprise if you are blind buying this. But, as long as you know that and are ok, then, absolutely, Have At Thee!

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is broken. I can haz sadz 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/394756/Fogheart-The-Torso-of-The-Giant-King–Old-School-Essentials-version?1892600