tenfootpole.org

Number SOMETHING in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Dust & Stars
Settembrini
OSRIC
Levels 9-12

This twenty pages adventure describes a tower with about thirty locations. It’s got a cohesive backstory that makes you want to know more and does a good job placing monsters in an intelligent fashion in a high level adventure. It’s also single column and could use an edit.

The Space|Time War. The fleets of the Eternal Empire. The Star Pump. Cosmo-port. A dying god. A river of dust, fine as silt. Celestial Cult. That’s how you write a fucking backstory man! Taking up most of a page, it offers no real explanations of what the fuck is going on but you just star at it, trying to take it all in, wanting to know more. It’s exactly the kind of “Don’t Explain Things” that I’m talking about when I mention that topic. It makes the mind race!

If you say the name of the tower, outloud, then something weird happens. Why the fuck doesn’t this happen in more adventures? Especially high level ones? Because of COURSE thats what happens when you say the name of something powerful outside. ANother room in the tower has a creatures name on a door “Frank may not pass!” Of course! These elements FEEL right. A trapped man turns in to a bodak. An elemental, over time, turns in to a mud pool … which is handled like a black pudding. Because that’s how to handle this shit. It is an imagining of the environment FIRST, and then an attempt to figure out the D&D mechanics shit later. This is the cure of the sad old tropey D&D. The D&D that only uses the book shit. Or, rather, uses it first/. “I need a EL12 encounter. I can use four of creature X. They are in the room. Yeah! Next room!” No! From the books came evil in to the world! Or, rather, STARTING with the books brings evil in the world. And not in that Good Way that we all secretly look forward to. The books are the death of imagination. They allow for someone to not try at all. But, this adventure (and, it could be argued, the entire contest) is push-back against that. You start by imagining a thing and then you find something in the book to make it D&D-able. Or, at least, you snake it SEEM thats what happened. 

A tower full of high level enemies, traditionally a monster-zoo type situation. This solves that, a bit, with solid reasoning behind things, that doesn’t overstay its welcome. One sentence on why creature X is here. A little relationship chart to show who they like and hwho they don’t for a little extra talky talky fun. 

The format is single column and the editing could use another pass. It’s approaches wall of text territory, and the language use needs to be tightened up for scanning.  “An iron cage once existed, covering the walk from the entrance door to the spiral staircase. It is rusty, broken and destroyed.” Once existed it the key here. And, while it seems like such a simple thing, not something to worry about, it’s the repetition of the concept that drags things down. A rusty, broken, destroyed iron cage covers the walk from the door to the spiral staircase.

I’m a big fan of this, in concept. This is one of oldest of the old adventures that you have to dig through and grok and work on to get in to your brain. I also suspect this is a side-effect of all high level adventures. They are complex. Given that complexity more time needs to be spent to ensure that they are clear. And this needs that. Taken out of single column, put in two, some sidebars, better formatting of the text, cleaning up the text with some editing, and so on.

But, still, a good example of how to write a high level adventure and make it challenging without simply resorting to writing a low level adventure with high level creatures in it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Number two in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

Tower of the Time-Master
Ben Gibson
Levels 1-3

A pale blue glow surmounts the weathered tower. The gentle babble of the nearby brook is drowned out by an alien cry from above. A shadow passes over the sun as a strange beast launches itself from the high crenellations. Beware, for the pets of the Time Master seek intruders to his domain.

This fifteen page adventure uses ten pages to describe ten levels of a wizards tower, each with about five to nine rooms. Ben has a style that allows him to describe expansive areas with a minimal of fuss, and that’s on display here. I think he could have done more, with the space he allotted himself, to make the place seem more alive.

Ben tends to write at a relatively high level. Not abstracted, and not an outline, but rather close to an outline of an adventure. Or, in this case, the outline of a room. This style, generally done well by him, allows him to cover a lot of ground. Grand sweeping adventures contained in only fifteen pages, with enough information for the DM to run many,many sessions from it. It’s a fine line between writing down your idea for an adventure, an outline for one, and providing the DM what they need to run an adventure but at a high level, and its one that Ben usually gets right.

We can see that here. Ten levels in ten pages, with five to nine rooms per page, a style that is NOT minimally keyed, and relatively interesting environments to explore. That’s a lot of ground to cover in that number of pages … and yet it generally works in this.

This place is local wizards tower. The villages around it pay homage. The locals might work as guards there. He ostensibly pays fealty to some lord somewhere. The hooks and rumors reflect all of this. This is not a ruined tower, or some place out in the wilderness, but the local wizards abode. The hooks are a great variety, that, I note, allow the party to approach the adventure from different avenues. Is this is a raid, a diplomatic mission, a sneak thief? The variety of hooks each provide a different reason for poking your nose in to this place … something that, I think, is seldom seen in adventures. Very nice job on their variety. Or, perhaps, I mean, the different play styles they would enable.

You get one page per tower level, with a map on that page the five to nine keyed locations for that level also located on the page. There are a few extra pages to note NPC relationships, guard rotations, and the wide variety of entry and exit points to the tower.

This, itself, is interesting. The map goes out of its way to note exterior windows and doors. Balconies and the like exist. You can pick your poison for entry, even going so far as to risk a grapnel to the Aviary. Multiple stairs and exist between levels are inside the tower also, as well as trapdoors and vertical shafts. This helps with the verticality of the adventure, allowings for something other than a straight-line adventure up or down. And, quite an impressive feat for a single page per level. 

Interactivity is good, with NPC’s to talk to and interact with, and various weird things that will need to be fucked with .. or not. The tone here is very similar to G1, with mundae things given a slight twist … like a t-rex with ruby eyes … and ans snapping jaws. Or a skull that begs to be placed on the neck of a body … promising all of the secrets of the universe if you do so. That’s my kind of guy!

There are, I think, a couple of areas that could be better. 

Bens descriptive style works well for grand sweeping adventures and slightly less so for these smaller venues. (Where a ten level tower is defined as “smaller”) It’s not that its bad, or unwieldy, but that it lends itself to slightly less evocative imagery. I assert that this is a self-imposed limitation … which I shall elaborate on in a bit. Ben also notes the guard rotations of the floors in an upfront section … and they would better be noted in the individual level descriptions, on those pages proper. As it is now, there’s page flipping or jotting down notes … and there’s room on the pages more information. 

Speaking of things missing … it feels like the format is limiting. Or that Ben put limitations on himself. There is room, spacious room, on many of the level pages. This could be exploited to bring more depth, or evocative writing, to the sparser room descriptions. The guard rotations/patrols were already mentioned. A grand hall with a description … but not noting the balcony around the top … because thats on an upper level? Kudos for the window notations, but the large gaps of whitespace just feel like they could have been exploited to better use.

Further while there are notes on the NPC’s present in the tower, they feel … dead? Static? They just don’t seem to have any life to them. Noting them up front and then noting, in the keyed encounters, that the cook is in this room … there’s just not any joie de vivre in them. Again, this feels like something that could have been spiced up in the room encounters, or even up front in the general NPC descriptions section.

And this is, I think, what I mean by the style being limiting. It’s great for the kind of grand & epic campaign that Ben can write … and it seems to be working less well for something like this, a more traditional room/key location place. He’s trying to do a lot here, ten fucking levels after all!, but it just never comes together and feels fully formed. 

Almost there though!

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

Number two in an eight-part series. 

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince’s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I’m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince’s commentary earlier. So I’m going in to this blind. Let’s see what “winning” entries look like, shall we?

The Well
Jon Bertani
OSE
Levels 1-4

This fifteen page adventure uses about eight pages to describe a temple with about 25 rooms and a few surrounding wilderness areas. A primitive frontier setting has a very Harn-like feel … but is too wordy and … cumbersome in its language for me to love this special-ops assault.

A dude walks out of the forest and gives you a tallystick. “Show up in the village of Pigsty by noon on the 25th and you may get an inheritance.” You show up to find a village out of 13th Warrior, all wooden palisades on the frontier-like. Indeed, even the village chieftain is a too-old warrior. But, shown the tallystick, he greets you with respect! There’s something fucking different! Finally, we don’t have the fucker in the throat 137 times! You’ve inherited a farmstead! He warns you the frontier is dangerous and sends a man to show you. Arriving, you find the gates hacked down, brigands looting, and the big mastiff dog shot and whimpering! Bastardi! Shall you track them back to their lair to recover your livestock? A small overland adventure ensues, with you finding an old temple facade in the side of a mountain. You then transition to a spec-ops sneak-in, probably, and then the usual  hack-fest when the gig is up. 

This is a hard adventure to review. It’s not my thing. But it is my thing. It’s a very frontier-like adventure. There’s a vibe of wooded palisades surrounding towns, tribesmen in the hills, danger over the next hill, lumberjacks and so on. 

Or, at least, that’s what the vibe is SUPPOSED to be. It comes off more than a little bland. The individual elements are there, a little bland, but they don’t seem to work together well. There’s a whorehouse in town. The madam is a fat rotund woman who treats her girls well. Ok. So … pretty bland description. The next thing described in town are the lumberjack mill. Ah! Now I get it! The lumberjacks are over the whores at the whorehouse! You don’t get this from the adventure. There’s no inference, explicit or explicit. The whorehouse isn’t rowdy. Or full of lumberjacks, or anything like that.You, the DM, have to make that connection. The old lord in his hall, the description never mentions his daughter … just provides her stat block. Make of it, riff off of it, as you will. Which I can appreciate! … to a degree.

The entire adventure is like that. Everything in it. You find your livestock taken off. What do you do? Go back to town? (And, the town is 1 mile from the farmstead currently being raided by the brigands … uh … shouldn’t that play some part in what is going on in town? I guess not?) What this needed was just a little bit more in each area. A small amount of riffing from one area to the next. More colorful interactions, like a better description of the whorehouse. As is, it, and the rest of the descriptions, are a little generic. Not vanilla, but generic. Here’s the whorehouse:

“A two-story stone structure with colorfully painted shutter. The sign hanging over the entrance shows an image of a shapely woman. This is a brothel, run by a middle aged woman named

Mother Eddith. She’s a woman of ample form and a pleasant face. Her workers are well cared for here and learn other life skills as well. They earn a measure of the coin they make and may leave at any time they so choose, just so long as they don’t open up

their own business in town. Eddith is one of the wealthiest people in town. She has one guard, her son Igmus, a simple minded giant of a man. He considers all the working girls his siblings and will protect them to the best of his abilities, which when angered are quite formidable.”

The elements are there. The madam. The son. His sibling relationship. But that’s it. The interactivity is not present. The color from the rest of the town. The town and wilderness encounters absolutely fall in to this, and the templebrigand lair less so but still. 

You eventually track them back to their lair, a facade in the side of a mountain. Turns out its an old dwarf temple. With a symmetrical map. Ug! We do get an alternate entrance, behind a waterfall. (Yeah!) What follows is kind of a harn-like assault on a mostly linear map. You will attempt to sneak in, kill guards and hope the alarm isn’t raised, eventually finding a pitched battle. 

Descriptions inside are much the same as the town: a tad bland. Intellectual? The latrine tells us that “This room is fouled with the stink of offal. It’s obvious the bandits are using this area to as a latrine and toss other waste here. Rats scurry away into cracks in the walls when light is brought here.” The writing is a little … hoity? High-handed? There’s no viscereality to it.  There are better example of thes in the adventure, such as: “A triangular fire pit burns with low oddly coloured flames. The flickering flames reveal an arc of runes upon the wall.” This is not the worst writing. But it comes off a little forced and as an academic version. “The flickering flames reveal” is a little too tash trope literary. It FEELS forced, rather than natural. And because of that I think it comes off as uninspiring.

Eventually the bandits are defeated and/or hidden parts of hte temple are revealed, with their dwarven challenges and rituals, or caverns with the newt-people in it. (Which seems a little out of place. I get adding secrets. I love that. It just seems to be missing some potential. Like, lets rally them to help defeat the bandits or something … but they seem almost an afterthought, thrown in at the last moment. 

Individually, the elements here are quite good. The lumberjacks keeping an elf captured in their basement to torment until he reveals his treasure. The shot dog. The newtmen. But they just don’t seem to work together. It’s the academic language of Harn creating an academic environment. And I get it … that’s a genre. I mean, the place is full of humans and ½ orcs, with an occasional small number of bestial orcs and an ogre tossed in … textbook examples of my preference for humans as opponents with a spash of bestial humanoids. But, together, it doesn’t ring true. A little too much explaining. A need to cut at least a third of the words, if not more, and bring the language down to more evocative descriptions and away from the academic or Harn and AS&SH. And … a hard fight for level 1’s.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute. A subtle dig?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/379533/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600

By James Hanna
Fey Light Studio
B/X
Levels 3-4

Blackstone Tower was supposed to be the perfect home for Virvul and Gosian, two of the greatest wizards in the world. Instead, it was abandoned, their monument to magic. This is the story of that place, and the many loves who came here, and some of those who never left.

This sixteen page adventure uses nine pages to describe a tower with about five levels. It has a gorgeous map/illustrations and is an utter shit show of an adventure. It obfuscates usage … ON PURPOSE. This means it’s not actually an adventure but rather some masturabatory art project.  Joy.

I had high hopes for this. I can dig a tragic story. Melancholy is my friend. It’s got some pretty good art in it as inspiration. And that fucking map! Oh, so, I like the color blue. And this map manages to evoke the kind of airy dream-like quality that a good wizards tower should. Alien and recognizable, airy and organic. Seriously, this fucking map looks like it was custom designed to appeal to me, as an art or inspiration object.

There are inspired moments in this. There’s a waterfall flowing from an upper level of the tower and to get in to the tower you need to walk through it. That’s both magical and sure to be a source of terror for experienced OSR players. “Uh, fuck no. I’m not walking through that thing …” Inside we can see a tower fountain, shooting up in the air, forty, or fifty feet high, in middle of a large open room. Turns out it’s the guardian water elemental. Didn’t see that coming, did you? Or the origin of the entrance waterfall, coming from a living quarters on an upper level, with a veranda to look out over the land. That is, I think the last of grooooovy elements in this.

Because this thing is an utter shit show. I mean absolutely the worst dreck possible. Because, you see, it’s not an actual adventure. It’s actually some art project that is taking the form of an adventure. If an adventure is a piece of technical writing, meant to be used to facilitate a game at the table, then what do you call something that purposefully obfuscates the DMs ability to run it at the table? And I don’t mean the usual shit. I don’t mean someone who doesn’t know any better or just is simply bad as making something useful to the DM. I mean, what if you made decisions to make it harder to run the adventure? Like, I know know, you write it in Basque in limerick form and all of the phrasing was metaphorical. Can you call that an adventure? Well, I guess, as the designer, you can call it whatever you want. As the arbiter of my own tastes, though, I dub thee “Shit show art project that makes me feel like I’ve been manipulated and deceived.” And as a good little midwesterner, well, we don’t like to feel like we’ve been deceived. Hardworking people, we like our snakeoil to contain both snake AND oil. 

The origin for my extreme disgust is the writing style. The adventure is written in voice from two different perspectives. EVERYTHING is in voice. Everything. FIrst, you get the voice of one of the wizards, giving interior design and architecture notes to an architect. Second, you have the architects comments between themself and their parter as a kind of “handwritten” addendum to the wizards instructions. It’s like the wizard was writing a letter to the architect and then the architect added some notes to it in the margins.

An example? Allow me …

“Sadly, rugged black basalt composes the vast majority of our beach front property

wish for you to clear out three areas and dredge some proper sand up to make sheltered beaches where Z and I can lounge in the sun.”

How about the description of a trap in one of the rooms? “A few oozes ought to do it. Hide them in chambers around the pool, and then flood the room, allowing the oozes, practically invisible in the water, to dissolve the hapless intruders. Once the room fills, have a tube dump the gelatinous contents into the sea.”

Or, perhaps, the description of the main bedchamber room that contains this little gem: “It is done. She is no more. She has taken herself from me. But I will always have her body to gaze upon when I wish it, for her body shall lie preserved forever in the waters of her home, in the bed which we made together.”

Like, what the fuck man?! The ENTIRE adventure is written like this. Not just in voice, but with the details obfuscated. From that last section you’re supposed to get that the chicks body is in the pool of water in the room. 

The designer wanted some kind of forlorn tragic love story thing. I’m not even sure that’s in this. It’s written in such an obtuse way that I can’t even tell if the two wizards are actually IN the tower. How’s that for fucked up?

Look, I got no problem with your art project. I’ve got no problem with experimentation. But I suggest that you didn’t actually write an adventure. You wrote some kind of piece of literature or performance art that mimics the form of an adventure. Because to be an adventure you have to be able to use it at the table and you can’t use this at the table. And the choices made in the design were explicitly to LIMIT its usage at the table. That may be too strong a statement. It may be that the designer wanted to play with voice and style. But the direct impact was that it limits its usage. In exactly the same way as if you sold a book of Basque limericks to English speakers as an adventure. It’s not.

And put the fucking level range on the cover or in the product description. Jesus H Fucking Christ how many fuckimg times do I have to fucking say that?

I leave you with this, the design notes from a wizard, describing how to get from one place to another, buried in the text of a larger room description and not shown on the map: “The only way into the grotto is via the staircase that winds along its perimeter and emerges in the center of the foyer beneath the hidden door.”

This is $6 at DriveThru. If you buy at DriveThru you will get an InDesign file. If you mail the designer to get a PDF you will get no response. You can then go to itch and claim one of the free community copies. Also, not preview, although there are page scans on the product page. You see that little “agreement” section on the last page? You have no idea how important that is from the preview. It should have shown a full level/encounter/room if it was going to go down the experimental path.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/377939/The-Many-Lost-Loves-of-Blackstone-Tower?1892600

By Greg Saunders
Fire Ruby Design
Mork Borg

The wizard Inclulas is dead – a spiked club to the back of the head has that effect no matter how many scrolls you own. Brigands have looted his body within sight of his manse, and his scrolls disintegrate into the bloody mud around him. His servant, Ottö, saw the murder, but his presence in the backlit doorway scared the murderers away – for the time being. Now Ottö has retreated to the alchemical workshop, to help himself to all the liquor he can find. He has inadvertently mixed several potions together in his guts, and the weird magical concoction has had peculiar effects…

Sixteen digest pages of garbage detail nine rooms in a wizards home. More Mork Borg crap.

I know, I know. Believe me I know. How could I not know? I mean, it says Mork Borg right on the blurb. We all know what that means. It’s gonna suck. We all know that. I mean, there’s a chance it won’t, right? And, we can’t actually, any of us, say that we know its gonna suck OUT LOUD. That’s not cool, to lump them all together. But, seriously, we all know this at this point in time. So then why? Why review it? I promise you that I don’t do this on porpoise. As I have said, time and again, I go in to these things with a sense of wonder and hope, optimism for a bright new tomorrow. I mean, read that intro again. “A spiked club to the back of the head has that effect no matter how many scrolls you own.” That’s fucking great! I love that! The rest of this HAS GOT to be like that, right?! 

Let’s crack this fucker open and back in the glow of each other majestic presence! Oooo, look, a description of the butler, Otto! “A thin, gangly man dressed like a shabby butler, with a balding egg-like head surmounted with a strange hat and a pronounced slouch, Ottö is no one’s idea of a good servant. Luckily, Inclulas was no one’s idea of a good master. Ottö is in parts whiny, moody and acerbic, but under it all lies a simmering rage at the injustice of his servitude. Unfortunately, he is also a coward, which is why he is still here after all these years. Drunk: Ottö is completely inebriated. We’ve all been there.” 

I mean, that a little lengthy, but, it’s a good description. A shabby butler, egg-like balding, pronounced slouch, a simmering rage at the injustice of his servitude just under the surface. That fucking rocks. “We’ve all been there.” That’s right man! Tuesday mornings, am I right?!?!

It is at this point that the adventure turns to suckatude.

There are virtually no creatures in the nine room mansion. Instead we are told to sprinkle in the four aspects of ottos’ split personality. They “may be encountered as drama and whim dictate.” Oh come the fuck on man. Fucking pout a creature in a god damn room! Would it fucking kill you to marry the room to a specific Otto and something specific going on? I mean, yes, it would fucking force you to actually come up with something that fits together. Heaven fucking forfuckingbig that you do that. I mean, after all, you’re only asking $4 for this thing, why would we expect you to do any work for us, right? 

The wizards lab? “In here are scattered the paraphernalia of a master of the arcane arts. Or it might be a useless collection of broken glass and rubbish. You decide.” Hmmm, I’m starting to sense a pattern. How about treasure in Otto’s room? “scroll (randomly determine which one) and a scattering of gold and silver coins” 

Are you worried about being judged? Is that why you don’t put anything specific down? If you don’t make a decision then no one can blast you for the decision you have made? And, if someone, such as a certain reviewer, blasts you for that you can just say that people just don’t you, man …    

I think not. This is just fucking lazy design, as all Mork Borg designs are. Are they all? DO I ever recall seeing a Mork Borg design that WASNT lazy as fucking shit? I don’t know. It doesn’t fucking feel that way right now. It feels like all of the Mork Borg shit is just some random ideas someone took an hour to throw down on paper. No real thought. No real design. No real attempt to make this in to an actual playable adventure. 

Is it that much fucking work? No. I mean, I asked these fucking questions before, a couple of years ago, and that what inspired the work I did on Maw. Can you just take a couple of hours and create something worthwhile. My goal was, I think, an hour to create a dungeon level. By the third-ish level I was able to create a dungeon level in about 90 minutes. Were they fucking works of genius? No. But they were fucking light years ahead of this crap. It CAN be done in a short amount of time. You CAN spend just a few hours to polish something enough to be a good enough design to get great gaming out of it.

But not it you don’t understand. Not if you don’t understand what an RPG is and how it is played. Not if you don’t understand what an adventure is and not if you don’t understand how to write for the DM. If you don’t understand those things then you get something like this. “Hey, man, here’s some ideas. Like, use them, or not, if you want, to run a game. Or riff off of or something.” That’s not an adventure.

 This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $4. The preview is ten pages and tells you all you need to know.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/378452/Alas-poor-Otto–A-Mork-Borg-Adventure?1892600

Hello. This is the Bryce Emergency Review protocol. Bryce writes about three weeks ahead and has not written a new review in about three weeks, so this script has snagged an emergency review to post instead. Bryce has also been emailed and told to get back to work instead of engaging in whatever delight he is currently using to manage ennui.