Wavebreaker Keep

Posted on May 9, 2022 by Bryce Lynch
Some unrelated internet image that comes up in a search of Wavebreaker Keep
Luke
Self Published
System Agnostic/Generic
Level ... 2?

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

The pillar of stone can be seen peeking up from the turbulent waves like the fin of a shark. According to the legends, this pillar should be none other than Wavebreaker Keep – a swimming tower made of stone crushing the hulls of every vessel unfortunate enough to crash upon it

This five page adventure features a sea tower with nine-ish rooms on six levels, with …. Lizardmen!. A mini-dungeon, it’s got some decent ideas but, also, it is what it is: Luke jotted down some ideas in a word doc. Luke’s never written a module before, and is afraid of being roasted too hard. In a stunning turn about and abrogation of responsibilities, I’m not going to. Mostly because I’m seeing The Vix today for green chilè hamburgers at a food truck instead of joining a work call that I. CANT. FUCKING. STAND. (and, said as much to the call runner just ten minutes ago, ranting for awhile. I was told to just check out of it and not pay attention. Well excuse the fuck me, if I’m not present on the call then why the fuck do I need to be present on the fucking call?)

Ok, so, good news first: Not an absolute disaster. What we’ve got here is an underwater tower with just the roof sticking out on top of the water. So, our first room description is “The top of the ancient stone tower rocks beneath you as the turbulent waters crash against it. Upon the crenulated tower top, you see a closed trap door made of wood caked in seaweed and soaked with water.” and i Kind of like the imagery of that. Just a low stone platform out at see, Crenelations, waves crashing up against it, maybe breaking over it. And then a kind of hatch on top leading to the inside … a kind of submarine!

The designer also does some other nice things. Lizardman reactions are briefly notes in each room … and I mean briefly. Like “One runs to get his buddies in room 3”. Which is kind of how I like my monster reactions, when they do react. And the baddie leader yells things during combat like “And lookie here, fresh morsels coming right to our table here. Dig in boysss!” Which is fun! Yes, it’s a lizardman who’s a captain and acts like a pirate, I guess? That’s disconcerting, and not in a good way. But, het, I like it when the things in the dungeon have personality. It’s a little abrupt here; that theming could have been present in more rooms and/or some foreshadowing or something. Right now its comes across as “you fight lizardmen, normal lizardmen, and then you fight this pirate captain lizardman yelling weird shit at you.” Juxtaposition … and not the pretentious kind found in art.

There’s another couple of nice elements. The entire tower is built ont he back of a leviathan, and if freed they might take you to shore and maybe give a boon at some point in the future. I find that fun; not enough Algernon’s being freed. And then if you deface the God of Seas temple room then “If any players attempt to deface or destroy the shrine, the God of the Depths angrily backlashes upon them conjuring the tower’s old inhabitants as shades to slay the players resulting in a deadly battle against six shades. It takes a moment for them to wink into existence, granting the players the first move. They chase the players so long as they remain inside of the tower.” So, not the best description but the concept is pretty rocking. Shades winking in, all shadowy Paths of the Dead style. 

But, also, this is a first effort and it shows. 

Italics read-aloud. “They hear you coming” in the read-aloud and other “you” statements. Overreveling room contents in read-aloud. We keep poorly maintained blood stained gear in the DM notes, only saying that there are weapons in the room, awaiting players to examine them to reveal that they are poorly maintained with red stains. And, it’s padded out with phrases like “In contrast to the rest of the tower …”. Plus, there’s a certain abstraction of content, the way we see in 4e/5e. Magic a Knowledge (Spellcasting) check to disable the magic circle! No. Absolutely the fuck not. You blow out candles. You fuck with the salt around the edge. You save the sacrifice. But you do not abstract this shit in to a die roll. The solving of the puzzle IS what D&D is. It IS what roleplaying is. 

Oh, hey, also, another room with lizardmen feasting on human bodies, this time with turkey leg/arm human body parts and a side of intestines! Grooooovy!

Good first effort Luke! Time to forget this one and crank out another one that’s better!

You can snag a copy at:

Wavestone-KeepDownload

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Waves of Sea’s Stone

Posted on May 7, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
Ben Gibson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 3-5

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

“Fear arrives on the waves as the terrifying tower, the Sea’s Stone, unleashes a tide of lizardmen upon the unsuspecting coasts.”

This four page adventures features nine rooms in a flour level ziggurat. It teleports in to the ocean in the morning and leaves again at sunset, with lizardman raiders coming out in between to abduct villagers. It’s got some great situations in it, real gems. It’s also got some lackluster evocative writing and just feels a little … short? For nine rooms.

The strength here is in the situations that the party is put in to. The kind of realized vignettes that they then get to work through. There’s a couple of “on the way to the tower” encounters that really highlight this. In one we get: “Punished Captive: Agonized and twisted moans echo through the mangroves. If investigated the moans come from a half-eaten young blacksmith left in the mud. His eyes, nose, one ear, lips, fingers, feet, and most of his large muscles have been eaten along with half his liver, it is a testament to his vast fortitude that he remains alive. If he senses anyone coming, he’ll beg for death through his mangled lipless mouth. If promised death or regenerative magic he’ll try to describe a raiding party’s composition. If healed somehow, he’ll seek to join to kill all the lizardmen.” This is great. It’s a fully realized little scene that the party finds themselves in. You can run this, for, I don’t know, twenty minutes? Just based on the text provided. This dude got a personality implied. There’s a kind of mythic quality to it as well. Another situation on the way to the tower has the party running in to a trapped lizardman, under a boulder, who can reward the party for their help, even though he doesn’t really speak common … with the allusions to all of the fiction and myth and folklore that that situation brings with it.

There are other instances as well, shorter. The enormous chief who considers himself tactful and will treat honorably if confronted … but also marking the most delicious character as a meal he must have. That’s fun! A little playing around with that, maybe some creep in to another adventure session or two … great times! And then there’s the fact that the tower teleporting is done by human sacrifice precisely at dusk … creating that most famous of race against time scenes from media. And then reappears … “ in a flash of golden light heralded with the sounds of ghostly sibilant chants at the precise moment of dawn the next day.” Yeah man! That’s the way this shit is supposed to work!

Otherwise, the adventure has some issues. Writing is a little weak in the evocative department. “Sleeping Nests: Formerly a stately statuary hall, now stinks of lizardman musk as the rubble of three of the four statues that were here has been rearranged into nests where the lizardmen sleep in piles.” 

And then, also, it could another edit pass. There’s indications to “roll for encounter” with no encounter table (although a decent mechanism for upping the frequency is included.) And, traps like a poison dart thing are a little confusing. Lizardmen duck, which I assume means a tripwire, I guess, but nothing is mentioned? I’m generally ok with some kind of implicit assumption, or leaving it blank and up to the DM, but in this case it’s kind of a half included case … which I’m not ok with.

So, a short four page single column word document adventure is a short four page single column word document adventure. It’s got some interesting concepts but needs a lot more work to turn it in to something more worthwhile.

(Which, I think, Ben said as such in his submission email)

You can snag a copy here:

Waves-of-the-Kept-StoneDownload
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The Wavestone Monolith

Posted on May 4, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 

Kelsey Dionne
The Arcane Library
Shadowdark RPG
Level 3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Fear the silence, the water, the dark stone itself! Deep within the sweltering jungle, a monolith of black basalt floats upon an undulating lake hidden in a cave. They say inhuman howls emanate from it on moonless nights… and that the fat gems and coins of a lost society lie inside for the taking!

This two page adventure features a nine room antediluvian step pyramid with a great chthonic vibe going on. Terse, obviously, and with evocative text, it does a great job bringing the weirdness vibe that Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun wanted to. It does feel a bit small and constrained at times, but, then again, the asshat who created the contest kind of dictated that. But, I can’t help thinking …

I think certain vibes are harder to evoke than others. I think I’ve talked in the past about how disappointed I am with cloud castles and undersea palaces, how they don’t really bring that kind of energy that you want from the location. Creating a kind of antediluvian atmosphere, a chthonic vibe, is hard also, I think. You want, I think, to channel the alien spaceship from Alien. Quiet, imposing, large, and weird. I’m often impressed by scenes of gore, a designed ability to create these kind of shock and horror from the gore of devoured villagers and the like, but creating evocative writing not related to that seems far more uncommon … an industry where evocative writing is already exceedingly rar. 

This one, though, is an exception. I think Kelsey does a great job of bringing the vibe she intends to. This starts with a statue. The pyramid sits inside a cave, in a grotto. To get in to it you need to go through a waterfall. Underwater, at the cave mouth, is the statue of a woman with raised arms, made of cracked malachite. A blank mask covers her face with wormy tendrils peeking around from behind it. This isn’t the greatest description ever, but, it does START the players don’t the path of the weirdness. It’s an introduction. From there we get a cave, vast, thick with stalactites, a translucent green lake with a black ziggurat rising from the lapping water. Not water. LAPPING water. Good imagery. It’s active, not just static. Broad steps ascend to an open archway at the top lined with smooth malachite swrwming with hundreds of trolibye fossils. We’re getting close to the good stuff! Out first “Real” room is “Wet. Echoing silence. Black stone walls with a few glossy, horse-sized ammonite fossils. Grey slugs in floor puddles that writhe away from light” Ok, man, we’re in the shit now! Wet. Echoing. Silence. Grey slugs in puddles. That’s fucking guuuuuud! Another room has muted sound, as it underwater, with light refracting oddly. Perfect! Faint sloshing in another. You get the sense of this ANCIENT place, and the tentacles and nautilus theming works really well to help communicate that in addition to the writing. 

Interactivity here is pretty good, for such a small size. We’ve got grates with water coming out of them, the waterfall proper, an underwater tunnel, communing with statues of gods (Fun fact: make a DC15 WIS save after or walk to the next room and attempt to drown yourself in the pool for 2d4 rounds. Because that’s hw the fuck communing with our antediluvian friends work, of course! I love it!) And, Kelsey slaps in a magic item that has both good and bad effects: among other things, you stop aging (of course!) but, also your skull turns in to a nautilus shape over 2d10 days. Doh! But, hey, you can commune with the nautiloid mother and speak primordial and breathe water! I’ll take it! Really great magic item; I love the way it can integrate in to a game and brings he bad with the good. 

A lot of other things are right also. Monsters are noted on the map and the trap description are terse. “Trap: Two trilobites are worn to a shine. Pushing them deactivates trap for 5 rounds. Pressure on fourth step down turns stairs into ramp. DC 15 DEX or slide into 20’ deep trapdoor pit at bottom (2d6).” Look, one line of mechanics! Yeah! Why people write multiple paragraphs on traps is beyond me. The final room also has a “normal’ D&D monster that makes perfect sense in this setting. I love it. Guess. What’s the best monster here, for a fucking boss fight? Ready? A fucking Mind Flayer! Errr, sorry, Brain Flayer. Perfect! Not the effete asshats of later editions of D&D, but an antediluvian horror! “Clax’uul meditates on malachite dais behind velvet curtain. Piles of perforated skulls. Blank mask covers face, purple skin taut over spiral-shaped cranium.”  

On the down side, it feels small. Or, rather, things are compact, the rooms close together. Because that was the contest, I guess. It just FEELS like more could have been done. Like, monster stats on a third page. But, also, mucho respect  for bringing this in at two pages. It’s a great adventure for that page count, especially considering one is mostly a map. 

I’d fucking lvoe to run this thing for a 5e game! (Yeah, this is for Shadowdark, a 5e-ish game that brings the OSR to 5e. I don’t know anything about it, sorry, but, given what I’m seeing here, and know about Kelsey’s other adventures, I suspect it does a good job. Someone should check it out and let us know if we can get the normies to play OSR by saying we’re doing Shadowdark.)

You can snag a copy here:

The-Wavestone-Monolith-1Download
Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 16 Comments

Heart Stone of the Wave Keep

Posted on May 2, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
Seven Bastard
Self Published
5e
Level 6

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Terror grips the coast. Tavern boil over with rumors of mysterious reptilian reavers raiding fishing villager and sinking merchant vessels. But these are no ordinary pirates, they op0erate out of a floating tower that appears out of the night and moves against the tides. This impossible story is make even more improbable as it is said the tower is topped with a great ghostly eye that rains down fire upon its foes.

This eight page adventure features a tower … full of raiding lizardmen! It’s got seven levels, walks around on giant War of the Worlds legs, is trying hard to be useful. It comes out a little confused, in the formatting, and, somehow, make me think that something is missing from it?. A stronger vibe, maybe? I’m left wanting more, or feeling empty .. it may be the formatting getting in the way. 

I can kind of see what is trying to go on here. The core of this adventure is the tower full of raiding lizardmen … this time in a tower that has mechanical legs and walks around in the ocean. (Kind of … it’s also a little broken and can blow up is OUT of the water for awhile. Cooling issues and all that …) There’s also a couple of pages in the rear about a slightly larger game world … a little mini-hex crawl with a few locations on it. A destroyed village, a tribe of humanoids and so on. Its a good way to use the extra spare pages the designer had (which is saying something, since they are already pushing the content in the tower proper. More on that later.) Anyway, we’ve got this extra content in the back and …

It’s linked in to the adventure … kind of. At times. I want to cover the humanoid tribe. A band of ogres. There’s a ruined ogre steading and also a makeshift camp a few miles away with the remains of the tribe, a hundred or so, but only about twenty adults. They got no chief or wie woman anymore, and most of the adults are dead. A parlay says they got raided about eight days by a giant stone creature with one eye that shot fireballs. Ouch! SUpporting this is a rumor from the local tavern “The north Gryphons claw is home to a tribe of Ogres called the Heart Eaters. They ain’t friendly, but they mostly stick to themselves. Uneasy truce with the locals. Still they killed Young Bill Blackbeard a few years back over a “poaching dispute” as he was taking furs from what they saw as there land.” I can quibble some with this but it FEELS right. A poaching dispute, traditional friction areas, and a named person. Along with “might not be outright hostile.” And then, in the tower, proper, an ogre held captive who can join the party. He could use a name, and a couple of words of personality, but, you can see how the different parts of the contant work together to form a more cohesive story without actually having to TELL that story. A rumor, that is actual tavern talk (though it could have been implemented better) and how that turns in to something more for the smart party.

The tower, proper, is a bit of a let down. It’s got some great support with a cross-section diagram and some notes on climbing different parts of it to get to the top … the part above the water. And how the great Sauron eye on top reacts to various subterfuges the party might employ. Then we get inside. The verticality of the tower is nice, with a unworking grav chute in the middle of it to get between levels. The map does get busy at times with all of the extra markings on it. It we imagine a kind of “battle map” mentality, then the creatures locations are noted on the map. This could either make it busy to grok or exactly what you want, depending on the degree of tactics in your game. I think it’s busy for what it’s trying to accomplish. Also, this is not my playstyle.

Evocative writing is adequate. It’s nothing special, but, also, I believe this is a EASL issue and I’m not going to blast someone for it. I think it gets the message across and is trying to keep up with the spirit of evocative writing even if it’s the best. “White symbols have been written in a neat pattern from floor to ceiling. Stacks of gold coins litter the floor.” or “Swirls of white paint and what looks like giant walking fish are drawn on the wall. Piles of different kinds of cloths tied into knots fill the floor of this room.” I think you can get the vibe the designer was going for, even if it doesn’t spring to mind the way I’d prefer. The knot thing, in particular, could be quite interesting. I note, though, that the designer seems to know what they need to do. For example, the monsters get descriptions! The reptile men get described as “These gray scaled humanoids stand between five and five and a half feet high with round heads, bulbous eyes, pointe ears and a mouth full of hundreds of sharp pointed teeth. Their hands and feet are roughly twice the size of a mans and multi ridged with extremely long fingers and toes.” That’s not a bad description and, the fact that the monsters get a description AT ALL is great!

This is mostly a raid adventure, so the interactivity is not going to be a lot more than that. The raid is, though, well supported. The climbing notes for the tower. How the Eye of Sauron reacts to weird clouds of fog and darkness in the ocean. (It shoots fucking fireballs at it! I appreciate it’s dedication to its ‘Look’ 🙂 and, especially, to the fractions notes in the tower. What they do if they suspect an incursion and what they do during an active incursion. I’m not sure that sound travelling/run to alert someone else is handled well, but, once that is taken care of the rest is well supported. Up to and including a guild navigator wrecking the place through overheating it on dry land if the party gets too close … and don’t pull him from his goo tank in time. Other interactivity includes rescuing people and fucking with the machinery of the place. And a big fight on a RoboRally floor, with conveyor belts, pistos, buzz saws, etc going off. 

I’ll note in passing that the “busy” nature of the map extends, I think, to the text. Underlines. Bolding. Words running around images, different colored text for alert levels. Offset boxes. I get what the designer was going for, and appreciate the attempt to bring clarity. I think, though, that it just didn’t out the way they wanted it to and instead sows a bit of confusion. It maybe have been better with out the smaller maps on each page since then the text would be normal justified instead of justified around the images. I don’t know for sure, though. 

So, Not terrible, and you can see what the designer was going for. As a raid, I like it more than most!

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is the whole thing. Yeah!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/392881/Heart-Stone-of-the-Wave-Keep?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 1 Comment

Truelife Gift

Posted on April 30, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
Christopher Lyons
Big Budgie Press
OSR 
Levels 3-4

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Beware the fruit of the Truelife Tree! A fearsome pleasure barge laden with terrible cargo floats and lists, its passengers numb to the wide world outside. Sinister magic permeates the ancient timbers and tiles, ensorcelling all would- be treasure-seekers and scavengers.

This six page adventure features four partial ship decks full of weirdos and loot. A little bit of a museum trip combined with a casual looting give rise to the question: what challenge, Horatio?

So you’ve got this giant ship. The top deck contains The Tree Of Life, with fruit that convey immortality … if you stay on the ship. The ship breaks in two, etc, and the back half, with the tree, winds up on a beach, side profile showing. On board are four levels, including the top deck with the tree. Various rooms contain treasure and some wacky NPC’s. 

My issues here are many and varied. 

First, the map. We’ve got four different little maps, one of each ship level, but with no real keying or notations on it. Various rooms are labeled, in the text but not on the map as “Rathgars Room” and “Study”, but that’s all you get. I am not amused. I don’t like the cognitive burned of looking at the  map, and the textual description of a room, and then trying to place it on the map. And, inevitably, making notes on the map to do what the designer should have done. 

The challenges faced by the party in this adventure include three electric eels. That’s it. Seriously. Ok, ok, no, I’m not being fair. I’m in a pissy mood this morning. There’s also a wandering monster table. That includes a crab swarm and some lizardmen raiders. 

Other than this, the main challenge is not getting caught. The barge has some wacky rich folk onboard, who are immortal, right out of the City of Rapture playbook. The notes say that they are 20-24 of them, with about four being named and having personalities like “wont anyone think of the children” and “that shirt is soo last season.” So, good, decent, short NPC descriptions then, at least for those four. The other 20-24 don’t show up again in any mention except in the Roleplaying the Passengers section. Basically, they don’t do shit except be annoying, unless the party harm the tree of life or try to steal shit, in which case they attack. Also, they are immortal and regen, the only way to stop them being throwing them off the boat in which case they turn in to dust. 

So, you wander around the boat, looting shit until you get caught and then chucking a body off the boat, I guess? Also, no real stats for the passengers.

The rooms themselves are decently described, just as the NPC’s are. A short little couple of sentences up top to orient, that could double as read-aloud, and then some bullets underneat with some bolding to help draw the DMs attention. They run a little longish, but, that’s mostly because each of the items in the room get a couple of sentences, in bullet form, and there are four or more things in a room to describe in more detail … usually some sort of trease. A treasure map, an old book, a chest, a person, etc. 

So, what’s the deal here?  I think I’m objecting to the NC heavy adventure without a heavy NPC focus, along with the unused page count. A column of additional NPC’s would have been nice, and then some more intrigue … granted that’s hard to do with the limited room count available. AT most, one of the NOC’s wants to perform in front of the other ship passengers and get applause. We need more along that line, a more involved situation, and some reason why everyone just doesn’t gak the party when they start stealing. 

I want to be supportive of this adventure, but, It’s just not hitting for me. Is it a loot? A social adventure? It’s not a crawl. It’ doesn’t seem to know really what it wants to be, and thus the text is having trouble concentrating on those elements.

You can snag a copy here:

https://bigbudgiepress.wordpress.com/2022/04/29/truelife-gift/

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 4 Comments

Coquina Keep of Clown-nihilation

Posted on April 27, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
Adam Hawkins
Self Published
B/X
Levels 3-5

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

The CKC is a magical coquina stone tower that floats along the sea coast on a wide barge occasionally making land fall. Sometimes it will randomly teleport unexpectedly across the sea or inland, such as appearing in the street in front of the Cs favorite inn. It was made by yet another mad wizard known as the Keepmaster for no particular purpose by to terrorize coastal communities with an invasion of lizard folk clowns when it washes ashore.

The rest of you are L 0 S E R S! Adam C Hawkins understood the assignment when I announced the contest. You see, the rest of you submitted an entry based on my direct illocutionary force. Adam, though, understood the indirect illocutionary force, what I meant. So confident was he that he included his address, for the inevitable mail containing the prize. He knew that I would have to review the reviews, or at least read them all. And, thus, he created something that he would then force me to read … and took the opportunity to torture me. Adam truly understands the masochism inherent in the tenfootpole outlook on life. He wrote a jokey clown adventure. 

Five pages. Nine rooms on a three level tower. Ignoring the intro, the real fun starts with the wandering monster table. Flying Baseball Bats. Crabby Old Men. Lizard Folk Clowns. What’s a flying baseball bat? I have no idea. Or, for that matter, I have no idea what a lizard folk clown is, there’s no description of either of them. The crabby old men, though, Do get a description. “What are you doing out  here? Stay out of our keep! Respect your elders!” In my hubris, I would like to think that these are a homage to me. Also, I didn’t get the play on words, at first, with the bats. I though they were baseballs bats, like the club. Now I think they are baseballs with wings. Modern lit is great, we are told, because of the different interpretations once can have of the same text, so, you know, Joyce and the Coquina are the same. You think I’m kidding but I’m not. I’m serious. Only Joyce got the suckers to buy in. 🙂

Room One! Assorted dead ocean fish (grouper, mahi-mahi, tun, sailfish, nursing sharks, eels, etc) are hanging on lines from the rafters of this room. They are hung individuals, tightly together, and at different heights, blocking vision across the room. They can be parted like walking through a beaded curtain.” Well, fuck. That’s not so bad. I mean, nice imagery there! I get it! And, it’s gonna fuck up the party; they are gonna get scared and probably fuck shit up! Also, there’s three jellyfish in there, so, nice integration of a “trap” in to the environment. It feels right. 

Okay! I’m in the groove! Let’s see … room two is … a magic shop. Room three is a snack room with a magic popcorn machine. Room four has meditating clowns asking “What is the perfect number?”  Room five has … a clown car full of lizard man clowns. Room six is a naked teleporter room. Ok, I got it. 

Also, I feel seen. The final boss is a wizard who wear the Talon of Weknaw Jr, his right thumbs replaced with a birds leg and talon and that holds ap uslating black pearl of doom that he throws at people, Sphere of Annihilation style. Everyone does know, byt now, that I immediately cut off my own hand, as a player character, and pluck out my eye at the first sign I may have found any part of the terrible twosome right? And, I mean, who DOESN’T lust after the Sphere?

Alas, Adam, your descriptions for the rooms need some more work!

You can snag a copy here:

Coquina-Keep-of-Clown-NihilationDownload
Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 11 Comments

The Frost Spire

Posted on April 25, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
Jacob Hurst
Self Published
B/X
Level 3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Long ago, when the world was new an elf king was banished from his kingdom and tossed into the sea. His hatred was so great, and so cold that it froze the water into a tall spire and he was cursed to drift forever bringing Winter to the world. But sometimes, he hungers for the blood of bad children. And on nights, when the fog is thick, and the ice piles up in jagged sheets upon the shore, he sends his wives to steal away crying babies, and the kinds of children that fight and do not do what they’re told. So beware sweet voices in the fog, and stay close to the fire, or you might be carried off, howling to the frost spire.

Well, Fuck you all, Picasso entered the jr high Art Fair. 

This ten page adventure features nine rooms in a tower off the coast. This one has a fey theme, with the Winter King abducting children. The use of language and image is masterful, with the entire thing only have a few minor flaws. Great job of channeling that Fey energy.

As i sit here, drinking too much, smoking too much, fucking too much, and not paying enough attention to work, family, or other trivialities, preparing for another sybratic weekend, I ask myself, well, where does that highway go to? My god, what have I done? Not yet halfway through, I think … and to stumble upon this!

I want you to reread that intro blurb again. “He sends his wives to steal away crying babies …” What an interesting framing for the elf king, banished and cursed to forever bring winter to the world. That just FEELS right, doesn’t it? The wives thing? I mean, the entire intro is written like it’s a REAL thing, like it IS a fairytale, or some Hollywood hacks spent 5 mil to write up the intro scrawl for a movie. It’s real fucking writing! I botch, a lot, about failed author writing. Inserting flowery phrases and hack fantasy phrases in to an adventure, in to the fiction piece, the intro, the read-aloud and DM text. There’s a time and place for that shit, and the fucking marketing blurb is ABSOLUTLY the place. This is the place to get inspired. To set the framing in the DMs head. To preload that frontal cortex for that stimuli to come. Mythic. Folklore. A fairytale to come. Who’s ready for some fey action?

And Lo, this is not the end! For while the flowery shit comes to an end, the great writing does not. But it shifts, to where it needs to be, to DM focused to run the game. And every paragraph, almost every sentence, has something REALLY great in it! “Large, impossibly fast growing holly sprouts outside the home of any child marked by the Winter Court, and in the fall and winter it hangs heavy with berries of crimson so deep they’re almost purple.” Hanging heavy. Berries of crimson. No, not flowery shit, but great imagery! And so it goes, on and on and on again. Line after line. 

Concept after concept. For if the writing lacks then the IDEAS it communicates does not! “On the first night fog rolls in thick and cold and does not leave” That’s some fucking omen level shit right there man! “A village near the sea.” The populace is completely shellshocked. Last night, 10 children vanished. Women are weeping inconsolably. Men are burning a huge pile of holly bushes in the town square.” I can run that fucking shit! I know what to do with that! I need no more! That’s what I fucking want! Inspiration! A scene, set, and primed, ready for me to go. Fuck you and your pages long village description; all I need is that short paragraph. There are nice little other hook-ish things, like a troll bargaining for his life, selling out the Winter King because he didn’t give him the children he was primoosed for dinne. Or a hedge witch who has figured out the holly bush thing, but no more, and is hounded by villagers and the local lord. Or a harpy, flying flowy overhead, struggling with a heavy lumpy sack, thes pounds of crying children clearly coming from it, heading towards a distant bank of heavy fog. Yeah man! Adventure Fucking Time!

Following that are a hort series of encounters the DM can insert in to the fog. “A father (Dylan) walks alone in a heavy fur coat, carrying a sword and lantern. His boots ripped and he can’t feel his feet anymore, but his daughter has been taken and his wife died in childbirth,” Uh huh. Thta’s kind of fucking grim. A merchant and a keg of ale, a woulded elf surrounded by wolves. The fucking shit is GREAT. It cCOMPLETEELY sets the tone for whats to come, setting the players minds to the correct framing for the content its to receive. A couple of adventures have done this, providing some context for the tower vibe to come, and I think they’ve all made good choices in trying to do so. It really does help!

The ice tower has a couple of approaches to it, none easy, a few easily seen, blue lights coming from a cave with a dark fog rolling out of it. The entrances, obvious, are not easily gained and there’s no provision to make it easy. You’re level fucking three poindexter, figure it out. 

Inside the encounters and imagery continue to be great, but transition to the Room Format that Jacob uses. A room title, a short sentence, some bolded keywords about major elements and a few words in parens to describe them, followed by some DM text. I like this format, terse and scannable. It’s the les sis more approach, just highlighting the important bits to get you in the mood and the important elements for the adventure and letting the DMs imagination do the rest, leveraging it for the players benefit. I will not, that, it seems a little less effective here. Something to do with the layout, perhaps? It’s still good, I think, but it is taking me just a little more time to figure things out and get the big picture Maybe another edit? Idk.

Inside the interactivity is strong. A thick blue bonfire, burning bones, a sword in the middle of it, bones in piles in the room, dancing rainbows on the ceiling from refracted light. The environments are magical, fey0like, from ice cave to forest walkway. A sleeping polas bear cuddles a skeleton wearing an ornate helmet of bright bronze with a plume of red horsehair. Shiny! Who wants to risk being eaten for it?! I fucking love push your luck shit. 

And the NPC’s, well, there are a couple of things to just hack, but, also, the ones you can talk to? How about a witch inside challenging you: “And just what will you do good adventurer? Return this babe to a hard life in a rundown hut of frozen dirt? A forgotten 5th or 7th child? Please, tell me again how untrained magic users benefit these lands?”Nice job witch lady! You’re making a compelling case! Akso, the winter king could be your patron and provide a moving base of operations “if they have a certain level of … ambivalence.” Ha! I fucking love it! Of course, the true answer is “Who appointed you CPS bitch?” STAB STAB STAB. But, of course, the truer answer is XP XP XP. 🙂   Still, great job making the PLAYERS lives a little bit harder. I love that tone. Have the gobbo beg for mercy and then stab the fuckers when they do it. 

I’m not really communicating the interior vibe, but, it includes staring too long at ice sheets, seeing long dead relatives. (not dead, LONG dead. The overloading of the phrasing brings so much more to the imagery!) And the, staring longer, having your own looks transformed to look like those long dead relatives. Because that’s what SHOULD happen in this circumstance, right? I mean, it FEELS right. And that’s what this does, over and over again. The encounters, the writing, it all FEELS right.

Yo, you need one paragraph on how the enemies react. Also, harpies? I mean, yeah, ok, But, like, emphasize the frozen wife aspect more so they are not genero?

Snag a copy at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T-jq1C5__G3OVG54jrFy4WzX0dWGMwTz/view?usp=sharing

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 22 Comments

Dread Tide Tower

Posted on April 23, 2022 by Bryce Lynch
An unrelated internet photo
Steve Williams
Self-published
B/X
Levels 3-4

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Okeydoke. We’ve got a seven page adventure featuring a six level tower is about nine rooms that is … hmmm, very similar to Wavestone Keep in concept. That’s interesting 🙂  Some padding in this one, with some basic lizard man killing and a few features, like dropping chandeliers. It looks like this is the designers first adventure, and they usually play with their son … so let’s be mean to them to assuage our own feelings of inadequacy! Also, I’ve been sick now for 24 hours in a fetal position on the floor with food poisoning .. my hearts not in this one. 

This is a pretty basic tower raid with lizardmen in the tower, brightened up by from horrific imagery and a few romo features. It’s interesting, i think, that I tend to gravitate towards good imagery being the horrific. It seems earlier to write the gore aspects of a description then it is something beatific or mundane. (Austere dwarven temples doing so unintentionally …) But, for whatever reason, it does seem so. And the designer here does a decent job. Bloody rage covering a body of a villager, its abdomen and chest hollow out, gnawed to the bone. The bodies of villagers hanging on meat hooks upside down, their throats slit. A pile of bloody rags next to a kitchen bench. These elements come before you even meet the lizardmen in the tower, providing a great reason to hack the fuckers down. Motivating the players, as opposed to their characters, are a good thing and some evidence bestial humanoids do the trick. No abstracted generalities here. You FEEL it, even though much of it is implied in these early rooms. We move on to the first lizardman encounter, with a villager tied to a door, having javelins thrown at the by the lizardmen in the room, for sport. (Which might end up being “blood runs after the door” after hearing some thumping sounds, if you go in the towers front door instead of through the basement cave. Again, good hints of whats to come.) Javelins hitting with meaty thuds, and their wrists nailed to the door, their head hanging down. Nice! The payoff is “Staring blanky into space, a severed head has been cracked open like a boiled egg and a long-handled spoon juts out of it” in a dining room. Yup! It brings the viscereality. Which is what it SHOULD be doing. When I talk about using humanoids effectively (my preference for bandits instead of stand-in humanoids) this is what I’m talking about. There’s a brutality here that quickly indicates what the score is and why you’re hacking who you’re hacking I approve! The imagery isn’t always this good, but when it does hit it hits at 100%. 

The designer does a good job also indicating whats in the next room, hinting at torch light or sounds or smells. But, I want to talk about some “environment” things that they also throw in. Combat after combat can be boring, but the designer sets up spme situations to bring some interest to it. Most obviously, this is a great chandelier in a room that can be dropped on people beflow it if  you cut the cord (which, conveniently, is right next to the top of the stairs yu come up.) Similarly there is a dumbwaiter that the party could use, or a smaller member anyway, that could set up an interesting scene with one halfling/dwarf and five lizardmen and I can just envision some screams to be lowered, etc. 

There are, though decent number of things to be improved upon. 

The thing was thrown together fast, which is ok, but, the map is a little small and could have been blown up a bit more to make it more readable. The treasure seems quite light for a Gold=XP game, and an old spellbook is in a secret language that the party can’t read. Boo! Boo I say, Sir! Give’em a spellbook!

More, though, is the language and text. There’s some padding here, with a lot of “appears to be” thrown in. Read-aloud can get long in places and borders on being a bit flowery. Primarily, though, its long through overshare, telling us that barrels are water barrels and vegetables are rotting. Save this for the DM notes, so the players can investigate. I note, also, that certain sections could be rearranged to better effect. The chandelier handle perhaps appearing closer to the top of the entry, since the party will see it quickly, than the bottom of the room description. And the light, which appears on the bottom consistently, perhaps moving up in the description to enter quickly in to the DM’s head. The rooms FEEL long, with regard to the text, but, also, I can’t fault the DM text too much. It’s generally well laid out and the paragraphs focus on the elements they need to. And, the sentrysystem, the order of battle, isn’t laid out very well, with a gog appearing deep in the text and no real notes on how the tower responds to a pitched battle thats sure to develop. 

I might call this almost a journeyman effort. Journeyman being Bryce codeword for “everything should be at least this good.” So, this gets close, I think, Yeah, it’s a tower raid, but, the bestial nature of the humanoids is well done and the extra environment elements do a bit to bring some novelty to a fight. A good strong edit and hard work on the text could do it well, and, maybe, something more. It just feels a little “one trick” and like the tower could use one more feature in it to bring it more fully to life and/or make it even more interesting or throw another wrench in to things, a complication.

Snag a copy here:

Dread-Tide-TowerDownload
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The Flute of Sailroc Edifice

Posted on April 20, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Cat Or Bat
Self Published
OSR
Level 3

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

Characters obtain a magical flute that causes a tower to sail on a rocky island from the ocean. There is a lot of filthy lucre inside, but much of it is bulky, brittle, puzzling, or dangerous. When the tower starts sailing off, the player characters will need to devise a plan to get the treasure out before the tower leaves for good.

This ten page adventure details a tower with about seven floors. You’ve got about 30 minutes to loot it before it disappears out to sea, making this a kind-of race against time. It’s using an interesting tabular/spreadsheet format, which, I think, is busy for the intended effect. Nice encounters, although a little light. Or, maybe, light until you get yourself killed in one.

You find a sea cave and inside the cave a dead guy on a cot with a key around his neck. Under the bed is a locked chest. Inside a flute. Playing the flute makes a tall tower ZOOM out from the sea and arrive off shore. What magical wonder await inside? The murals on the cave wall imply TREASURE!!!! Ok, so no, they don’t imply treasure … THEY OUTRIGHT SHOW MOUNTAINS OF TREASURE INSIDE!!!

You see the tower arrive, row over to the small island and see a tower. There’s a front door and a ladder up the side to the top. Some interesting design choices then come in to play. Each level of the tower has, essentially, one room, Maybe a couple of things going on in the room, but, one room. If you climb the ladder and start from the room, going down, then you probably pick up a lot of loot risk free. Or, potentially pick up a lot of loot? A lot of the loot is big and/or fragile, which begs the question on how you’re getting the loot out of the tower and back to shore in order to claim it. (This is make more sense in a moment.) So, starting from the top leads to to some encounters that are essentially loot encounters with some minor inconveniences. There are some EXTREMELY fragile undead in one room, crawling around on the floor, but wearing very expensive clothes. You can undress them to get the loot, and, they probably die as you do so. Because they are so fragile. Or you can be super careful, taking, like, 30 minutes to disrobe one of them. “Spare us, we’re brittle!” they call out. Nice! The level underneath that one has a big table, chairs, a cabinet, and so on. Large items hard to loot. 

Most of the encounters are quite survivable for a group of level 3’s, with no real combat challenges. Until the basement. When you reach the basement you probably get fucked up. There’s a 10HD sleeping dude in there and a treasure hoard. Which are mimics. Which encountering probably wakes up the ravenous giant dude who then almost certainly fucks your world up. Did you push too far? Then you’re dead instead of looting. 

There’s another mechanism going on here as well: after thirty minutes of game time the tower heads back out to sea. Rapidly. So, you’re either in for it and along for the ride in a tower full of loot and no way to recover it, probably, or you’ve got thirty minutes to grab as much loot as possible. Thus, if you started at the top, and, given about fifteen minutes per floor, you probably miss the giant if you work your way down methodically. If you star at the front doow and go down you could be dead. If you work your way up you don’t make it to the top. And in BOTH cases, the secret treasure room is in the MIDDLE floor, which you don’t reach in thirty minutes by starting from either the top or the bottom. This means substantially different outcomes depending on the choices made. Nice! 

Or, nice in theory. As implemented, I have some issues. 

I’m not sure I’m down with the way the thing is implemented. As it stands you’re basically just making a random choice: do I start at ethe top or with the door in front? I guess it could be argued that “were going in through the roof!” people are smarter than “front door” players, but, I think it would be far better if there were some trade off for the players to make an informed decision about. Randomness is not agency. I’m making too much of this, already, because, hey, player choose Left or Right for their characters in a dungeon hallway all the time, but, here, somehow, it feels different. 

Related to this is the timer. If it is even a timer? You’ve got thirty minutes, which means you can basically examine about two floors, according to the adventure text. (Unless you undress one of those zombies of course … and assuming you don’t examine the roof very closely and burn fifteen minutes up there …) I’m not sure you’re making a choice here about what to do? If the ceiling is collapsing then you know you are pushing your luck with grab at the treasure pile you tale. But, here, you don’t really know that the tower is going away and thus you don’t know to go deeper, or skim the surface, or whatever. It’s gonna just appear that the tower now starts moving. Which, ok, sure, you don’t need to telegraph everything to the players. But, in this case, it seems appropriate. Unless, of course, you want the party stranded in the middle of the ocean. Then you’e got all the time in the world to loot the place, or get killed by the dude in the basement, before the DM tosses in a boat for the party to evac on. It just seems weird to me to have a timer on the adventure and not COMMUNICATE the timer, or at least hint at it. 

And, then, the format is a little … interesting.

You get a little intro section, a couple of sentences, and then a three column thing. What you first see, then what that this is upon infestation, and then what it really s, which is essentially the DM play notes. Sounds pretty familiar, right? But, imagine instead I did this in a spreadsheet, with three columns, and then combined the columns for that intro section? It’s a little disconnected … it just doesn’t enter my brain well. And, then, there’s ALOT of formatting of fonts. Blue text, bolded text, red text, underlines, italics. I know, I avocate for this stuff, but, also, moderation is a thing. I find this sometimes, in adventures. People come up with a format and follow it religiously. “I’m going to note the light in every room. And the smell. And the condition of the door, and …”  The goalie not the format. The goal is an understandable adventure. It can be tempting to think that by rigorously following a format you can make something better. But, no, ultimately everything must serve the ultimate purpose and things can go too far and loop around the otherside of comprehension, becoming more difficult. 

So, encounters? Interesting. The concept is decent also, or, perhaps I mean the design choices of “choose your entry and difficulty” being so intentionally made in the design. I’m not sure, though, tha I could run this well, given the format and may want a little more in the form of a “room introduction”/overview in a format like this.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/391124/The-Flute-of-Sailroc-Edifice?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 7 Comments

Wyvern’s Roost

Posted on April 18, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Richard Sharpe
Self Published
B/X
Level 1

This is an entry in my Wavestone Keep adventure design contest. Which I held to combat the crushing ennui I feel when reviewing too many bad adventures in a row. The challenge was to write and short adventure, eight pages, inspired by the concept and marketing tagline of the Wavestone Keep adventure. Now, to combat my crushing boredom, and the perfectionism which prevents me from working on larger projects, I’m going to review the entries!

This eighteen page DIGEST adventure contains about nine or so rooms/encounters in it. A delightful romp in a simple lighthouse, its got some decent imagery and nice interactivity. A B/X adventure, in the most laudable sense of the phrase. It could also use a bit of a rewrite with the way it formats its entries to put important things first.

This is a retheme from another adventure, a bandit tower. But, instead of bandits we’re rethemed to pirates and a lighthouse … and it works well! A dude in town says he’s looking for wyvern eggs and there’s a tower nearby. You get there, avoid getting eaten outside, negotiate a troll cave, cross a rope bridge, make it up the tower to the nest at the top. What’s notable, here, is this being a Level 1 adventure with a Wyvern, a Troll, a and a Vampire … with only the Wyvern being an outright obstacle. And that leads to a wonderful tone, the kind most of us enjoy, where you’re not just hacking shit down but, rather, scheming and talking to the people inside.

The people inside who wear obvious keys around their necks for that big fat treasure chest sitting in the room. And have big fat ruby rings and earrings on, obviously worth a lot of money. Everyone should know by now that my favorite game as a DM is “how close can I get to luring the party in to attacking the actual Keep in B2?” … and other related issues. I love a friendly NPC with “next level loot here!” signs hanging around their necks! Especially when they are overpowered like the ones here are. 

The interactivity here is pretty good. We’ve got the obvious NPC’s to talk to, and the overall “grab the loot/push your luck but the wyvern is probably not a fight” thing going on. Nice traps, a rope bridge, and a decent secrets layout is all pretty good. 

Writing can be quite evocative in this. The troll’s goblin buddy is “Her erratic personality will rapidly shift back and forth from screaming rage at the troll for suggesting they eat their nice visitors to simpering, handsy doting on any adventurer who doesn’t violently recoil from her reach, and she is persistent. She only sometimes licks her toothy chops when looking at tasty exposed people flesh.” and “Chains the size of a person’s arm encircle the riveted, black iron coffin and run through its four handles. There is a sliding shutter door at the corpse’s eye level.” Not bad at all! NPC’s are well described and memorable without being over the top. Folk in the local tavern have rumors and are for hire. Rooms have decent, and short, descriptions to relate to players. A one-eyed troll with an acid-melted face is a win

Other things are great also. There’s a small amount of cat & mouse with the wyvern, in a throw-away statement, as the party approach the tower. Good non-linear entry in to the tower. NPC’s in town are good, as are the rumors. The various magic items are solid, including a hood that “A thin layer of elven cadaver skin is stitched inside like a lining. It’s peeling and flaking off the back of the mask. One time only, the wearer can transform into any person’s form whose facial skin is stitched into it.” Sweet! That’s what I want! To wear someone else’s face, literally and figuratively! 

Also, though, there’s the formatting …

There are a couple of things going on here that kind of rub me the wrong way. First are the room summaries. I feel like these happen BEFORE The encounter, before the read-aloud. And they get a little long. They are NOT done consistently, which is not what I’m bithcing about, but, also, they seem to be long and just appear. I’m on board with a general overview of how things are supposed to work inthe tower, etc, but, also, you can do it shorter and/or not include it at all in a short adventure and the let the adventure encounter keys speak for themselves. 

Then, also, some of the descriptions are a little cumbersome in how they are laid out. Like, that coffin description, with the chains. I think the subject, the coffin, probably needs to come first and then the chains. Unless the chains are just SO FUCKING HUGE as to the most obvious part of the room, then the coffin is. By getting all fancy with the description writing you’ve put the coffin in the secondary place in the description. First things first in descriptions. 

And, look, I get it that digest is a format near and dear to many of our hearts. I don’t thin it works well for a lot of text. More reference? Sure. More text/paragraph based? I don’t think so.

But, I’m just fucking quibbling. What this is is a great example of a B/X type adventure that is short. It feels like a good adventure, and like a good BX adventure.

(Richard, I declare you Not The Winner THusfar, thus making it irrelevant for me to judge if the page count, in digest form, qualifies.)

Snag a copy here:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/392795/Wyverns-Roost?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments