The Weathered Well

Posted on March 19, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Gronquist
Hack Shack Games
5e
Level 1

It’s a story as old as time. Boy meets girl. Girl meets abandoned well. Boy chases girl down abandoned well only to find horrors beyond their worst nightmares.. Perhaps those old tales about ‘ol Grim Jack and Granny Hentooth lurking in a world below the water weren’t just silly children’s rhymes after all?

This 68 page adventure has, I don’t know, thirty rooms? In abu=out thirty pages. It’s overwrought and overwritten and the intro is full of shit to justify the shitty shitty choices in the design. A rich Tapestry. Fun for all player types. Bleach!

Look at that! The sun is shining! The birds are singing! I found a bottle of whiskey when I thought I was out! And the last two adventure recommendations from readers have turned out to be decent or better! I’m on a roll! Let’s grab another recommendation from the readership!  

Oh …

It’s fucking trash.

Somehow you end up in a village. They don’t like you or trust you. But, also, they sent you a letter asking you for help? Somehow, in the village, you figure out that you have to get through this wall that surrounds a grove of trees and a well in the center. I guess you learn about the well in the center from someone in the village? It’s not clear; it’s just assumed? And you have some quest to find some missing teens/kids. I think? It’s not really spelled out, again, it’s just kind of assumed. Inside the grove you get the idea to go down the well. Again, I’m not really sure why. I guess you explore the entire grove and figure out the well is the next place? And inside of it you wander through twenty rooms of a temple. And, somehow, from that, you figure out there is a gate room and all these other rooms that require things in them to be placed, obtained from other rooms in the dungeon, to activate the gate. Why do you do this? I don’t know. I guess because you can. And then you enter a six room linear dungeon with a challenge in each room. You find one of the missing people petrified in the last room. 

This thing is just trash.

It’s full of advice. It’s supposed to be a “Dark Ride”, like at an amusement park. IE: a railroad. Monsters don’t spill over in to other rooms, that would ruin the tory. You’re told to fudge die rolls ALL the time for the sake of THE STORY and keeping the players alive. “Don’t be afraid to fudge things to get the ending right!” the advice says, at the ending. Because “how any story ends sets the tone of the memory it leaves on those invested in it …” Ha! Jokes on you! I’m not invested AT ALL in this shit. I’m eye rolling and wishing I had gone drinking tonight instead of playing D&D with friends. THis fucking thing is SOOOOO pretentious. Fuck you and FUck Your Story.The story is the one created by the players through their characters, not the crap the DM attempts to impose on them. Fucking railroady bullshit, it is. At some point, future players will look on this era, this style of adventure design, with the derision it deserves, just as we do today with the 2e/Storyteller era.

Is the read-aloud atrocious? Of course it is! It’s boxed. With a blue background. And every one starts with AS THE PLAYERS ENTER READ:. I get it. It’s fucking boxed text. It’s distracting. And it’s long Very long. Multiple paragraphs long. It is no wonder that players pull out phones as their eyes glaze over while the DM reads this overly long garbage. Overly written garbage, ta that. Overwrought. With lots of “YOU enter a narrow hallway …” and “as YOUR race begins …” Loathsome, overwrought writing. Which overreveals details, destroying the interaction between player and DM that D&D thrives on. But, whatever. This ain’t D&D, right? IT”S A STORY. It’s like those video games that are actually video novels, just push a button to advance to the next cutscene. “With theta llooks like a doorway.” It’s fucking doorway. That’s how the text should be written. *sigh*

And this continues in to the DM text, with paragraph upon paragraph spelling out everything. Columns of creature tactics. No use of bolding or whitespace, bullets, etc to make the thing easier to comprehend. 

It’s a living hell. 

It is all that is wrong with adventures today. Congratulations for reaching the end goal. I only wish you were more popular so as to force more people in to the realization of the emptiness of void within themselves. 

And the rebirth that brings.

And a big shout out of FUCK! YOU! To the person who suggested this was good and recommended it to me. Kickstarter trash. Two ratings, both five stars, of course.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages. The last two show a couple of houses in the village surrounding the well. You should be able to tell from those how garbage things will be.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/364705/The-Weathered-Well?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 7 Comments

Treasures of the Troll King

Posted on March 16, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Chris Bissette
Loot the Room
Mork Borg

Galgenbeck is palimpsest. Tumour. A city built on the ruins of itself. Beneath the sewers the bones of the old city fester. The troll-king Niduk was exiled, driven into the depths to rot and die. Now twisted by hatred and rage he oversees the small domain he has carved for himself, in a forgotten chapel to a murdered god. Why are you here? A lost bet? A doomed quest for silver? Boredom? Does it even matter?

Yeah, It’s Mork Borg. Someone told me that this one didn’t suck. They were right.

This 36 page adventure details a sewer point-crawl with around six locations, and then a more traditional dungeoncrawl with around eleven rooms. Good formatting. Evocative writing. Some interactivity beyond stabbing. Creative situations. This one is not bad at all, even with the required Mork Borg “tilt font 23 degrees to the left” formatting that shows up at times. 

The Mork Borgians have a bad rep. I might summarize it as “someone who geeks out over layout and three color art had one conceptual idea for a room in an adventure.” Layout, as a means to facilitating comprehension by the DM, is a good thing. But, the reputation is that layout is pushed too far until IT alone becomes the focus, losing the fact that it is supposed to facilitate DM comprehension of the adventure. Pushed so far that it becomes a detriment to comprehension. And it’s clear that most Morg Borg adventure revolve around one idea, a single concept, and could almost be, or should be, one room dungeons. They don’t try to work toward something longer than two hours.
This adventure ain’t that.

Yeah, there’s some three color art (red, yellow and black, the Mork Borg “we’re PuNk!” staples.) And there’s some formatting nonsense in places, like using roman numerals on a die roll table and tilting the fucking text and varyng the font size, etc, to make a half page “art” die roll table. These are relatively minor though. The art contributes to the adventure vibe in a positive way and I can accept that you gotta throw in that table nonsense or they kick you out of the Mork Borg club. It’s just a couple of pages, anyway.

The Mork Borgians don’t get enough credit for their creativity. Generally each of the adventures has come cornerstone element that is quite interesting. The problem is that they don’t follow up. They have one idea and that’s it. Not so with this one. It delivers hit after hit, creative elements and interesting situations of diverse scope. For example, Stolen Wishes. A pile of coins under a sewer grate. Ye olde god of wishes is no more, but, if you seal a coin you’re cursed until YOU fulfill the wish. That’s fun! Good concept, nice push/pull. I’m down! And that’s just one of the ideas that this thing delivers. There are a lot, from individual room encounters to larger dungeon concepts and even treasure, that just reek of creativity. “A wooden idol bound with filthy bandages. Breaking it summons a small but vicious gore hound.” or “A darkened glass vial containing powdered sunlight. Worth a pretty penny to those who know its uses. Vampires and other undead monstrosities will give anything to see it destroyed.” Not just treasure, but a springboard to adventure also! Nicey done! How about a monster? “The finger collector

approaches in a mist of swirling spores. Visibly necrotic with tumorous growths on the shoulders and head, it clucks and clicks in a twisted mimicry of language. A necklace of fingers rattles around its neck.” Not bad! I could use a little more than “visibly necrotic”, but, still, not bad.

We get decent writing also. One sewer room has “Blood-red thorny roses sprout from the cracks between the stones.” Well, that’s a sight! A juxtaposition between a sewer environment and blood red roses, growing from cracks int he walls, should have the players shitting themselves! Formatting is pretty good to excellent. The pointcrawl sections, through the sewers, is randomized. I’m not a big fan of random for the sake of random, but, it works out ok this time. You rolls for a chamber and roll for people inside and it’s decent enough, with brief hits of evocative writing and good room formatting. Meaning a room title, a little brief overview, and then bolded bullet points with breif descriptions of DM text. The mechanics are nearby, but offset, so they don’t get in the way, and there are lots of minimaps. It’s done well. 

I would note, also, tat the Nork Borgians generally eschew a lot of up-front “how to use this adventure” bullshit boilerplate text. I’m supportive of this. I don’t need to be told how to read a stat block, nor does any other person, ever, in the history of D&D. Yes, I know I can customize the adventure, thank you, no need to tell me. And thank god they got rid of this shit. 

So, what could be improved?

There are, I think, two or three things that stand out.

First, the formatting fails in places because important things are not high enough up in the descriptions. A room with an alter in it, and little else, has no mention of it until pretty far down in the description. A room with a listing floor has no mention of it until farther in. Obvious things should be high up n the room description, generally in the player overview section, and not something for the DM to later discover as they scan the entry. “Oh, uh, yeah … and also the floor is listing a lot toward that door …” Well, fuck, Frank, you should have said so sooner! THis is a relatively common thing in this adventure. Thus the format is good but how to use the format to maximum effect falls down more than a little. 

There’s also, I think, A kind of lack of knowledge of how D&D works, or, perhaps, what the imrportant thing are. Hoks are presented as individual hooks. YOU owe someone. YOU escaped, and so on, almost like it was solo adventure. Rumors don’t always match up well to gameable content (although, “Gas from the sewers does funny things to the light, and what you see can’t be trusted.” is a great fucking rumor, for the obvios reasons!) One room has a ceiling that hides chitterring things … with no mention of creatures, so I assume they are just noises? There IS anunderstanding of some design elements … the troll king is foreshadowed rather well, for example, but there is also a kind of “individual rooms” theme rather than a “cohesive whole” theme. I’m not talking a funhouse set piece, or the need to themne every room, but a little more of a wholistic view of the adventure would have served the final eleven room dungeon well. And, man, loud rings bells are likely to be heard from more than one room away?

But, it’s not a bad adventure. It’s just not a ten. It’s creative, the writing is evocative which helps the DM run it, it’s formatted well, and it’s more than four rooms … it’s an actual adventure, which may be a first for a Mork Borg product? Good job. Good enough that, if I can remember, I’ll go looking for other Loot The Rooms to review.

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is nineteen pages, showing you both parts of the pointcrawl and the dungeon. Check it out! I like it!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/363891/Treasures-Of-The-Troll-King

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 3, Reviews, The Best | 8 Comments

Tooth and Nail

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By ELW Green
Lead Filled Games
OSE
Level 1?

Nerovia is a land existing in a world of nightmares. This ancient place struggles against spirits, disease, and the unknown. The people are busy surviving between lunar cycles and harvest season. The winters are long. The mountains are steep. Sorrow so clouds this land that the shadows lead the living. This adventure offers a rousing mystery in the forested mountain settlement of Brynmawr. Whether its’s the roaming hunger of the Hunter Beast, or a foul plot to murder an otherwise harmless baker, there is something afoot in Tooth and Nail.

This sixty page adventure details a small village and a few intrigues going on around it, in a sandboxy/open-ended manner. It’s got some good specificity in it and is not bad for what it’s trying to do, from a design standpoint. It’s also horribly overwritten with a formatting that is DISASTROUS for running the thing. Like, it’s a fucking novel instead of an adventure.

The concept here is pretty simple. You take a village, stuff some NPC’s in it, and then throw in four or five things going on that the party can get in to trouble with, with a few “adventure sites” supporting them. Where ‘adventure site’ is defined as a small lair dungeon with three rooms, repeat four or five times. There’s nothing wrong with that concept, it’s a time-honooured one. I think I prefer these things to support another, larger adventure. In other words you go to the dungeon and you use something like this as your home base, with the local trouble adding some intrigue during what would traditionally be downtime play. 

You start out in the inn, waking up in the common room the next morning after a night of drinking. Super! Nd the innkeeps wife is like “Wake up Jorge!” … except Jorge is dead, face down in his bowl of porridge. Supporting this are rumors of a ghost near the town well, and of a huge beast in the forest that villagers have seen. A couple of people are missing and the town is on edge with now what looks like the third murder in a short time. The local preist is working his dander up. Let’s toss in a handful of colorourful NPC, including an asshole sheriff, and you’re ready to go!

There’s some good specificity in the descriptions that bring the NPC’s to life, as well as the adventure sites. I think this is one of the harder aspects of writing an adventure, so I’m happy to see this in place. But the implementation here is ALL wrong.

We’re looking at 6o pages to get all of this out to the DM … and it slots in at 164 meg … meaning we’re getting image pages instead of text pages. And those NPC’s? They take SEVEN pages to describe, about two to a page. Listing just their name up top in bold, rather than their role also, making reference hard. They are relatively focused, and there is a summary at the rear, on one sheet … but the summary, in particular, is quite poor, not mentioning the essence of their nature or their quirks/knowledge well enough to run off of it. This is an issue. The village will live and die by it’s NPC’s, in terms of player engagement, and that just can’t be done with the way the information is presented.

And speaking of presentation …

This is a wall of text. I mean, literally, a wall of text. IDK what the format is called, but the right and left side of each paragraph are justified to a fixed length, resulting in an endless scroll of information, page upon page of text, presented as a wall. This fucking shit is IMPOSSIBLE to wade through. Some in long sections of italics, making it hard to read. Other just … a wall. 

Inside of this the actual specificity that bnrings the adventure to life, and the specificity DOES do that, is lost. In response to the death of the philandering baker, Milos, the villagers might say something like, “Yeah, Miklos can cook …” and so on. These little bits are GOLD, but are lost inside of theinpenetrablewall that the formatting brings to the table. 

Further, shit is scattered around. Info is on the rumors tables, in the various NPC descriptions in various site locations … putting it together in to one cohesive whole is going to be a pain. I had to read and reread in order to get certain pieces of information. One vital clue, the body of a boy, was lost to me unless I scanned the text for a third time. That won’t do AT ALL.

So, the basic concept is a good one. The actual DESIGN of the adventure is fine. But the formatting, and the wya the information is presented, is an absolute fucking disaster. Once you get past that you get a set of relativy mundane.common things goin on  the village for the party to resolve. Not 60 pages worth. Certainly not 164meg worth. And NOT worth slogging through in order to run it.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview, so fuck you if you wanted to take a gander before making a purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/388626/Nerovia-III-Tooth-and-Nail?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

The Dungeons of Grimhold Keep

Posted on March 12, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By J
New Realms Publishing
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

Once a dwarven stronghold guarding the Great Trade Road, the Grimhold Keep has fallen into ruin.  Rumors claim, though, that an extensive network of tunnels and chambers exists beneath the ruins.  Home to all manner of horrors and traps, the dungeons are also said to house the hoarded wealth of marauding bandits and monsters.  Only a brave party of adventurers can survive the dangers to discover the truth. Enter the depths of Grimhold Keep in search of gold, glory and adventure.  But beware, the denizens of the dark depths are a danger to all who dare to enter their domain.  And there are rumors of a new power rising, one that bears the symbol of the crowned skull.

Who the fuck recommended this thing to me? The background has nothing to do with the adventure. This is HeroQuest.

You draw a card to determine the room shape. You draw a card to determine the monster in the room. When you search it you draw a card to see what you found. I hate my fucking life.

Here’s your room :“Numerous narrow tunnels pierce the far wall of this large room. Bones, rags and rusted arms litter the floor.” Numerous. That’s fun, right?

Here’s your monster: “A clicking sound fills the air as a large, multi-colored centipede scuttles into view” Large and multi-coloured. I’m astounded at the wonder and majesty. 

Man, I just wanna play a good game of D&D. Someone? Anyone? I’m gonna go get fucked up. Make sure and join my Patreon for loads more interesting and informative reviews like this.

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. There is no full sized preview, alas. How can I make a purchasing decision without a preview? Oh, Lament!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/257394/B2-The-Dungeons-of-Grimhold-Keep-Level-1?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Reviews | 3 Comments

Lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Bryce Lynch

Thick Skull Adventures

DCC

Level 1

The blazing beacon from the lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals used to be visible on every cloudless night. Just above the horizon line, the brightest star in the sky, a sleepless eye, slowly winking on and off as it rotated between Sagewood and the sea. After weeks of fog and rain, last night was clear… and the lighthouse was dark. The town council of Sagewood meets and decides you must go to the lighthouse and discover what’s gone wrong! There are portents that someone—or something—wanted the light- house extinguished. It is up to you to uncover the mystery and see what has befallen the residents at the lighthouse at Shipbreaker Shoals.

This sixteen page adventure describe about fifteen locations in and around a lighthouse is nigh impenetrable with the amount of text in it. Massive italics text and useless DM details combine to form an adventure that even my mother could love.

The adventure is in two parts. First I guess you walk around town and talk to people and then you go to the lighthouse and kill shit. The town portion is the more interesting portion, both for details and for critical commentary. You don’t get a town, you just get a series of NPC’s listed, a couple of pages worth. Each  has LONG sections of read-aloud in italics. This is both a blessing and a curse It’ eschews a traditional keyed format, which I’m supportive of in situations like this, but, the NPC’s are just listed by name. Instead of “drunk in the inn” or “mercantile woman” you get a name … and have to figure out on your won that this is the mercantile woman. You don’t want that. You want things easy to find and reference. You’re going to the temple so you want “TEMPLE” and the main entry, maybe with the character name following in case th party seems out “Priest Frank” from another dialogue. 

What you absolutely DO NOT want are sections of long read0aloud. People don’t listen to this shit. Yes, I know, you want to convey information and you want to convey the character of the NPC. But you do this with a couple of words describing them and some ideas, aimed at the DM, at what they will say, maybe with an in-voice sentence for something key, which would also help convey character. But, multiple paragraphs of read0aloud? No. 

Nor do you want it in italics. Italics is hard to read. Use an offset box or some shit. You can use a phase in italics, or a sentence, maybe, but more than that and italics becomes an eye glazing afair.

 It’s the designer job to convey information to the DM in an easy to use manner that also is evocative … and it does a decent job of the evocative in town (and in some sections of the lighthouse.) We get brief snippets tha are good specificity,like the rumor that the lighthouse keeper ate his own leg when he was shipwrecked once. Or, the rambling s of the dunk in the inn with his “you ae all DOOMED” speech. Most frustrating are two younglings tht follow the party out of town and try to join the party. You get no personality or anything, in spite of the fact that thOSE NPC’s will most likely be the ones tha the party will spend the most time with … and thus are the most important convey some sense of their charatcre beyond being a swinherd and innkes daughter. 

The lighthouse is more of the same. There’s an occasional bit of evocative test in the read-aloud … a giant SLAB of fatty grey steam cought on a root in a sinkhole … with the putrid smell of rotting fletch coming from the sinkhole. Note the use or slab, and purtid. Not boring words, but specific, that conjure an image in the mind that’s good.

Less good are the MASSIVE amounts of DM text. Sometimes a page per room, in order to describe something like a normal kitchen. The read-aloud over communicateds, destroying the back and forth between the players and DM. The DM text conyers useless information about the mundane or irrelevant to the adventure “Her husband dies at sea and her sons moved to Malmo, one weeks walk north of Gielo. Well, fuck me, its a good thing I now know that! 

And thus we get another lame adventure. I mean, it’s sgot some flavour in places, but its the usual “sometime crawls out of the sea” thing, even though, as a DCCadventure, we get decent creatures. And the environments don’t generaly support the DCC playstyle … in particular you need a decent environment for githers to mighty deeds off of things … and a flat field don’t help much with that.

It’s ok, if quite quite basic, but it would NEVER make it to my table, given the amount of text there is to wade through.

Keep your adventure descriptions, ead-aloud and DM text, terse. That helps the DM scan is quickly to find pertinent information. Supplement that with strategic bolding to help find sections. Cut the useless drivel of backstory and explanations WHY, and focus on evocative writing that is curt and to the point. This don’t do that

This is $6 at DriveThru. There is no preview, alas. How am poor little I to make a purchasing decision if I have no hint at whats inside? 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/388424/Lighthouse-at-Shipbreaker-Shoals?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

The Bone Place of Dreib

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Rob Alexander
Medium Quality Productions
OSE
Levels 3-4

You are alone. It is dark. You have never read a book. There is something in here with you. On a hill above a deserted road there is a rocky crown, and in that crown is the Bone Place of Dreib, and in the Bone Place (so you have heard) is a temple of the ancients full of treasures wondrous and diverse. Why it is unlooted and undefiled? Probably the stories about the place, the ghosts that come if you sleep too close, and the list of grave-robbers who never came back. But the stories are probably bullshit, the ghosts probably just nightmares, and the grave-robbers rank amateurs. You are don’t care about that shit. And you have this dream every night. A dream that you are alone, that it is dark, and that you have never read a book. You are down there in the earth and there is something in there with you. It is a million years old and it is not your friend.

Dude, this thing is weird.

This twenty page adventure details about thirty locations with a non-traditional (or, maybe, ultra-traditional?) undead thing going on. And fear. And primitivism. And … well, it’s just weird man. And I mean that in a good way. It’s could use a little more theming, I think, in order to communicate a vibe to the players better. But what there is, here, is very interesting and as freaky as anything I’ve ever reviewed … without it in ANY way being gonzo or alien. 

Check out the fucking marketing blurb on this thing. At first I thought it was just some modern adventure, from the “never have read a book” thing, and then I see it’s OSE and I look at my other Medium Quality reviews and I’m like, ok, I’m taking a chance. And man, thet fucking blurb delivers. That in the dark thing … that million years thing. But, it’s not ALL that. Ok ok ok ok ok ok ok, I’m gonna cover this shit.

The place has three parts. First, there’s the “outside”, or maybe the preamble. Imagine the Ol Zeke shit in Death Frost. There’s this giant mesa and a path cut in to ala Petra, and outside of the mesa and path are some shit. A little hut. A graveyard. A little section off to the side, elsewhere, with two fresh graves but NOT in the graveyard. We’re building energy here, preparing the party for the vibe to come so they can shit themselves when stuff starts to go down. A hand sticking out of the ground that grips back if you grab it. Skeletons in the graveyard, if dug up they have vaguely animalistic features. A couple of fresh graves off to the side, I guess they didn’t find the loot they were looking for. And a gap in the mesa, 6 feet wide, flanked by pillars with a stone lintel engraved with DREIB in foot high letter. Uh … ok. Who’s up for the paths of the dead?!  

That section, along with the rumors and hooks, makes the initial vibe setting. There’s a creature in the dark, and weapons simply don’t work. There’s a creature, under, that should not be woken. That’s what the ancients sealed the place up. If you overturn the great stone THEY will come and drag you underground and that will be the end of you. Vague shit. Scary shit. Less is more and the parties imagination starts to run. Oh, and while I’m not a big fan of dream shit, there’s a crawling through narrow tunnels naked and afraid in the dark clutching a primitive torch and a sharp antler. Fuck yeah man! That’s a fucking vibe!

Part the second: you come through the crack in the mesa and it’s hollow on the inside and big. Giant rock in the center, a boulder, and like nine or so tunnels that go in the rock. These are tombs, but, also, that’s a little misleading. Let’s start with “hey, its a cave a we buried a dude in the back” at the middle of the spectrum and branch out both directions from there, but absolutely trending to the more primitive side of things. (There is a more traditional tomb or two, but not a fancy one. More of a burial place, I might call it.) Caves, tunnels, some narrows, ornamentation of some sort in most, mostly primitive. You got me? With some undead. 

Undead like a leg and pelvis sticking out from under a boulder. If you fuck with it it gets up and kicks you, maybe kicking off YOUR leg. Or a ribcage that launches at you. Ar a mass of skeletons under the big boulder that form up to kick your ass. Or ghostly bodies wrapped tight in white burial shrouds, attacking like worms? Or maybe the ghosts of those people, dressed the same way? We’ll call that the more traditional of the encounters. 

Because there’s also a spider thing, with hooks on its feet and vaguely human like face, squeezing through small tunnels, slicing off a limb or head and then retreating to eat it … it’s quiet the rest of the day. Or worse, the thing in the tunnels .. .which is really just vague.

And let’s cover that third part now. The Prehistoric Tunnels. The alter of man. The alter of the stag. Tight, your light doesn’t seem to give off much light at all. And something, in the dark, reaching for you. Clawing. Stabbing it makes it retreat for awhile, but its always present in the dark, always coming back. 

Learn to genuflect baby, that’s gonna be one of the most important skills here, to appease some shit and keep the restless spirits happy!

I’m down with this fucking thing. Except … I am an unhappy boy on the descriptions. It’s using a brief summary paragraph with keywords bolded, and some keywords in parens to describe things. So, in the primitive tunnels we get “Headless man-figure (made of wood and clay, with crown and staff as if a king and an excessively erect phallus)” Yup, i agree, that’s what it looks like. And I’m down with this description. Terse, brief, evocative; works for me. But, the encounter areas themselves don’t tend to get descriptions. There are some general notes about packed earth and the like, but I think almost all of the rooms could use an additional sentence about the actual room instead of the things in the room. That vibe of the location needs to be better communicated. And not having it is a major downer, I think.

Like, so much so I’m not going to Best this one. Oh, and also, I can’t find the entrance to the Prehistoric Tunnels? I don’t know here they are?  But, sure, this one is close. A little more work and it could have been.

The Spider-Thing is a hairy black spider, 8ft across with

all its legs splayed. The legs end in cutting hooks. Its

central body is a black sphere, and though you look

close enough there is a humanesque nose and mouth…

though the latter has all the wrong teeth.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There are two previews available, the seonc shows you the prehistoric tunnels. Good stuff, and enough to make a purchasing decision.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/387172/The-Bone-Place-of-Dreib?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 3, No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments

Whitestone Tower

Posted on March 5, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Stephen Grodzicki
Pickpocket Press
OSR
Level ?

In the skies above Vorngard, a winged beast is causing trouble, killing messenger ravens and scouts that wander too far west. Scouts say the monster lairs in a fallen tower, once home to a long dead sorceress. But if that’s true, what’s causing the glow in the highest window by night?

This twelve page adventure describes about eight locations in and around a tower. There’s one big bad and some minor creatures floating around. The situations in this are pretty good, and while the writing tends to the long side, and flat, a highlighter solves that. of course, I won’t do that, but maybe you do?

This is a relatively basic adventure that could, I suspect, be done in one night. There are some garbage hooks and backstory that take up more than a few pages, but, basically, it’s a ruined tower with a manticore in it. There’s a short overland journey to get to the tower, with a decent wandering monster table. The wanderers are not just a monster listing but rather a situation. Some are creatures, like a band of barbarians camping or a”dessicated husk of a dead beastman with yellow warpaint on the ground. Several days old and laden with grubs. In the high trees are a phase spider, hoping to ambush the outermost part member that stops to investigate.” Just a couple of sentence that give the DMs brain something to work with. This is exactly what an adventure should be doing: giving the DMs brain something to work with. You need JUST enough content to get the creative juices of the DM going, but not so much as to overwhelm their ability to scan and absorb the information quickly. The designer is relying on the DM to fill in the rest, as all adventures do, but doing it in such a way as to add significant value by giving the ol noggin a hard shove in a certain direction and letting the DM riff from there. I’m a big fan of the one page of wanderers, ten in all. I think it’s the right page count for the right number of creatures, and the encounters tend to be situations. 

Ok, you’re now near the tower. Turns out there’s a band of barbarians camped at the base of it. A group of exils that have banded together led by Malmogg the hulkig young teen, bald, skin covered in battle scars ,exiled for seducing the chief’s second wife. Again, perfect amount of content for the kid. You get a few keywords and that describes the dude enough for you to riff on it from there. The exiles serve the manticore in the hopes it will go eat their former tribe … but might let the party pass with a bribe if he thinks they are weak. Great! More personality!

Also outside the tower is the place where the manticore eats his prey .. .not wanting to get his bed dirty in the tower. A clifftop blood stained, scattered with bones old and new and skeletons at the bottom, overgrown with grass and other plant life. Pretty good scene. And some giant worker ants picking over the bodies. Who are fine with taking a live human back to the nest. And if you kill them then in an hour or so some soldier ants show up to swarm the area. Perfect! It makes sense! That the ants are there in the first place and that the soldier ants eventually show up. It’s what SHOULD happen. 

The tower has a few floors, like, four or five, and as many rooms. Maybe. I say maybe because there’s no map. We get a small map of the lands around the tower, showing the relationship of the bandit camp to the tower to the feeding grounds, along with a small river/creek to help with the inevitable sneaking plan. But we don’t get a plan of the tower. There’s a sideview of the outside, noting some features like a large hole in the side and windows (and some advice inside for gaining entry that way) but nothing about the interior. It’s just described, textually. Yes, I suppose that theoritically this can work. But, just include a map man; it’s a thousand times easier. 

It’s pretty basic inside. A bathroom with giant worms in it. A storage room with animated armor. The manticore, who is open to some Smaug-like talky talk Maybe that happens. Or, maybe, he’s not in the tower and the party has some time for an ambush and explore before he comes home. Either way. Nice.

And then there’s the “extra” encounter. One floor has a ghost on it. The sorceress that once lived here. She’s the usual ranty/moments of clarity ghost. Except … if someone agrees to stay with her … she remains mostly lucid. And les them go eventually. And even bestows spell power on them … but she touches them to do it … aging them! Nicely done! We turn a minor also-ran encounter in to something that could hang around the campaign for a long time and also speaks to the essence of what a ghost encounter is. Another nod to the way things SHOULD work, things that seem like they fit, or are realistic. Not just a throw away encounter. Perfect!

It should be obvious I’m pretty enamored with the situations in this. And the advice to the DM, on gaining entry to to tower and where the manticore can’t fit, for example, is spot on what the DM needs to run the thing. The things that don’t work here are relatively minor. 

Treasure is f the “roll once on the loot table in the rulebook” variety. Not cool. Add some colour and flavour to your treasure man! And, there’s a curse on the tower that makes approaching it very difficult … I’m not sure about this. Basically, if you fail then you try to keep your friends from going in to the tower. “Its doomed, an we will be also! You’re my bud and I can’t let you do that!” Pretty good, actually, but in practice I’m not sure how its going to work over time. Two factions of the party? And on return visits? This could be the major holdup in the adventure … and thus a few more words of advice would be in order.

It IS wordy. We’ve got some “This room was once a … “ text going on. The text, while not full on conversational in style, does trend in tha direction. We’ve got some if/then statements. Combined with the textual description of the levels, insertions of motivations and so on, then we’ve got room entries that are trending to half a standard page or more. And that’s not something you can scan easily without some extra bolding, whitespace, or so on to help the DM orient themselves. You either gotta be terse or do the heavy lift of the formatting and layout to help with DM scanning … and this doesn’t do that.

This is a decent little adventure. Decent enough that, being three years old, I may check out some of the others in the line to see which ones are better and which ones worse. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is only two pages, with one of them being the cover. It does nothing to help you make a purchasing decision.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/260668/Adventure-Framework-42-Whitestone-Tower?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts | 13 Comments

Wavestone Keep

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Kevin Conyers
ShickTohp
OSE
Level 3

Fear the waves, the tides and the sea itself! A fearsome tower of stone roams the oceans, delivering its deadly cargo of lizardmen wherever it happens to land!

*sigh*

Eight pages. Nine rooms, all on two pages. Which could have been one, honestly.

Look at that tagline. Fear the waves, the tides, the sea itself! A fearsome tower of stone! Note: this adventure doesn’t even have a tower, that’s how AWESOEM it is!. The existence of waves, tides and sea must be extrapolated, allowing the DM to put a bunch of extra time and effort in things, allowing them to exercise their brain muscle!

Seriously, no tower. A cave complex, but no tower. Note the adventure tidal: Wavestone Keep. No keep. At all. Just caves. How’s that for marketing oomph?! Yeah baby, it’s open ended, allowing the DM to fill in the gaps!

How about a bunch of rooms with lizard men and kobolds who just wait in side to die, not responding to anything? You got it! Wave after wave of them, where “wave” is defined as the waves in the tagline, I guess? It’s too complex for a mere plebe like myself to understand.

Like, what the fuck am I supposed to say about this thing? “Crudely carved room, stone protrusions serve as beds.” Woaaah! I’m inspired! How about the 2d10 lizard men that are inside? You know it baby! There’s a challenge for you! Your brain just SPRINGS in to action when something like this pops across the page. “Natural cave with a carefully cleaned floor?” Count me in! My players will DROOL with anticipation at that! And the loot! That room contains AT LEAST 4000gp worth of treasure, allowing the DM to just fill everything in on their own without having to worry about a designer filling it in for them!

Wait, wait, back to the 2d10 lizard men! EVERY room is like that, with a variable number of monsters/guards. How’s that for sticking it to man?1 No need to actually put itin, it could be 1 or it could be 10! Masterful game design!

How about that wandering table with giant rates and bats on it?! You remember that old marketing line that D&D was limited only by your imagination? Rubbish! This is clearly not limited by imagination AT ALL, and has NOTHING to do with imagination! The marketing lies, this is the real deal, right here!

“Crumbly natural cabe, stone floor littered with detritus.” Thrill at that terse description motherfuckers! Fuck your evocative writing! This adventure don’t need it! 

Room after room like this. All nine of them. With variable monsters. With a short description tat says nothing. With DM text that elaborates on nothing but what there is to stab. Sadly, there’s no details on how many egg clusters there are on the nesting room, or what lizard men eggs taste like. 

A boy can dream.

I find my recent run of adventures deplorable and they make me want to giv eup on life. Not kill myself. Just stare at the screen, numbly. So, we gonna do something bout that.

Ok fuckers, you made it this far. Welcome to the next Bryce Lynch adventure design contest. There’s only one prize. $100. And you get a handwritten card from me calling you not a fucking idiot. Unless it turns out you are one. 

You get nine fucking rooms and eight fucking pages. And PLEASE don’t feel the need to use all eight pages. Pretty please?  Entries must be received by March 15th. The title has to be Wavestone Keep, but you can’t use that name, just call it something like that. And the marketing blurb has to be “Fear the waves, the tides and the sea itself! A fearsome tower of stone roams the oceans, delivering its deadly cargo of lizardmen wherever it happens to land!” But, again, you can’t use that wording, come up with the same fucking thing though. Oh, and buy a copy of this shit-fest as inspiration. br*********@***il.com That’s a zero and not an o in there.

This is $1 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/386162/Wavestone-Keep?1892600

Posted in 2 out of 10, 5e, Adventurers League, Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeon Magazine, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, God Effort, Level 0, Level 1, Level 12, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, Level 6, Level 8, Level 9, Millions and Millions of its Babies, My Life is a Living Fucking Hell, Pathfinder, Reviews, SciFi, The Worst EVAR?, Uncategorized | 69 Comments

The Cauldron

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jon Bertani
The Merciless Merchants
OSE
Levels 3-7

Rumors abound of treacherous jungles with giant birds, carnivorous apes, a smoking and angry volcano, and even hushed whispers of a giant sea creature that protects the island! But the lure of countless lost treasures of the fallen civilization may be more tantalizing than old tales told by fools and drunks.

You make me. Feel like. I’m living a teenage dream. The way you turn me on. I can’t sleep. I mean, not the adventure. I’m talking about you, gentle reader. Let’s run away and don’t ever look back! 

This 25 page adventure details about a six locations on a tropical island. AKA: Dread. We can dance until we die. As Dread clones go, this one is far better than usual and, also, suitable to a shorter game … a session or two or three, maybe four, instead of Dreads “We’re gonna fucking be here for a while …” There’s nothing wrong with the long game as Dread enables, but sometimes you’re looking for a quickie tropical game treasure map. You and I. And the writing is generally evocative and put together well, if a bit long.

There’s a bunch of garbage in the beginning about hooks, and reverse pickpockets and shit, but, ultimately, you get a treasure map to an island about a week away with a big X on the map like, a “lost temple/treasure!” note on it. That’s all you fucking need man. Will be young forever.

Supporting the sea voyage, and the hooks, and general fuckwitery, are three different pirate ships and rews that the DMcan use to spice things up. Wandering encounters on the ocean, or near the island, or aybe on the return journey. They are MUCH more fully formed than the usual dreck you come across. You get a ship name, a fun little description of it that takes up no more than a sentence, and a sentence each on the captain, someone else important like maybe the first mate, and another for the pirate crew. Together they amount to four fucking sentences and bring SO much more life to the things than the usual adventure does. The pirate shit is a big part of these things, usually, and it’s good to see someone deliver on the promise of some fun pirate content. “The Bone Vulture” has bird bones attached to the ship because the captain things it bring him luck. Captain Vaigle is very superstitious about small things, constantly runk making him fearless, and an expert at close-shore ship maneuvering. Legless Freynar the first mate is a legless barbarian from the far north with a very intimidating voice the crew responds to immediately. The crew is a very superstitious lot that listen more to the first mate than the captain. You get it, they got some color and fucking life to them and they seem fucking fun to run! And when I’m excited to run something, especially lame ass pirates, then that’s a good job!

Our wandering tables do a pretty decent job as well of brining the mundane and the exotic. Things from the rumor tables show up, and each entry gets one sentence to kind of bring them to life and ge the DM riffing on the encounter. I love that. Got a motel and built a fort out of sheet! One of my favorite is just a fight breaking out among the ships crew you’re on. Just the mundane shit that a DM can riff on. There’s gonna be some shivving, taking sides, and sme ocean justice kiddos! All cause the wandering table says “Squabble on the ship! Sailors begin fighting each other over some argument.” Ima get your heart racing in my skin-tight jeans

We hit the island and you’ve got some of the classic encounters from Dread. Volcano plateau with temple. Cannibal tribe. Good tribe. Then you’ve got a dragon living UNDA DA SEA in the lagoon and a small abandoned temple with just a few locations … it being just above ground ruins. And then you’ve got the wrecked ships on the beach. What d oyou do? Hey Mr Adventure Person … you’re on your ship and you see some wrecked ships on the beach .. .what do you do? What comes to mind? Well … do fucking HARPIES come to mind!?! It’s a fucking GREAT harpy encounter! Fuck! Yeah! Classic baby! They charm the young sailors and get them to wreck their ships. Sailor heads, sailor heads, eat them up , YUM! (More on this kick ass encounter later.) So, you get my vote for some decent encounters … although they do tend to be a little sandboxy and open-ended and could use a real adventuring location at some point on the island … and the volcano temple isn’t really large enough to count. You want a Kopru complex (and some more treasure, i think … it seems a bit light … unless OSE is on the silver standard?) 

Formatting is pretty good .. .you get a longish opening paragraph with some keyword bolding and then bullets underneath that expand on those keywords. It’s a good format, one of my favs … even though the text does a run a bit long in the various descriptions. It’s not extravagant, but I really do think it’s pushing things for scanning purposes ,,, but, sure, it falls inside the range of normal for good scanning, if at the end of the that spectrum. And, bonus point, there’s some clarifying artwork at one point tat makes on of the volcano rooms really come to life!  When  you look at me, just one touch.

I’m pretty happy with the language, even though I do think the evocative writing is not used consistently. But when it does it’s pretty good! A large tied gourd holds one tribes loot. Good fitting in to the theme of the village and I can visualize it being wrapped up A LOT in grass twine or some such … even if the description does use the hated word “large.” But, in other places we get longer visuals, like “Several corpses are strewn about, some even hanging from trees with dangling entrails that the curling mists reveal once closer. Broken branches, feathers, dung and foliage make a series of filthy tiered nests among the towering trees” Dangling entrails in the mist for the win kids! Other visualis, like a chief being the only one in the village with a bit of metal armor “a shining open faced helm with ornate eye slits.” A tribe of cannibals with just suede like that? I’m signing up for that visual! 

Oh, and the fucking harpies again. They’ve got one dude they are keeping alive in their main nest, from a wrecked ship, who they are using for breeding .. .and he’s guarding a harpy baby, his, with his life. Fuck man. Heavy. Oh! Oh! And the wandering tables do have sailors refugees, stranded pirates and the like routinely showing up, for roleplaying fun and maybe joining your crew, since they are stranded … that’s awesome! 

Again, quite short, I think, compared to Dread, but really well done. It could use a larger adventure site on the island and maybe one more thing going on with the island. There are ROCs and the lag0on dragon, I guess … as a DM you should be ramping that shit up I guess.That part could be a little more explicit .. .even though the adventure tells you to use them frequently. It just doesn’t FEEL right, I guess, the way it’s communicate. Which is weird because a lot of the rest of adventure DOES feel right. This could be polished a bit more, I guess I’m saying, to bring the minor stuff more to life. Still, good jorb!

I’ll be your teenage dream tonight!

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is thirteen pages, and shows the pirate ships, the general island and that great harpy encounter. Good preview … although the rest of the island is not quite at the harpy level.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/383741/The-Cauldron?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

Bandits Below!

Posted on February 26, 2022 by Bryce Lynch 
By Eric Moss
Bugbear Games
OSR
Level ?

A seemingly innocuous store front, Just don’t look below the floorboards!

This seven page adventure uses two pages to describe ten rooms, about evenly split between a building above ground a small cave/dugout below ground. The above ground portion seems more natural, while the below ground portion is lacking in anything interesting at all. This is, essentially, a one page dungeon padded out with extra text and blank pages. That’s disappointing, as is the rather basic premise.

There’s not much going on here in terms of plot, which is ok. The hooks are basically “you’re in the shop and something happens”, which is pretty much word for word what the hooks says, “something.” Or, you’re sent to find a kidnap victim. I’m not really upset at this, but, it also feels like “some bandits using this store as a front” could use a little more to it. I don’t know, a paragraph describing their extortion schemes or something. 

The front itself is a tad interesting, but could be better. You’ve got a grumpy old man with an eyepatch running a general store. I’m imaging a run down one, anthough tha’s not mentioned. He’s a coward and lets the bandits use the stor as a front. Again, I think maybe a little more, in the intro, could have been good here. He’s got money troubles or a sick mom or something, a little bit more depth to him. In any event, in times of trouble he gets the fuck out of dodge, which is a great realistic reaction … something the upper level/front business does well. In the back room you’ve got some tables with some bandits hanging out playing cards. I’m imagining something out of the Sopranos, although there’s not anything more to it than “three dudes in a back room playing cards.” Still, again, this is a realistic kind of thing and I like it. It feels right. I could have used a bit more description, to get a vibe going in the room tha the DM can then communicate to the players. We’re not talking about the need for a lot here, just a few more words, maybe one sentence that describes the room/social club. In a similar vein, we’ve got two dudes sitting out the “special guests” room, guarding it. That’s all we get, they are in a foyer, with it being undescribed. I imagine them sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper, the legs up or some such. It’s good that I’m going there, that my brain is making up these little scenes … but the designer could have added a sentence to bring that vignette more fully to life. 

When the adventure moves out of the front store and down in the basement dugout, then the wheels fall off. It’s just a room with a couple of bandits in it. Bandits ambush in the room that has the entrance trapdoor in the ceiling. How, in what I assume is an empty room? Sure, i can put some cratesin it or something. Or, the designer can provide one sentence more about the room that brings it to life. And not even the minimal brain spike from the upper floors are included in the basement … it’s just dudes in a room. 

There’s just nothing here to work with. It’s padded out with nonsense, like, the backroom has goods for the general store that the guy legally acquired. Ok, sure, what’s the point in the legally aquired thing? It’s not going to make one difference one way or another. The padding and more conversational 5e text style (and it looks like it’s done in one of those 5e adventure templates) doesn’t provide anything to work with DURING the adventure and just detracts from the scanning.

As a small single location for the party to adventure in, a quick raid on a storefront bandit lair, it’s small. And that’s ok. But the lack of entanglements, or things in the room to work with, or evocative writing to help more fully bring the adventure to life is really dragging it down for me, no matter the small concessions to the more realistic bandit behaviours on the first and second floors of the building.

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/386378/Quick-Micro-Dungeons-2–Bandits-Below?189260

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments