By Simone Zambruno Classic Dungeon Adventures OSE? No. Levels 0-1
The History of Neraka Valley is a tetralogy of adventures revolving around a singular narrative. Each one weaves a fragment of the epic of an ancient temple nestled in a small, secluded mountain valley, from the present times to the days of yore.
This 25 page adventure uses about eight pages to describe thirteen rooms in a dungeon. Ponderous text and low interactivity. You know the drill by now, and are bored of it.
I see this web thing about a new place in town that advertises the best hamburger in Indiana. I drive there. There’s a giant sign that says “Best Burger in Indiana” It’s in a great building and the decor is wonderful. The staff are great. Drinks (vodka gimlet, of course) are dirt cheap with a generous pour. I order the burger, medium, for $12.95. About a minute later they bring out a McDonalds hamburger, still in the wrapper. It’s cold. “Yeah, we been working on the decor and bar; didn’t have time to work on the burger.”
This adventure has a musical soundtrack to go along with it. For each room there’s a note on which track to play for the party. It’s also got this super fun presentation where the pages are all black and a white font is used. A fancy one at that. And, of course, all of those background pages and notes for the DM and appendices and pregens and such. Those make up at least, what, two thirds of the text here? I suppose folks are excited about things other than the main text. Or, if they are me, they are sick of looking at the main text. But the main text IS the most important part of the adventure. The main thing is the main thing. That’s what the vast majority of your time should bespent on, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Yeah, I’d like an easy to use format. But the fucking formatting isn’t the adventure. The text of the room keys. The interactivity of the encounters. I can, and will, sometimes tell people to go get a highlighter for this one, because it’s worth it. But I’m never going to say “oh boy! This is a super shitty/average adventure and the room keys suck, but look at that colour scheme used! Totally get it for that!” Dazzle in the page ong backstory of the dungeon that tells us there is an earthquake and worms tunneling collapsing things. Multiple times. This is not the main thing. You need to focus on the main thing.
There is read-aloud. It describes things in second person. This is never a good thing. “You descend the stone steps.” The read-aloud over-reveals. It destroys the back and forth between DM and player. The text, read-aloud and DM text is full of overwrought prose. “The luminous switch, if touched by a soul of benign alignment …” or “… survived the ravages of time. Mayhaps they were crafted from special materials or magically treated.” You can also see an example of if/then writing in that. Background data: “This room, erstwhile intended as a waiting room or a modest study, now lies in disarray.” No shit it’s a fucking room. Thats what the fucking key says. And we don’t care what it was, I care about whats going on now. “Along the right wall you may discern a sizeable circular aperture.” “They appear frightfully ravenous.” This is not how one writes. We write to convey a vibe to the DM, who can convey it to the players and riff off of it. We don’t use this kind of overwrought text.
Interactivity is stabbing things. There’s a room where you can fall in a pit “Escaping is easy if you have a rope.” But, but, what if I have a ladder instead? Is it still easy? Anything else to be pedantic about? Anyway, stabbing, a pit trap, a room that heals you.
It’s a generic/universal adventure in spite of it being labeled as OSE.
This is $1.00 at DriveThru. There’s no fucking preview.
Three Rat Chiefs rule over a tribe of rat-like humanoids, harnessing the power of chili for their own depraved and corrupt ends. Treasure awaits the intrepid explorer, or a death choking on capsaicin, clobbered by a rat wrestler, or incinerated by a lich.
This 56 page adventure (not 52 as the cover suggests) uses 21 pages to describe eighteen rooms in some caves full of rat men. It’s got a hint of good descriptions, in places, but is an overly verbose tangle that has little more than stabbing things in it.
Just is a site based location, with no hooks. Well, there are hooks, just a “if you need one then maybe they stole a cow” kind of thing. But, otherwise, there’s none of that overblown hook shit found in other adventures … even though there’s a section called hooks. And I’m A-Ok with this. Sites don’t really need hooks. There’s a hole in the ground. Get going. I would not, however, that the hook section is two paragraphs long. Even though there’s essentially nothing there other than “maybe they stole a cow.” This, my ignoble readers, is what we call a sign of things to come.
Let’s look at the description for room one: “If the PCs manage to make their way down the mine shaft, they’re met with a grim visage:” The sentence continues with “the mangled, ancient remains of two apparent miners, a broken pick next to one, a strange helmet next to the other.” Let’s be clear: I hate absolutely the fuck everything about this description. Both clauses of it. In fact, I don’t think I could write a more textbook description, if I were going to give examples of what makes a description bad. IF the PC’s manage to … Great start, with an IF clause. And, of course, they really MUST make their way down the mine shaft in order to enter the dungeon (at least, this entrance.) That’s all just an if/then pad. And then there’s that grim visage shit. It’s not aimed at the party, so it must be aimed at the DM. But it’s overly … meta? For the DM. If it’s read aloud then we describe a scene in which the players think “man, that’s a grim visage!” If it’s for the DM then we cement that imagery in their head in a way that facilitates them communicating it to the players so that they think “man, that’s a grim visage!” But in no circumstances do we do this meta thing. So, the first two lines of the five line description ( in the layout) are meaningless. The rest of the description is, well, boring. If it were read-aloud (And its clear, I think, its not meant to be) then it would over-reveal. But it’s just boring. And it has that word apparent in it? I LOATHE the use of appears to be. Seems to be. It does nothing for the text at all. I want a description that really brings the scene to life, and that’s not it.
And that happens over and over and over again in the adventure. The descriptions are both padded out with this meta shit and then the ACTUAL description ends up being more than a little boring. There’s no sense of rat man tunnels, or caves, at all. And while there is a chili garden, and they boil chilis in one room, the whole chili theme isn’t really present at all either. It just a fucking boring ass cave with a chili garden and a cauldron in one room.
There are, though, some high points. They are exits from the rooms. I hate room exits, in a description. I LOATHE them. For that first room they take up about half the page while teh actual fucking description and shit, for the room and things, takes up, I don’t know, a quarter of the page? Perfect, the fucking exits get more description than the room does. But, also … it’s using the OSE style. Which, I know, gets some people worked up., But it’s used here perfectly. (crudly dug, a smell of ammonia and wet fur) That’s EXACTLY what you want to communicate to the party. That’s exactly the sort of thing I want in a room, in fact. That’s the vibe. Or, (spicy armor, cow tracks, crudely dug) or (rotten stench.) The first one, crudely dug dirt tunnel with that stench of ammonia and wet fur … that’s REALLY good. It makes you imagine and feel something. And that’s what every description should do. Monster, treasure, room. “This potato-shaped chamber is blessed with a natural crack in the roof, leading outside;” Blessed with a natural crack in the roof. Fuck that shit.
The actual encounters in the caves are pretty boring. It’s mostly fighting rats. A lich rat. The rat chief. The farmer rat. The alchemist rat. The potion rat. You bored yet? I am. There’s a library in one room. No book value listed as treasure (maybe that’s an into the odd thing?) But there’s a whole lot of No Treasure. And not a whole lot of things to do here other than just go in to a room and stab someone. There are some throw away lines about talking to the rats. “Bob likes books.” but I don’t see how that comes up when he is threatening to stab you.
The idea here is not realized. The interactivity is poor. The descriptions show a lack of understanding of the descriptive purpose. Meh.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $1. The preview is a worthless six pages, but you do get it for free, I guess, since it’s PWYW.
To kill a Unicorn is a tragedy. To murder one and construct a weapon from it’s remains is a sin against the world.
This eight page adventure presents a single NPC. I guess I should have known better.
Someone I know was getting her oil changed. They told her that she needed to get her air filter and cabin filter changed once a year. $80. She doesn’t know. Every oil change place is a rip off. Every chain auto place is a rip off. You get your oil changed and NOTHING more and hope that they actually do it and don’t fuck it up while ripping you off. The dealer is the same but they are better at lying and charge 5 times more.
Don’t you wish you could trust someone? If you buy something you could feel like you didn’t need to worry about getting screwed over? Puffery abounds. More than puffery? Adventure levels one through five! Yeah, but it was written for fives and the one experience is totally different, not expanded upon by the designer, and left as an exercise for the reader. Sandboxes that defy the expectations of a sandbox. And not in a good way. It doesn’t matter what the product description says. Do you research, endlessly, for a $2 product? Why not just buy it? You can afford it, right? Damn the cynicism that builds up from the continual line of garbage that flows obfuscates, beyond the category of outright lies. Is it an apple? What, Socrates, is an apple? The form? The function? “It is art if you say it is art.” … and an analogy to D&D adventures? At what point does incompetence become outright fraud? The marketing blurb on DriveThru? Ha!
Frank the NPC kills this unicorn and makes a spear out of its horn. He then goes around killing animals, I guess. You stumble upon his campsite outside of a city. He’s got a couple of followers “if the DM wants to make the combat harder.” That’s your adventure. Nothing more. Just you fight this dude at his campsite, which is not detailed. Does he have a personality? Yeah. Paranoid. So he picks a fight with the party if they are nice to him instead of immediately stabbing him. Cause fighting gotta happen, I guess. It’s a long NPC description and then a note that you can fight him at his campsite. Enjoy this adventure. Or NPC. Or whatever it is.
But, hey, not to worry. There are fifteen downloads for this eight page adventure, so you can have those eight pages arrayed any way you might imagine, as well as solo artwork pieces. Wonderful effort there.
This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Which means I can’t tell if it’s an NPC or an adventure. “But the description says there is an NPC!” And what does the description not say? And I’m supposed to start believing what the marketing says now? Everything is hopeless. Except … the existence of a good preview, which shows you everything you need to know before you buy. Which this doesn’t have.
You wake up in a bed on a bamboo platform on the back of a 300′ tall woolly mammoth. Pink sky and orange desert surround you. Elephant-shaped balloons drift lazily out of a hole in the mammoth’s back. Enter the Dream Shrine, master its challenges, escape with your life. Just hang on to your teeth…
This 24 page adventure details ten locations in a small portion of the demiplane of dreams. It’s relatable, weird, and could probably be tossed in to any game where “dreamland” makes sense. I’m as surprised as anyone else that a dream adventure is decent.
I’m not a big fan of dream adventures. There’s some kind of a “you can do anything!” nonsense that is generally combined with a “it was a dream!” lack of consequences. And, then, it’s usually some bullshit excuse to just visit a cloud castle or something like that. I don’t know how many dream adventures I’ve reviewed so far, but I AM pretty sure that almost every one of them sucked hard. But, against all of this trauma, I will put my faith in Brad Kerr, who is most definitely Not An Idiot.
This is stated for OSE but the setting and encounters could be, I think, appropriate for almost any RPG. You want to XFiles in to the land of dream? It’s chill. You could use this. Cthulhu now? Champions? No problem. If it at all makes sense to insert some knid of dream adventure then you can probably use this one. As that statement would imply, the environment here is more of a neutral groud than fantasy RPG< and, is built from the stuff of YOUR dreams, gentle reader. Our wanderer table has someone at desk taking a test who has not studied for it, or being naked and embarrassed in front of the party. There’s a clown here. It’s like the Wacky land from the old Loony Toons. And, one of the main antagonists is the Tooth Gobbler, who wants to steal your teeth. The settings, likewise, are generally those from dreams you’ve had. A home familiar to you, a crypt, a weirdly long liminal hallway. The appeal here, in the creatures and the locations, is that of things that are relatable to the players, as dreamers. I don’t know how long people been dreaming about loosing teeth, but I suspect it’s not a modern phenomenon. And it’s this pulling from the real world that makes this a pretty good universal supplement. Of course, that assumes you can accept and get past some of the anachronistic elements of a modern living room, and such. And I hope you can, because this pulling from the “real” world of dreams for ideas and encounters is so much more effective than any of those other dreamland adventures I’ve encountered.
Writing here, imagery and the like, is pretty good. “Tucked among endless rows of fog dappled firs” or “an exhausted middle-aged clown on a wooden stool nursing a cigarette.” Come on man, that’s great right there! How can you not imagine either of those for all their worth given those descriptions. They are the EXACT tropes for each of them. “Endlessly rolling hills; a modest house stands in harsh, late afternoon sunshine. A freestanding door looms in the yard.” Harsh later afternoon sun. There’s a man who can relate to trying to have a cigar on a south facing balcony at 4pm.
And the interactivity here is fine. There are some traditional encounters, or things that could be traditional encounters, but there can also be a puzzle aspect to some of them. A HUGE mouth on a wall, chomping teeth, a room visible beyond it … how do you get past it? Brad offers little in the way of advice, letting the party and DM work it out on their own. With, perhaps, a tid biit thrown in here or there. “If your house doesn’t have a basement then put in a tradorr under a rug. “ Short, giving you advice, without becoming mechanistic in its implementation. That’s what I’m looking for. “
There’s also some decent crossover here. “In the cardboard box: 100 tiny elephants minding their own business.” I can get in to some trouble with that! Or a jack in the box … that steals teeth! Or, giant legs in a rom, walking through it, getting their attention being a possible way to save your life, but, “ Imagine a beetle trying to announce its presence from the floor of a busy bus depot.” That’s perfect imagery! It brings home exactly the situation in question that the party is facing! And Brad has the ability to do this time and again. He’s put in a myriad of things to help the party navigate this land, if only they can figure out a clever use for them. And I’m not just talking 100 tony elephants
At the end is a lady, imprisoned, the demi-god of night wishes. She’ll give you some stat bumps! Oh, and, also, freeing her results ins some GREAT shit going on after the adventure is over. Like ,300 foot tall mammoth walking around the land accidentally stomping on shit. And beggars riding fine stallions. And the lawful gods getting REALLY pissed you freed her after they locked her up. Those are all REAL sweet consequences for your actions. A little window dressing, a little springboard. And an absolute indication that you’ve had an impact on the game world, ala Rients.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is thirteen pages and shows a handful of rooms, but it more than enough to get a hang for the descriptions and the interactivity, and the overall dreamland vibe.
Join us on this whirl wind epic journey, as the characters are swept up in a struggle between good and evil, law and chaos and right from wrong. Return to the glory days when you feared rolling the dice, and one misstep might be your last
This is a small double-cross and shipwreck adventure, padded out to 53 pages. Long read-aloud, overpowered opponents, and a simplistic adventure are not something I wanted to wake up to this morning.
This is from the designers home campaign, built over forty years. You can tell that they really love their home game. The artwork here is of serious adventurers doing serious things. The adventure has a section on the gods of the campaign world and an overview of it, all very serious. This is not my vibe. I’m more of a ruffians and reprobates kind of guy. I’m not sure what the market is for these “this is my campaign world” adventures; I’m usually looking for something that I can drop in easily to my existing game rather than use, whole cloth, as my new world, with a set of interconnected adventures. The inclusion of the background campaign world and, in particular, the gods, is quite peculiar since I don’t recall that information having little to do in the adventure.
So, the party is caravan guards and they arrive in a city at the end of their journey. They see a sign advertising for adventurers, which is a trap. They get captured, and then shipwrecked. Then they get captured again and dumped in to an underground temple. You escape the seven room dungeon and the adventure ends.
I am, perhaps, a little more forgiving of these railroad beginnings at the start of a campaign. You gotta kick the game world off somehow, yeah? But something about this one just rubs me wrong. The whole “the town has thirty buildings” and then captured in the bar well known for capturing people thing is just off. And then, of course, the food and wine is drugged in the bar. As is the incense in the air, in case you don’t eat anything. But, of course, the dude hiring has taken the antidote beforehand, so he’s not impacted. Also, there’s an illusion wall with a bunch of 7 though ten NPC”s behind it, ready to capture you. It’s just a little too much of a set up for me, and my hatred of gimping like this, where every possibility has been thought of. And then you wake up in the ship hold, the ship having already run around.
It is at this point that the party find themselves alone on the ship and need to get to shore. While in the water they will be attacked by a sea lion. A 6HD sea lion. Ouchies! Oh, wait, TWO 6hd sea lions. It does note those that they take their meal away after they kill someone. I guess one or two people are not playing D&D tonight?
Then you’re captured by an entire tribe of kobolds, many strong. You’re not escaping this, since you have to be chucked down The Maw and in to the dungeon below. It is at this point, finally, that you get to play D&D for a bit. Seven rooms. Full of, for the second review in a row, inscriptions on walls to give clues to people. “Don’t leave the room without making a sacrifice!” or else get hit by a 6d6 lightning bolt. And other ham handed interactivity like “ When the door the adventurers entered through closes, a mouth appears on the ceiling and says, “Remember the way out is always opposite the way in.”” Well that’s fun. This is the extent of the interactivity. Well, beyond being captured the multiple times in an adventure. That’s always the least fun thing. To have absolutely no agency over your character,
Read-aloud tends to the long side, sometimes approaching column length. The DM text is full of backstory and history. Explaining why and so on. Completely useless to the game at the table and obfuscating what you need to see to run the adventure. And then there are things like “You could fire a shot from the ballista at the longboat rowing away …” with a bunch of text following. I guess I get no text in case I fire off a magic missile? The picking and choosing and over-explaining things tha the DM should be relied upon. I fully expected to read something telling me how to roll to hit. Or, in one part of the ship “The furs are from two different animals that the adventurers do not recognize, but they seem exotic.” Great. Does the DM get told what they are? No. Value? No.
And then there’s a long fiction piece at the end.
I appreciate the history of ones game, and how it feels important. But a published adventure is different than a home game.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and shows you nothing of interest, except the first long read-aloud. It should have shown some encounters.
And to the undoomed living shall be revealed but a small portion of the horrid secrets the dead have hitherto so well guarded…and they shall quail… […] Now, ages later, Ordane has long lain in ruins. Recently discovered by explorers from the colonial duchy of New Herod, it has gained the attention of powerful interests. The PCs are tasked with exploring the ruins and eliminating any threats. Rumors of goblins and bugbears in the area as well as a palpable miasma – an apathetic pall within the grounds of Ordane itself – are nothing compared to the whispers that…something…lurks deep within the bowels of the undercity…
This thirty page adventure uses six pages to describe ten rooms in some ruins, half above ground and half below. It’s a Cthulhu cross-ver, with shoggoths and elder things. Because of that its a little more freaky than the usual fare, but, still, there’s nothing much here in the way of interesting encounters.
Ohs nos! The fort has been raided! Here’s a pittance for your level six through tens, please go stop the goblins/hobgoblins! The problem here, I think, should be obvious to anyone who actually plays OSR D&D. And the problem is almost certainly not relatable at all to those who do not run ongoing OSR games. This level range should have the party being pretty much badasses, or close to it. And they should have their own lands, or close to it. And whatever reward offered to them just isn’t going to cut it in terms of motivating them to do something. The pretext here is essentially out of touch with what the actual game vibe is. There are a couple of alternate hooks, class specific, that show some life to them. You owe a debt, from a failed theft, to the thieves guild. Or you got caught with a hooker and now need to prove your piety by ferreting out some heretic shit. I’m not the biggest fan of off-screen pressure on the party, but they at least have a little life to them.
You get a few above ground encounters in some ruins that consist of goblins, hobs and bugbears. There’s a vague “ancient techno” thing going on, with them having a flame gun, before you take an elevator down to the few linear encounters underground. This isn’t really gonzo though. You’ve got to think of the underground as more of a ancient eldritch empire, in to Cthulhu stuff, with a few vaguely techno items. Maybe more like something weird shit that an Elder THing might use. The final boss is a shoggoth, there’s an elder thing trapped, and nyarlathotep is wandering around as an extra. In spite of this, we’ve also got a horde of skeletons, a generic wraith and a some generic shadows running around, as well as a few golems.
While there is an artpiece that is quite evocative, of an elder thing on a throne, the vast majority of the adventure is quite generic in its descriptions. I’m disappointed in the generic shadows and generic wraith. I want some life here, a good description that brings the horror of the undead to life! And the shoggoth and eldritch creatures are not handled as much more than something to stab, though you could talk to the Elder Thing. This accompanies the rather generic and bland room descriptions that don’t really bring that kind of pseudo-cthulhu environment to life much at all.
The interactivity here is quite simplistic. It mostly consist of, beyond the stabbing and the few opportunities to talk, reading some words written on something and then “solving the riddle” so to speak. “Etched upon the backrest in Ordanian script is, ‘If thou seekest knowledge, first prove thyself worthy. ” Well, great.
And this is all conveyed through the usual WOTC template of long text paragraphs with just monster words bolded … and not even consistently at that. I fucking hate wading through these text blocks in order to run a room. Overly long and mechanistic, they hide the information you need to see to run the game. It’s not that there’s not a place for text blocks, but poorly written ones are just a pain to dig through.
And that’s all really too bad. The concept here could have been great, with the eldritch things in a ruined city. And there are little add ons to follow up on that are quite nice. In the wilderness “As well, a trio of lusty mermaids is known to sunbathe on the nearmost sandbars, crooning lasciviously to exceptionally attractive passersby (CHA 16+), who then must successfully …” That’s a nice mermaid, a classic. And you can find a dead ghost dude inside the ruins that can point you to another wilderness location with his body.
Those sorts of things are pretty decent. But they are not really put together in a cohesive way that makes sense and flows well. Just like the gobbos above and undead below, it’s seems also perfunctory. Their promise is lost by a combination of formatting, lack of evocative descriptions, and overall flow of the adventure. It seems like they are there just because, even though some of them have those little things to follow up on. And $120k in loot aint gonna go very far at some of the level ranges.
A rumor tells us “A covey of vane harpies has recently made their home in the ruins. Don’t tell nobody this, but…I seen ‘em, and well, I kind of like what I see. Is that crazy?” See, that’s some good shit right there! But the promise, the wonder, is not delivered on. Instead we get all of that extra padding, all of the extra text and appendices and background and so on. The effort should have gone in to the adventure, proper, instead.
This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is nineteen pages, enough to see every room, so, good preview.
Embark on a thrilling journey into a shadowy temple in an attempt to retrieve an ancient relic of a faith long forgotten! Explore the ruins, brave the shadows, overcome the challenges within, and discover more about the world, leading to your next adventure.
This nineteen page adventure has a small temple with four rooms in it. Four. Simplistic interactivity, Second person read-aloud. That over reveals. I can’t imagine this taking more than 20 minutes to play.
I was looking forward to a small little adventure. I got an even smaller adventure than I was expecting that looks like some conversion dreck.
Blah blah blah. Hired to go tomb raid an old temple for artifacts. Blah blah blah. Dm advice “We give plenty of opportunities for characters to shine and show off skills and abilities, but ultimately, the roll of the dice decide and help to tell the story” blah blah blah. I think everyone can see where this is going.
“You scramble up the hill and come to what does indeed seem to be a decrepit temple.” Yeah YOU read that right. And then the read aloud generally goes on to over reveal details of the room. YOU know why, right? Because the exploratory nature of an adventure doesn’t matter. What matters is ham handed appeals to interactivity. Stabbing. A riddle “A tooth!” puzzle where you say the answer out loud. Don’t step on the discolored floor tile traps. Exploring a room, the back and forth between players and DM, engaging in the act of discovery, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is getting to the monster, or the trap, or the puzzle. So you dump all of the information at the party to “get to the good parts.”
There’s four fucking rooms here. In nineteen pages there are four fucking rooms. Linear, of course. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine the appeal of something like this. Consumption of media for the sake of consumption? (Or, as a hypocrite, reviewing?)
Did you write something that could win an Ennie? I don’t give a fuck what you think of them, but, did you write something that could win an award? Well, why the fuck not? Because you HAD to put something out that quarter/month/week? You don’t need to do that. Write something that you are so proud of that you think you have a realistic shot at winning an award for it. It’s 2024. Everything ever written in the history of the world is now available to every person. Why the fuck am I selecting THIS adventure over something else? Because of something written 20 years ago, for Cthulhu, that I’ve converted? Because it SHOULD be better than that. Pour yourself in to it. Don’t just go about things, rote. Think about it. Agonize over it. Put the effort in at the right places, not just in wearing your fingers to nubs typing.
I’ve nothing to add here. Fight a couple of shadow monsters. Avoid the discolored tiles. Joy.
A far away villager tucked under a rarely traveled mountain pass, a storm, attack on the road, the player characters find themselves shivering in the night, waking up drenched in cold waters. The forests are dangerous at night, and the safest way out of here seems to be with a village of starving people.
This five page adventure has more soul than adventures ten times its length. Which is not to say its good, but it is absolutely going down that that road that you dream of generic/universal adventures taking, giving you the vibe of a thing rather than the mechanics of a thing. I’m a big fan of the descriptions, but the lack of a more concrete adventure is going to keep me from ever using this.
I’m kind of the opinion that generic/universal adventures should not exist. Anything that is published as generic/universal could be stated for a system. and then, presumably, converted to the system of your choice. Presumably you, the DM, know how to run “My Weirdo System” and can convert the adventure to it. I mean, you have to do it anyway, right, if the adventure was published as generic/universal? Yeah yeah, I know, I know. Some systems have a unique vibe to them and Thou Are But A Warrior isn’t going to work in 4e. But, generally, I think for most of the more mainstream adventure, a B/X adventure can be converted to just about anything that it makes sense to convert it to. But, then, there’s also this sense that, in a generic/universal adventure you are getting something written with a conversion in mind. It’s giving you the building blocks to really solidify the thing. We’re just dubbing/subtitling Godfather 2 in to another language. That shouldn’t really matter, a good adventure should do all of that anyway, but someone it FEELS like a generic/universal should do it better, and I think I subconsciously think that a generic/universal adventure IS going to do it better. It’s going to give me great descriptions and a plot and so on. Maybe because I don’t think it’s going to get tied down in some nonsense like “goblins are AC11 not AC 14!” or some crap like that.
And this thing is doing a great job with some of those elements. The monsters and NPCs really get a focus on how they act and appear rather than the mechanics fo what the stats they have. And I absolutely love it when the focus of an adventure is on the impact the NPCs, monsters and scenes have rather than the garbage mechanics associated with them. This ties in to this “imagine it first, and then stat it” attitude that I wish more designers had. Forget the bullshit tropes and what has come before in movies, tv, and literature. I want you to image something, visualize it working, and then present it to me.
The zombies in this are crawling bodies, weak, numerous, and intelligent. Best of all they screech in human voices when injured and killed. Given that these ARE the bodies of the villagers, and not just some kind of generic undead. It somehow humanizes them, and makes them so much more terrifying. That’s Gerty, crawling along the ground, pulling herself, talking to you, and screaming in her old voice. The horror of THAT bit of imagery! Or, the main monster, a murdered villager, transformed, body of bark head of a deer skull, a locket with her old portait in it on her chest. Appearing in a thick fog. ROts away villagers. by saying their names. Teleporting as a mist. Fuck yeah man! That’s a fucking monster. It is a part of the land, a part of the villager. It is tied to the thing, not just fucking pasted the fuck in.
There are a lot of great little bits to this. The villagers, starving, have turned the church doors and pews but left the alter and its holy book in alone, out of fear. Or that “Thomas Pruce organizes hunters to defend the village the villagers call him captain for it.” Or that the main baddie, the murdered Olivia Woodmill, the Leshy, will gather the bodies of the zombies the party has killed and return them to the graveyard to be reburied. That figure with the deer skull, walking through a fog in the woods, reburied with her hands, fellow elderly murder victims, newly rekilled by the party … that’s some good shit right there.
So the various elements of this are really great. But the adventure, proper, is almost nonexistent. You wake up at the bottom of the Million Dollar Highway, having crashed, and need to make your way to the village. A small boy scavenging your wrecked carriage and the bodies. Also, you go through the woods and presumably get attacked by the zombies. There’s nothing explicit here. Just that the party “wake up with him (the boy) searching through their stuff.” We then get four bullet points for The Monsters, that just describes how they act; all that crawling and human voice shit. But nothing that says or implies in any way you should make your way to the village or that the zombies attack you on the way or anything like that. Just “you wake up” and some zombie descriptions, but NOTHING to connect the two. Yeah, I guess it’s obvious what to do, but, our definition of an adventure here is something that supports the DM during play, and if you go too far down the “implicit” path then you’re not really supporting the DM during play.
And the adventure does this over and over again. The individual elements are great. But then the four scenes gives are almost non-existent. Like, two sentences each for three of the four scenes. Just really an idea of something that the DM could do. That’s not r4eally an adventure, yeah?
It’s so weird. Most adventures fall down on that specificity that is the soul of a description, but this adventure does a wonderful job with that. (Which, I think, I consider the hardest part of adventure writing.) But then everyone seems to get the plot part of an adventure dowwn … except this adventure. I really really like the vibe here. It’s horror thing is great. It’s appeal of a kind of realism or naturalism is great. But, then, there’s just a couple of sentences on what to actually do to tie it all together to actually have an adventure. Not cool.
(I could mention other shit. The gates to the village being the last thing described, when they should be the first. The cold water the party wakes up in not being emphasized, some references to “howard” that you can kind of follow, but just barely.)
What brought me in to this was the preview and seeing those monster descriptions right up front. So, fucking awesome from a “get Bryce to buy it” standpoint 🙂
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $3.21. Le Preview shows you the first three pages, which gives you a good idea of pluses, and some of the minuses.
The snakes in her hair lie languid in sleep. She needs their warmth for her children, you see. Swollen, ever-pregnant with memory, Metegorgos waddles about the dark, wet ruination of her ancient home. Long forgotten, she has not been allowed to forget. Again and again, she births wretched reminders of her tragic past. Untold ages has the cursed Queen suffered for the most cardinal of sins: she dared to make herself powerful and better the world around her. Such slights the awful gods do not forgive. Still, above all else she is a mother. Still yet does Metegorgos love her torturous children, and so too do they love her. And thus are they doubly dangerous.
This 32 page adventure has, I don’t know, five encounters? It’s got a great mythology and I though it was going to be be wonderful. It ended up being more vision than adventure, with too much, I don’t know, idea? And not enough execution.
We’ve got a kind of medusa myth here, really well done. Cursed by the gods and a kind of fertility thing going on, giving birth to monsters, living in darkness and filth. What’s the name of those little fertility statues that they find, the ancient ones? With wide hips and large saggy breasts? Whatever, that’s her form. Except she’s got a head full of snake hair. Having given birth to abominations, her first being a wyrm, sleeping curled around the outside entrance to her ruined tower. That publishers blurb does a decent job of converting her vibe. And it’s reinforced by the text in the adventure. You really get this kind of mythic cursed creature thing going on from the backstory. (See? I don’t totally ignore backstory.)I can’t emphasize enough the mythic nature that is laid down by it, for her, and her first son, the wyrm. And there are elements throughout that give it this air also, an amphora half filled with wine, with something in side of it, or a rotten gods wisdome tooth stuck in a different gods appendix, kept in a box under a bed, delicate and translucent obsidian. That’s all wonderful, yeah? It’s got that tragedy from myth mixed in with a heavy dose of the naturalistic, bringing it down in a realism, leveraging ancient cultural memories.
Too bad it’s fucked in every other way.
There are a lot of issues I have with it, but mainly it doesn’t have any room to breathe. All of that backstory and all of the shit embedded in this is just garbage filler because there’s no chance to get it out in the open. You’re just dumped in to a forest and then the lair. And a lair with only a couple of rooms in it. There’s no build up. There’s no foreshadowing. It’s just another place to go and stab something. At 32 pages I would have expected a little bit of a lead in, and little more room in the lair, perhaps, or region, to build things up. To get the party shitting their pants and expose some of that mythology to the players to help get them in the mood. But there’s none of that here. So you end up just stabbing a fertility medusa and a wyrm and a few other things. I don’t really get it at all.
You’re dumped in to a forest that takes either 30 minutes or an hour to explore to find her lair, depending on your rolls. Every five minutes, real time, you fight some sad zombies. (No turning! Curse of the divine and all that jazz.) Once you kill 30 or so, on a tracker, they are all gone and you can continue. There’s this whole thing about how she turns people to stone and then birth stillborn replicas of them, the sad zombies who love her and are repulsed by affirmations of false love. That’s a great little bit! Too bad it’s all just explaining the whys and hows of the thing and has no impact on the game otherwise, because there’s no room for it to expand. There’s no slow burn here and no thrill of discovery.
Then we get her wyrm baby thing wrapped around her house. (tower? Cave? It’s not clear to me.) Kill it and move on, and forget about all that jazz about its mothers love and suckling its teats and all that shit. Inside you’ve got a sun demon standing just inside the doorway. Then some shit demons and some gnome things, some hags, and the medusa. All linear. All with very little description of the rooms.
This thing is trying to communicate a vibe. But it comes off all all vision. I really can’t emphasize enough how disorganized this thing is. How nonsensical. There’s no map, of course. At one point were told there might be something in the rubble. That’s right after the first room. Is it part of the first room? Is it a second room? We get section headings like “Is that a stairway heading deeper within, halfway back and to the right?” With the descriptions “Totes.” Ok, sure, I get it. But this is what passes for design now?
I’m all for having a vision. I think you MUST have one, in fact. But then you have to bring that thing to life for the DM so they can bring it to life for the players. And this thing fails so utterly at that. The vision is expanded upon, but never brought down to earth. The text is confusing, the layout, the words. What am I reading? What relation does it have to everything else? I think the room descriptions, from what I can discern, are almost purple more than they are descriptions, but I’m not even sure purple is correct. Most of the time I’m not even sure you ARE reading a room description. And, recall, I LUV a room that uses vibes instead of descriptions. But this thing is so p in it’s own vision that it doesn’t really get anywhere.
This is a great myth here. But, ultimately, the encounters end up as just stabbing things, in various ways. There’s no exploration, no discovery, no mysteries to uncover. Enter room. Freaky monster. Kill it. Next room. The mythology, that clearly soooo much work went in to, is a failure because it doesn’t lead to anything in the game.
An actual ruinous palace would have been a better setting.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing. I’d read it, at least the start, to get a great idea of that mythology, and then move on with your life and riff it to something more gameable.
Charles Ferguson-Avery Self Published System Neutral? It's D&D Level ... 3?
“By the grace of Solis, all shall be welcome” “By the will of Solis, all shall be equal” “By the hand of Solis, all shall be safe” “And so the night shall not consume us Promises made and promises broken, words that spelled the death of an entire civilization. Abducted from the surface and trapped below, a world bent to the maniacal will of the Sun-King For half a millennia, this world remained sealed until now What slithers and lurks in the dark after such a time?
This 208 page adventure presents a dungeon in a dying underground city with about six levels and, oh, I don’t know, 200ish rooms? Not quite a megadungeon, but much more the five room crap fests that dominate D&D. It manages to capture the grandeur and decadence of a city just past it’s decline but not quite dead yet. It manages to fulfill, I think, the promise offered by B4/Lost City.
A lot of people really love Lost City, but it never really captured the lost city vibe for me. Bryce the heretic, I guess. Anyway, I think this adventure DOES capture that lost city vibe and is a better lost city than Lost City was … albeit with a longer page count. I like this one a lot. We’re not talking Thracia here, but, also, I’m gonna start by trashing it a bit. Know ye, though, that it’s getting The Best and I mention Thracia because sometimes it’s worth clawing through the flaws to get at what’s underneath.
We’ve got this civilization with a sun god and they all figure out that there’s going to be catastrophe so they make a city underground and move in. Well, the commoners who built the city get locked out and die screaming at the entrance gates, but, hey, Musk and Bezos get in. So we’ve got this upper class thing going on and then an undercity in the undercity, full of the laborers. I think there was a Star Trek:ToS about that? The inevitable happens, riots, revolts, etc, and one of the four religious cults goes nutso and gains power and everything is in decline now, 450 years later. Sun god sends you in to Egyptian territory, but instead I want you to go in to a Bioshock/Rapture vibe, with some Brazil (the movie) thrown in. Maybe not as “NYE tuxedo!” as Bioshock, but think of the decaying grandeur of Rapture mashed up with the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of Brazil. The place has gas lines. We’re not talking techno vibes here, just, the place has gas lines and that kind of towering socialist realism art from the commies.
I’m going to comment negatively in two specific areas. First is the lack of contextual specificity. We’ve got a 208 page adventure. Sixish levels of dungeon. A kings court, with a renegade king. Four religious cults. Various other groups. This place comes across as a place with a history that has influenced the way the people act today. Which is fucking fantastic! But, while we get kind of the grand scheme of things we’re also lacking the kind of local specificity to help us understand how the place works, on a day to day basis. How do the factions interact. Grand themes. We might draw some comparisons to how I usually reference vista overlooks and order-of-battle in adventures. We need some SPECIFIC context in how the place works. Something more specific than “Winter cult is the underclass.” What’s the impact here, in summary? Those summaries are generally missing. The grand scheme, yes, but not the specifics of what’s going on, summarized, so it can guide the DM during play in riffing on things. You can put this together, during prep of the book, but it means highlighting and note taking. And while I’m generally not cool with that, sometimes I think it’s worth it. And I think it’s worth it here.
There’s also a tonal imbalance in places, but I don’t think on purpose? The civilization upstairs rebuilt. It’s now a happy go lucky collectivist anarchy. Everyone is happy and productive member of society with non ill will towards anyone. They are all so very earnest. We’re not really pushing the collectivity anarchy shit, but, also, it seems unrealistic to me, especially in D&Dlandia. Even the hirelings are all so very earnest. Not the mudcore I usually run. But then you get to the underground city and things can get grim. The difference here is quite stark. Not quite harvesting kids to eat their organs in mud pits, but its certainly closer to grimdark than your usual adventure. I found this tonal imbalance striking. But, also, it doesn’t seem like its been done on purpose. I didn’t see the juxtaposition between the two really called out or emphasized in a way that would make me think it was meant to be a part of the game. This tonal imbalance is found in some other areas as well. There’s this dude that crawls through the pipes in the underground city, a kind of traveling merchant. Bang on the pipes and he pops out of a pipe or vent an hour later with a bag of shit to buy and sell. It’s presented in a cartoon-like manner. I was REALLY struggling with the adventure up to this point. I then, however, made the jump to Brazil and the first few rooms of the dungeon proper lent that Rapture vibe, with cultists wearing stylized masks and/or leather faces … eek! The dungeon clicked then, for me, but the village above … ? I can’t tell whats supposed to be going on there. Or, rather, nothing is going on there since everyone is so content. Poopy, I say sir! Poopy!
Otherwise, this thing is pretty decent. One of the things I think it does quite well is to capture that sense of ruined grandeur. This is that thing that the endless parade of dwarf city adventures fails to do. It does a great job of communicating impressions, while still giving enough specifics that it feels like a real description. A Vast Hall: “Dozens of patterned columns hold up a vast and partially collapsed vaulted ceiling. Noise echoes easily, and scurrying can be heard in the dark…” or “Creation Mosaic: Light catches a wall of glittering glass tiles. Covering the wall and stretching dozens of paces wide is a mosaic of beatific images of a sun-headed figure overseeing a city.” Glittering tiles. Vast hall. beatific figures. Scurrying. Very specific descriptive words that lend a vibe to the setting. And it does a great job of presenting these early on in the adventure, setting that tone, framing everything else, every other description, that the party is about to come across, putting it in the context of those first rooms that they laid down so well. It’s quite a good job. (And, I must say, it’s complemented wonderfully by the art. Great job of communicating a vibe and really delivering on the art complimenting the adventure text and helping the DM frame the text and bringing it to life. I’m looking, right now, at that Creation Mosaic art, but, the cultists and so on have these stylized masks and robes that really come across well also.) “A soot-caked hovel that billows smoke every hour of the day.” Well there you go! I can run with that!
And, thank fucking god (sun god?) tha the monsters get actual descriptions. Not all that ecology shit, but a description that you can use during a game. “A vaguely humanoid wall of sinuous muscle the size of a draft horse. Its face is a horrid mess of teeth and its arms nearly drag on the floor.” That’s a kind of hulk cultist. I’m not in love with it, but, also, it’s better than most descriptions, giving me shit I can actually use when the characters encounter it. I want a monster description, or an attack description, looping, howling, pouncing, etc. And this gets pretty close to that.
But, also, the adventure is more than evocative descriptions. And this adventure is a lot more than “enter room, kill dude, repeat.” The very first room is a ruined marketplace and we get some mole/weasel things stalking through the place. Not just a room with a monster in it, but a kind of confused chaotic market mess with stalls, and stalking things. That’s a decent encounter for a location like that. In another area we’ve got a kind of sculpture, a bronze one, resting upon a plinth, a lot of interconnected blocks. Geometric, abstracted almost. Except it’s a sculpture of the underground city, it’s levels and such. And, thus, the clever player can learn some things. Perfect! In another are we have “A fissure in the walls of a cell gives way to a tight passage filled with statues piled upon each other. They appear to be climbing over each other, their faces filled with fear and shock.” What’s that you say? The DM text tells us that “the cave cockatrices used it as an ambush point until it was filled with their petrified victims.” Ouchies! Noice! and, even better … “A room can be spotted through the passage, behind the pile of statues.” Fuck! Yeah! I. Can. See. You. Let’s do it man! Tantalus. Goals. These things drive D&D.
We’ve got a great little ghost mini-game also. Lots of bodies. Lots of ghosts. Loots the bodies and pissoff the ghosts. Bury bodies, etc and make them happy. Each ghost has an unhappy and happy effect, and will react that way if the party pushes the happy bar up high or the unhappy bar down low. Do they set off the leaking gas line or do they put out your flames while pointing to the broken line? But, also, looting bodies brings treasure, and it’s XP … and levels! It’s a great little mini-game to have going on while they fuck with everything else in the dungeon.
This is $20 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad designer! Bad!
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