tenfootpole.org

B Everett Dutton
CLAYMORE
OSE
"Low Levels"

UNITY!

THE MARTIAL CULT OF BLOOD KNIGHT GAIUS is a 20-page dungeon crawl about a religious order of vampires who deny their feeding urges, instead only drinking the blood of those whom they have given a formal chance to defend themselves.

There’s a reason I have not gotten to the things on my list. Calling your adventure “The Martial 

This 20 page dungeon is about a dragon that is actually good. Oh, wait no, it’s about a captured princess who is actually evil. Oh, wait, no, it’s about vampires that don’t drink blood. Unless they defeat you in honorable combat. Which means they cheat. It’s one encounter and not an adventure.

Cult of Blood Knight Gaius” and the marketing saying its about a cult of honorable vampires that don’t drink blood … well … as much as some things turn me on and get me excited, other things, like scat, turn me off. And that marketing is one of them. I mean, I’m not a pretentious fellow. Yes, I am having a bloody mary before work this morning. But that’s more to deal with the terrible ennui. 

So, yeah, honorable vampires in a monastery. Their leader, Gaius, fight  you one on one in an arena. There’s a magic circle that heats up your metal items, so, you’re gimped. And if he starts to lose then he switches from bitch slapping you to using a staff and then spells and then a blade. 

This is, essentially, the only thing to do. You can wander around the nine rooms (ten if you count the arena!) and poke your fucking head in and look at shit.; But none of hte vampires fight you. There’s no real interactivity. Vampire mass involves you falling asleep until someone wakes you up. They get pissed at you if you steal their candlesticks that are covered in wax, but they don’t attack. Not honorable. SO, wander the fuck around and get bored and then someone in the party fights Gaius.

Oh shit! Oh shot! I forgot! They got some machinery that milks people of blood. SO, throw in some lame ass techno shit in that room only, also.

Ok, so, you’ve decided to fight some vampires. Good fucking luck! I mean, vampires, right? Well …. They are 2HD. Except for Gaius who is 3 HD. And really all they can do is maybe hypnotize you. This was, I think, for me the most disappointing aspect of 5e, as a system. The dumbing down of the HD of classic creatures. Look, you can’t put in a 15HD orc. You can’t mix him in to a bunch of 1HD orc. The players need to be able to make choices for their characters and dumping in rando HD defeats their ability to do that. The game is no longer about choices, or pushing your luck, but just about rando shit. And rando shit like that aint fun. Vampires have more HD and have more abilities. They are fearsome opponents. They are not your first level adventure and pussy ass motherfuckers, like they are portrayed here. Yes, sure, you can have a non-traditional monster. And not every adventure has to be a dungeon to explore. But, also, if you’re gonna put in a twist its gonna have to be a real twist and not some hackneyed BS. 

Let’s see. SOmoene feeds a captive vampire a bowl of porridge. SO, there’s that. The vampires standing guard outside wear heavy felt garments and veils so they can stand in the sun. And they all like to hold garlic cloves as penance. The wanderer table has some vampires who get after you if you are snooping hwre you shouldnt be, but, there’s no real indication of what that means. In the entry or in the rooms. The map is a symmetrical fuckfest, the worst kind of map. Why not just make it a dwarven temple to boot? Oh, wait, it’s a monastery, so, the meme continues unabated. 

I don’t know. The designer dumps in random text before a couple of room, so, you think you’re at the end of the room descriptions but then you get another room after the long section about some NPC found in the next room. SO, yeah, I understand WHY the decision was made, even though it’s a BAD decision.

SO, not an adventure. It’s a side-trek, from Dungeon. Kill the vampire and win 500gp! Heh. I think the fuck not. One encounter, some nosing around. No real role-play notes to drag it out in a fun and memorable evening. Cause if you’re gonna do this then you need something else also and roleplay seems to the easiest thing to dump in to something like this. SO, notes for the DM on building tension, some shit that can happen, and so on, some better NPC”s. SOme faction play. Maybe. But it’s still just gonna be one fucking fight after poking your nose around. This is the kind of shit I throw in a town between games, not something to buy from Exalted. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. You get a nine page preview, which is enough to show the writing style and get the vibe for the adventure, so, good job with that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/380520/The-Martial-Cult-of-Blood-Knight-Gaius?1892600

By Adamo Dagradi
Mountains of Weirdness blog
OSE
Levels 2-4

Partially collapsed 400 years ago, during a massive earthquake that completely destroyed the

surrounding city of Spina. Empty since a few days after the cataclysm, when the city was abandoned by the few survivors.Only the Incarnate of the Goddess Pulchra Morte (N – Female) remains, a girl named Dafne, chosen since before birth to be the God’s representative on earth and granted immortality by Morte, until a sign showed the arrival of the next Incarnate. The sign which heralded her coming was the apparent death and resuscitation of her mother, while pregnant, in front of Morte’s altar. Dafne looks like a 17 years old girl and usually wears makeup that makes her face look like a skull, she dresses in red robes taken from the ancient clergy’s apparel

This eight page adventure details four levels of a temple with about fifty rooms. As the ration would tend to indicate, this is a relatively minimally keyed based adventure. Full of loot, and mostly devoid of creatures (only four fixed encounters?) it also tends to lack in evocative descriptions and interactivity. A weird one, that seems to mimic form but without its function?

Request-a-thon continues with this quirky thing. You get four pages of hand-drawn maps, that have all the quaintness one could desire in a (relatively) small map. Not exactly linear but also not exactly looping, we get a kind of star shape out of them, with rooms hanging off of loop corridors. Wanderers, 1 in 6 checked each turn, seem to be the major enemy here. For there are only four listed encounters in the text? And they all occur on the last level, mostly beasts. A tiger, a bear, a nymph, and a ghost.  This gives the thing a kind of empty feel to it. Almost haunting, I guess? Or, as a player, something less than haunting. Combining that sparseness of encounters with the lack of interactivity produces a weird sort of thing where you just wander around and loot the rooms? You walk in, search the place, take your jug or urine or silver hairpin, and move on the next room? There’s a pool or two where you can heal, but that seems less than fulfilling for a fifty room dungeon?

Descriptions tend HEAVILY toward minimalism. “Ex-storeroom, now museum. Dafne gathers here everything that she finds in the city’s ruins and that sparks her interest. Dolls. Tools. Trinkets” This is one of the longer descriptions. The rooms don’t really get much of a description at all, in fact. You get a room name, like “Female Temple Area” and in the description “In good shape but otherwise empty.” Uh. Ok. Or a storage room that just lists the contents. There’s a lack of overall vibe for the rooms. No real effort to bring them alive that is consistent throughout the work. One of the best is “Stone steps, sleek with humidity . Smell of burned herbs and fat from below.” Which is pretty good for stairs, but, that description, the first encounter area, is by no means an example. “Round room with stone bleachers on the sides and a pool in the middle. The water is murky, but clearer and colder on the bottom, 2 meters down” That’s more typical, and, even tending towards the more descriptive for the rooms in this.

I’m not really sure what to make of this. “. In a hole on the third northmost column a rotten leather patch is stuck and contains a gold ring with the sigil of the Malaterra family (70 gp – 300 if returned to the heirs).” That’s typical of the treasures … something interesting about them being hidden with a little description of them. And, I’d say that’s the best part of this, along with the maps and, perhaps, the wanderers table. But, I don’t really see how you can sustain that?

And the formatting? Font sizes change. Some monsters are bolded on some levels and on other levels they are not. (Pixies on the first level, for example.) A kind of sloppiness in the formatting. I guess it works, as an example of just writing things down and pushing it out the door. Yeah, you gotta publish and real artists ship. But, also, you gotta make it a kind of cohesive whole. And that’s missing from the formatting of this, which is all over the place. Almost like the manually set literal mimeograph and pastups of the olden days. Almost. 

There’s a certain degree of promise here, I think. You can see the designer is kind of on the right track with things. Almost as if they are playing Fake It Until You Make It. Which is fine; it’s how you get better. But, the lack of interactivity is rough, as is the soreness of both encounter and description. The lack of consistent formatting it just the final bit of straw. 

But, hey, it’s free on the designers blog! It looks like it may be the designers first dungeon, so, hey, Congrats Man! But do a lot better next time.

https://mountainsofweirdness.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-temple-of-pulchra-morte.html

By Michael Grayson S
Mapmaster Battlemaps
2e
Level 1

And in the middle of this vast sky, there sits an impressive palace of scattered towers and keeps. They hang suspended amidst the clouds from which they rise, as though the pillowy vapors support them, sometimes separated from each other by a mile or more of distance. The architecture is varied, as if erected by different builders of different times, some of them perhaps even alien to the observer. To the east might sit some great ziggurat and to the west something more akin to a tudor castle. Pyramids, obelisks, towers and even mammoth copper domes all stand perplexingly arrayed at dizzying heights. In the darker depths an observer might catch a glimpse of some, strange non-euclidean structure for a moment before the mists swallowed it.

This 113 page dungeon  is the first 100 rooms of a 1001 room dungeon. It’s essentially Dragons Lair, the adventure,maybe mashed up with Myst,  with the party teleporting from one rando room to another and having a little isolated adventure piece. The encounters are interesting enough. Although the evocative nature of the rooms comes not from the text but from the rendered 3d pictures of each. 

Woah, boy, where to start with this one? This is the first booklet in a series, each of the booklets describing the next 100 rooms in the Palace of 1001 Rooms. That’s a kind of mythical place. As the intro says: one of the first doors in Sigil leads to it. A place beyond the edge of the world. I saw one of the later. Looks like the latest kickstarter was for chapter 7, so, rooms 700-800 … and thus dude has delivered 800 rooms so far of his 1001. That’s a feat in and of itself! Each section looks themed, and this one, the first one, is the Gatehouse. The “end” room of each section leads to the next section,  with the claim that the challenge level increases in each booklet. This, a kind of campaign.

Now, you got to hang in there with me … there is no map. Some of the room have descriptions that say that a certain tradoor or some such leads to room 6 or something like that. But that’s not why there isn’t a map. Instead, every time you use a door it leads somewhere new. You see, each room number corresponds to a page number. So, when the party goes through a door you roll and see which room they end up in. A significant number of pages is spent describing how this works and nerfing any magic spells, etc, that could let the party dig through a wall, Wizard Eye and so on, as is traditional in one of these teleport door adventures. I don’t really get why the fuck the designer did this? And I don’t buy the “magical nature of the mythic location!” nonsense. Just put in a fucking map man. This is what contributes, among other things, to the Dragon’s Lair vibe it’s got going on. 

But, that’s not the major deviation from the norm with this. There is, as mentioned, one room to a page. And each room has a rendered art piece for the room, , taking up about half the page, showing it and the major features. This is where the Myst reference comes in, among other place. You get this kind of view in to the room, as the DM. The little art piece has some numbers on it and the room text has notes related to those numbers. The chamber pot and cutlery, tapestry, an unseen servant washing dishes, and hand towel. This is the feature that attracted me to review this, for you all know how I am drawn to folk trying to experiment. I really like the little art pieces as a way to visualize the room. And the little numbers, referring back to the text are interesting. Oh, yeah, and I don’t think it works well.

The renders are all samey in their art style, as one would expect, but, I think the vibe of the rooms are different. There really is something to the Less Is More style of describing rooms. Little brief and evocative vignettes let your mind fill things in, but leaves the edges fuzzy. There’s something immensely appealing about the renders, and, yet, I don’t think they work as well as just an evocative room description would.it’s too concrete. And, because it’s visual, there’s no “room”, inside your brain, to fill things in, with the result being it looks a little dull … at least as compared to THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION! [Insert rainbow emoji)

Read aloud is a little TOO terse. “You emerge from the portal into the bottom landing of a

 cool spiral staircase.” Uh, sure. “The room smells of machine oil. A series of vaulted arches run against one wall.” And that’s for a relatively complex room with pillars, arches, stairs, tradoor, weapon racks and the like. Which, I must say, I can describe from the render. But, idk. It feels disconnected from the read-aloud. 

And then there’s weird randomness in the descriptions which don’t seem to make sense. I can’t figure out if I’m not getting something or if it’s dungeon dressing or just filler background. “The Builders prepared this room with a special wax and a broken clay ziggurat, which was mixed with the mortar” and “Someone has chalked an arrow on the wall pointing to the farthest portal down the wall in a vain attempt to leave a trail for others to follow later. A few feet away, the same chalk has scratched out 7 straight lines. AFAIK, nothing is done with either of these. The first is maybe just background padding? Or maybe background padding and dungeon dressing? The second is either dungeon dressing or a clue to a puzzle? But the rooms are so disjointed, (Dragon’s Lair!) that I don’t see it making sense?

And then there’s this kind of abstracted description thing it does in places. “A tribe of goblins live here.” Sure. It’s stabbing time. How many? No clue. None at ALL. A few? A bajillion? IDK. And this sort of thing is all over the place

But, the variety of room, and things to do in them, is quite nice. One room is a pillared rotunda. Archways. Gargoyles looking down, a dozen or so. A mosaic on the floor, and in the middle of it a slate pedestal with glowing runes on it reading, in Sylvan Elf “Run of Mind Shielding”. Maybe a little on the nose, but, also, a nice little puzzle and atmospheric for an IDENTIFY pedestal. 

I know the renders are the gimmick here. But I can’t help thinking that a more traditional format would have suited this better. Nuke the render. Spend the render time instead on working those evocative & terse room descriptions HARD. Did things get better in the later volumes? Idk. The first one is usually either the best of the nearly the worst in a collected volume, in my experience.

This is $30 at DriveThru.No preview. Which Sucks ass. But, you can go to the website of te designer and see a preview at https://mapmasterbattlemaps.com/the-palace-of-1001-rooms-1/btxusf8mxow3qd4ekkinhzfg392282

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/412181/The-Palace-of-1001-Rooms-Chapter-1–The–Gatehouse?1892600

By Carl Ellis
Broken Arch Publishing
OSE
Levels 1-3

A Scriveners Guild. Seemingly a place of quiet work and contemplation, however its Guild Master is a Wizard of mighty repute and holds many treasures. Recently, they have gained possession of a rare and sought after tome. Plan, cheat, or lie your way into the organisation and, perhaps, make away with the prize.

This 24 page digest adventure uses about eleven pages to describe 38 rooms in a scriveners guild. It’s not a dungeon. It’s not a heist. I don’t know what the fuck it is. Incomplete?

I don’t know what the fuck a heist is. You’re robbing some shit? Ok, I went and read the SLy Flourish article. And this thing ain’t that.

Let’s see here … “Heists have multiple potential entrances.” This adventure has one. The front door. It’s set in a manor home, according to all the art and text, but there’s only one door. The front one. No root celler. No back door. The generic overview text says the rooms have long tall windows, but we never hear of that again, or see it on the map. So, no, there are not multiple potential entrances.

Hmmm … “Have multiple paths within the location’ says the flourish of sly’s. Nope. Just your standard corridor with doors on it. One stairway up to the second floor. One stairway down to the basement. One down to the secret basement. No balconies or shit. So, not multiple paths to be found.

Hmmm ‘Has secret paths and shortcuts to discover.” None of those. Well, one secret door, to the secret stairs to the secret dungeon level. 

Hmmm “Inhabitants.” Who are the guards, how many, what is their behaviour, etc. Nope, none of that. Well, there is a guard mentioned in room two. It says he guards room one at night at sometimes comes in to room two to tend the fire. THEN YOU PUT THAT FUCKING INFORMATION IN ROOM ONE!!!!!!!!!! Seriously, man, the number of times I see “the monsters here in room thirteen react to noises in room seven” is unreal. You put that fucking shit in room seven, the room where the DM needs the information. Fucking christ …

So, no grounds for the manor. No multiple entrances. No real NPC’s to interact with. Aggressively generic content like “The Guild Master has received a secret Grimoire that outside forces desperately want.” And I’m not fucking around here. Thats the extent of it. Or “Within the Secret Study is an ancient shrine to an unknown God.” Or “A false bottom in a desk draw has a cipher book and coded correspondence.” That’s it. Nothing more. “The kitchen staff takes pride in their work” … but no other mention of them at all. 

No guards, just the one in room two. Nothing mentioned about any more at all. So, non order of battle or how the scribes react to a incursion. Oh, the treasurer is a 7HD fighting man. So, there’s that I guess. The guildmaster just sits in thee final room guarding his book. 

It’s not a fucking dungeon because there is nothing to interact with … not even creatures (ok, there are 3 … in 36 rooms: the guard, the treasurer and the guildmaster.) Walk in a room, and walk out again. It’s not a heist because it’s not written like one. There are no resources to take advantage of for an infiltration, sneaking in, or roleplaying in. It’s aggressively generic. 

THERE’S NOTHING HERE. it’s just a generic description of a scribe guild.

This is $5.50 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. Buy is sight unseen, sucker.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/407008/Poached-Parchment?1892600

By Jokin Andersson, Johan Nordinge, Olav Nygard
Cyclopean Games
S&W
Level 2? They never say ... ?

There once lived a Moon Sage in a wondrous palace. Dilimbabbar—for such was his name—was a leader of armies and a scholar of the night sky. In his palace, he collected wondrous things and hoarded riches beyond belief. He summoned servants from the ether and demons from the earth to bring treasures no mortal eyes had ever seen. But that was long ago, before the flood washed over the lands. Now, the Sage is lost to an unknown fate, his powers having faltered. Yet his palace remains, brimming with wealth locked away in the vacant halls. …or so travelers say, telling tales to each other under starlit skies.

This sixteen page adventure uses five pages to describe sixteen rooms in an arabian nights/sumerian type setting. Decent interactivity, but a shit way of presenting it that I’m not gonna dig through in order to run it. 

Seems unfair, right? I mean, you come up with an ok adventure and then it gets ignored because you wrote it in Basque in iambic pentameter. Cause there’s 600 hundred other adventures that are ok, or better, and easier to use.

Let’s cover some random encounters! I fucking love them in this, and when I saw them I was cautiously optimistic about the adventure to come. “The warm wind brings the laughing voices of a group of women, bathing in an azure pond of remarkable depth.” Hey, man, that will get some players attention! And, for once, they ain’t Oh Brother sirens! Or, how about “A long line of prisoners of war are being escorted to Sippar by a troop of well-armed soldiers. One of the prisoners is an Akkadian prince, promising a bountiful reward if he were to be freed and brought to his kinfolks in Ashur”. Where “troop” is define as “74” … which seems a little large to get up to some fun, but, still … that’s a great concept! And the random encounters on the way to dungeon are pretty much all like this. A bolded sentence that grabs you and a follow up sentence that only adds to it. Really top notch chance encounters. In contrast to the actual wanderers in the dungeon, which are, like “1d10 centipedes.” Meh. Ok, then how about “1d6 skeletons”? No. Yeah, me neither. A real disappointment after those desert encounters. (Which, I will continue to praise on, are REALLY fucking good for their size. Like, hex crawl good.)

Ok, so, you’re going on The Wonderous Hoard adventure and you’re hired to go to the dungeon and bring back this mask. And told you can only take two things from the dungeon or you’ll be cursed or something. Grrrr … ok. I’m not sure I’m down with that. It absolutely fits the theme of the arabian nights/folklore thing this adventure has going on. Almost every creature is a person or demon or insect/animal, so, it’s got the human-centric/realism thing down pat, which I groove on, and the “only take two each” fits in with that. And if you do take more than two then theres this chance of not escaping the dungeon and being cursed afterwards … more for each thing beyond two each. So. Ok. It’s a different vibe, I guess, which is ok. 

Ok, so, the actual adventure. It’s ok. The rooms have some decent things in them to interact with. A hallway in tiles of glazed clay in blue and black … the severed corpse of an adventurer in the middle of it. That’s fun! And the man, dressed as if from Sippar, carries a healing potion  of the sort sometimes sold in the foreigners district – in a small leather pouch. That’s hw you integrate extra fucking information. Not quite the usual evocative writing, but something behind it. Or, how about the Moon Beasts room! “A giant centipede lies coiled in the middle of the lower room, preternatural frost radiating from its body. It is chained by silver shackles to a large meteoric rock that prevents it from climbing the balcony, but not from moving freely—albeit with some effort—across the rest of the room.” I love a truly giant centipede … especially as a moon beast!

And then the magic items are great also. The Bone Crown brings back to life anyone who wears it. Until they take it off and they drop dead again. How fun! The “mundane’ magic items gets a little bit of fun to them and a large percentage are non-standard. A good mix, with everything done well.

But man, that fucking text is a fucking mess. “It was here that the moon sage rested between his campaigns.” So the fuck what? How does that contribute to play at the table? More importantly, lets look at the COMPLETE CHAOS that is the room organization in this. I present room two.

Taking up a column (not unusual here, for the text to stretch out that far in this adventure), we get a room with walls covered with shelves stacked with cuneiform tablets. Which contain astrological calculations and formulas. Then we get notes about a secret door in the room. THen the same paragraph tells us about glass vials and amphorea with strange infusions scattered on the floor, some broken. Then what in the vials. Then that there’s a robe in the corner of the room. Then a paragraph break to tell us about the robe. Then another paragraph to tell us about a big round rock sitting in one of the wall. 

It’s almost a stream of consciousness writing style, for organizing the text. SOmething gets mentioned, then some details about that. Then something else gets mentioned in the same paragraph. With details about that. Thus, any overview of the room requires a full on grokking of the room. You can’t scan the text, at least not easily. And then shit just shows up elsewhere in the room descriptions, in other paragraphs, There seems to be no  overarching format at all other than “I guess I’ll put this here now.” And that’s not cool.

Either giove an overview of everything in the room, up front, that the players will notice, or separate them out in to separate paragraphs, Or put them in bullets. Or something. But I, as the DM, need to be able, when the party enters the room, relate to obvious contents in split second. A second, maybe two, that’s how long I have to glance at the text Before I start relating shit. And the format chosen needs to support that.

And this don’t do that. You have to dig. You have to read the entire thing, slowing down the game. You have to hunt for information. I missed the secret door location TWICE in room two, while scanning the room description. That’s not cool. The descriptions are long. They pad out with useless information, and they are arranged in a manner not conducive to running it at the table. Uncool man. Uncool.

But man, those random desert encounters … In the middle of the desert, a city of tents has sprung up. Here, a drunken revelry is held to the deafening sounds of countless cicadas. The ecstatic festivities culminates in an ancient ritual—led by Tuol Aham, a copper skinned priest from Borsippa—where two teenage boys are sacrificed to summon the vile cockroach demon Bahaga.

Also, when you call your adventure The Wonderous Hoard, then, maybe, you should have a wonderous hoard in it? “There are plenty of precious things in here for example …” (gives three examples …) Hmmm, so, not so much wonderous?

This is $3 at DriveThru.The preview is five pages. You get to see a good portion of those desert encounters, ad well as the intro. Meh. Show us a fucking room man! Or three! So we can make a real purchasing decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/205392/The-Wondrous-Hoard-SW-compatible?1892600