tenfootpole.org

By Jacob Fleming, David Cameron
Gelatinous Cubism
OSE
Low Levels

Beyond the city wall, there are creatures with their own plans. Giant spiders desperately assault the city in swarms. No one knows the cause of these attacks, but their frequency increases by the day. Far to the north, smaller orc war-bands are beginning to gather and remote settlements are all that stand between them and the walls of Obanhold. Too much blood has been spilled in the name of human expansion and the orc tribes of Maut’hgar have called for retribution. It is a matter of time before all out war is declared. A storm is coming.

This 72 page adventure presents a sandbox region to explore with a few things ostensibly going on. It feels, though, like it doesn’t have a soul. Going through the motions of an adventure. Going through it very well, but it doesn’t feel like it’s heart is in it.

Yeah yeah, I know how that sounds. Hang in there though.

We’ve got this city, Like 35,000 people. Just past it is the wilderness. Abandoned ruins. Hardly any people. And lots of orc bans. Don’t make sense to me, but, it’s D&D, so, we’ll ignore reality and handwave a “supporting lands/communities to the south” kind of thing. Anyway, there’s another town, like sixty miles north. And then there’s a lot of hexes to explore. It’s not a hex crawl, but more of a sandbox region to explore … although I guess the difference here is mostly in format. You’g got these orcs in the north, various tribes and their ancestral homeland. You’ve got some bandits here and there hiding in ruins. You’ve got some kind of spider queen thing giving birth to lots of spiders who like to charge the city walls every couple of weeks. And you’ve got some ancient ruins of The Builders, some three eyed giant dudes who liked to leave statues of themselves in the ruins, it seems. A wyvern flying around, some orc ancestral artifacts/magic items … some decent elements to mix it up together.

Then, you chuck in the party. This would normally be flamethrowers in the gas factory, but, not in this case. IN this case it’s … boring?

There’s this really nice region map. The art style is great, with nice shading and topo marks and a clear legend. Maybe my favorite of the various styles of overland maps since it looks fairly realistic. And then the design on top of it is interesting. Towers in high places. Trails that lead, out of nowhere … but they make sense when you look at the map. I note, also, the presence of a couple of treasure maps in the adventure that leads to buried hoards, noted also on the map and unable to be found without the map. A very good implementation of this feature. Not quite a full adventure hook, but finding them gets you moving on the overland map, wandering encounters, and perhaps finding a few of the other fixed locations that are off the beaten path. Quite the nice map and utilization of it. The wandering table isn’t large enough, or interesting enough, to support the map and Idon’t think there are rules in OSE for hex visibility, so I’m not sure just exactly how you’re finding some of these places. But, handwave handwave handwave … nice map.

The rest of the adventure is, well, …

We get an opening story. Rated on the “fiction in adventures” standard it’s a fucking masterpiece. Which means it’s inoffensive. It’s just some farmer who has his village raided by orcs and rides off to the city. Oh, oh, good time for this, I guess. This is a Colonization adventure. The orcs are featured as natives who just want to get along, their lands encroached upon by the humans. Some want peace and some want war. “The orcs had been here long before humans settled it. “They had no tolerance for the human expansion and saw any encroachment on their land as an act of war.” Also, their history has them encroaching on these lands when they migrated to it. SOMETHING THAT ONE OF THE ORC NPCS ACKNOWLEDGES AS A REASON THEY SHOULD JUST MOVE ALONG AGAIN. That’s interesting. Anyway, this isn’t really played up, at all, beyond what I just typed. Yeah, they are nomadic traders and it goes on a little long with this, but, sure, whatever. Alignment: Evil. Hey Frank, what’s your god say, they glow evil? “Yup.” And you cast Detect Evil, not Detect Different Culture, right? “Yup.” And there’s a god of evil that they worship … whose goal is the destruction of all life? “Yup.” Okay man, just checking before I get to stabbin.

The first half of the adventure is useless. We get a generic description of a generic fantasy town. Then we get a generic orcs-as-natives overview, and a generic overview of a few locations on the map. Like a paragraph for each location that includes little to no specificity. In one village you get a couple of sentences and then it ends with “Some of the villagers claim to have seen orcs roaming in the distant hills, and there is a standing reward offered to any who can find those missing and deal with the orc menace” That’s your call to adventure, so better pick it up. Seriously, there is very VERY little to help the DM get things moving. Just like with that entry, there are hints here and there of the adventure actually having a soul. One watchtower had all of the guards recalled to re enforce the city walls. Except, three of them stayed behind. That had some play opportunities. Grizzled rangers or some kind of shit. Guerrillas. Maybe doing some Aldo the Apache type shit to the orcs. “And the Orc will be sickened by us, and the Orc will talk about us, and the Orc will fear us.” But, nah, it doesn’t give us anything like that. It just says that three of them stayed behind to keep a watch on the orc movements. *Yawn*

The orc strongholds are treated much like the human villages: a single paragraph of description. The second half of the adventure describes about ten locations that you can explore, each with between six and two dozen rooms … with a dozen being average? That’s a decent number of locations in the region. 

But …

It’s all just a little … staid. Static. The descriptions are note very evocative, and, again, I might make the statement that they feel soulless. I’m not even sure I might say that these are fact based descriptions. They feel lifeless. And the interactivity is just seemingly lacking as well. A trap here and here (although, far too often the adventure says something like “the door is trapped” and then doesn’t actually tell you anything else about the trap.) but, mostly, it’s stabbing monsters. In the grand context of the region there might be interactivity. The orcs, their cultural magic items, some thieves in a tower, the interlinking ancient ruins. But, individually, it just feels like the rooms are going through the motion of being an adventure. Descriptions which lack life and rooms rather than situations.

I could, I think, get behind this in some ways. It’s a more realistic, or, naturalistic adventure in a region. But, you are gonna have to bring hella imagination to bring the thing to life. You’re going to have to take “three soldiers stayed behind to watch the oc movements” and turn that in to a full on thing that the party will remember and enjoy playing out. And your’e going to have to do that for every single thing that the party encounters, in every region, in every room. That’s really not much of springboard, in any of this, to build upon. Cutting down on the word count, the mundane vanilla and generic word count, and instead inserting a little life in to the encounters. Turning things in to situations and giving them, and the NPC’s, some character, would have gona long long way to turning this in to a kind of instant classic. The region is there. The locations interlinked are there. But the lack of a soul means this is not a classic. I don’t hate it, but I would never in a million years run it.

This is $10 at DriveThru. That’s a fair price, if the content delivered. But, the preview is broken. Sad 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/456393/The-Scourge-of-Northland?1892600

By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
OSRIC
Levels 3-5

The annual caravan bound for Insarna Castle is weeks overdue. The lords who rule over this remote castle are worried that some grave calamity has befallen it. Since resupplying the garrison is of vital importance to the realm, this is highly alarming. They urgently seek a group of capable adventurers to locate the missing caravan somewhere in the wild expanse that surrounds the route to Insarna. Time grows short for the missing men and supplies. Can your party of adventurers solve this mystery before it is too late?

This 21 page  adventure has the party following a trail through the wilderness, fighting monsters, until you find an eighteen room cave system with more monsters in it. All you do is stab, in rooms with minimal description. Just a generic OSR “adventure”.

Some copper dragon has gotten itself possessed by an amulet with five demons in it. It attacked the caravan. You track it back, following a path of destruction and finding some people who fled from the caravan. Usually they are being held captive by gnolls, etc. Oh, also, the dragon has a wife who is flying around. She  might ask you to help out. She doesn’t do the job herself, of course. Why this is a part of the adventure I have no idea. The wifey thing does nothing. Well, she does have a cave and the cave has a nice hoard in it, so, youknow, time for a humanoid-centric view of the world. I guess, in the name of XP. Or, you can do your own goody two shoes thing. But, killing her and taking her eggs is more fun. And this adventure desperately needs more fun. 

You wander around this valley and have some wandering monster encounters on your way past the various monster lairs. All of the wandering monster encounters are essentially the same variation of “These wicked lizard folk ruthlessly attack all who cross their paths.” It’s boring as all fuck. It acknowledges that they SHOULD be doing something, but fails to recognize that “they attack ruthlessly”, at every encounter, is exactly the same as not having them do anything at all. 

The wilderness map has a wagon trail on it, so it’s pretty linear. The dungeon at the end with the evil dragon is essentially linear also. That’s always fun. Enter a room, kill who is in it and then go on to the next room to do the same thing. There is almost no interactivity in this beyond just killing what is in the room. 

Examples of the masterful evocative writing style include “Two firenewts each armed with a glaive guisarme stand guard here.” or “Two burst sacks looted form the caravan lie on the floor of this ordinary cave,” That’s D&D for you. An empty cave with two sacks lying on the floor. Is it dark? Moldy? Damp? Running water? Rocks from the ceiling everywhere? Path through it? Shadows? No? It’s just “an ordinary cave.” Abstracted and generic. Boring. 

The descriptions are generally not that short. They fall in to a kind of expanded minimalism category. This is hard to describe fully, but it’s when you wander on and on with the text to no real point. You pad it out with background and other useless trivia that does nothing to help run the adventure at the table. Here’s a great example, from which I have removed the inline stats: “Two aspis drone guards watch the passage that leads out of this cave into the deeper caverns to the south. Each one wields two clubs (1d6 damage each) and two shields which give them Armor Class 2. A wooden pen holds 17 giant aphids These harmless creatures have no means of defending themselves other than to flee if threatened. The insect men harvest the honeydew they produce as a food source (see AREA b, p. 12).”

Note how that description doesn’t really SAY anything. Two drone guard a passage. Yawn. It leads deeper in to the caves to the south. Boring description, and its just telling us what the map says, not adding anything to the action at the table. What they are armed with. Boring. Shield. Boring. A wooden pen is somewhat interesting. Note how its stuck way down in the description. That should probably be the first thing noticed. No way to defend themselves is useless, as is the honeydew background information that is completely irrelevant to the adventure. It’s a WHOLE lot of words that add nothing to play. 

When you finally meet the dragon you get to fight it. But, in addition to the stat block there you ALSO have to turn back to the beginning of the adventure to reference the rules for the demons possessing the dragon. Like, the possessor uses it’s THACO instead of the dragons. There’s a whole section, with table. But you have to use it AND the stat blocks at the end to make everything work right in the combat, That makes sense.

It’s just a boring old stab everything adventure with no real interactivity. Nothing very interesting happens. The same kind of generic stab adventure that has plagued the OSR since its beginning.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/463632/The-Lost-Caravan-DUNGEON-DELVE-SIDE-QUEST-2?1892600

By Michele Toscan
Self Published
5e
Levels 3-4

The incessant floods engulfing the region have forced the young Maddalena Malatesta, the wicked Lord’s niece, to leave Montefiore Conca Castle without her cat, Cerasus. Since Maddalena was brought to the ancestral Malatesta residence, she has grown weaker and weaker, yearning only for the company of her little companion. The company of soldiers from the house, sent by her father Ferrantino to recover the cat, never returned from the mission. Psychic storms prevent any form of foresight around the castle, which has been shrouded in a shadow of terror for days. Lord Malatestino I Malatesta has decided to enlist a group of assorted heroes to retrieve little Cerasus. But is that his only objective? And why did the previous expedition never return?

It’s the holidays and I’m in a generally generous mood. So I decided to accept this review request. I have regrets.

This complete and utter mess of garbage uses … three pages? To describe … a castle? Maybe?  It uses very general terms to describe a few things that might happen. Except, my description is WAY too concrete to actually represent what the designer has done here. This isn’t even an outline of an adventure, or a summary of an outline. Maybe an idea for an outline would be a fitting description.

Ok, so, floods ravage the lands. Some dude hires you to go check out a castle of his and report back. Also, his daughters cat is missing in the castle and please bring it back. You might have an encounter on the way to the castle. Inside you meet some mercs. Underneath, in its dungeon, you find a cthulhu that has woken up. It’s served by some etruscans. It made friends with the cat. The end. 

Come now Bryce, you can do a better job os describing the adventure than that! Ah, but, gentle readers, I cannot. For that is not a summary of the adventure. That IS the adventure. I’m being serious.

The opening journey through the flooded lands tells us that “Feel free to add as many chance encounters as you like to the journey that begins on the Roman Flaminia road and then

climbs into the southern hills. The hills are full of bandits. An encounter with the ghosts of Guido del Cassero and Angiolello da Carignano might lead the character to understand Malatesta III has well deserved the name Guastafamiglia“. We get another paragraph when we arrive at the castle describing the mercs and how they sent out a messenger. The implication, I guess, is that he’s lost and you should find him. But there’s nothing more than that. No messenger notes or anything. Then it tells us that under the castle are etruscans and their leader, this cleric dude named Velma. Again, I’m no exaggerating to say that’s all there is. It’s another four sentences. That’s it. Then it just morphs in to a table, without any heading at all, to describe a kind of random element in the tunnels. IE: they have been abstracted and you roll on a table to discover the room you are now in and what happens in it, until you roll “the final room” and find the cat and his buddy the cthulhu. Let’s see, you are rolling a d20 and there are seven possibilities. Enjoy.

The rest of the adventure is six or so pages of pregens and monster stats and a three page background overview of the campaign setting. 

Did I mention that the read-aloud section is long and in italics? Did I mention that the entire thing is in some weird ass fucking font that’s hard to read? Or that it appears on some kind of background to give the appearance of an old and weather newspaper, which makes it even harder to read? I fucking HATE that fucking people do this. I’m not gonna struggle to try and comprehend the written fucking words of your adventure. Why not just write the fucking thing in Italian and make me struggle to figure it the fuck out? It’s the same fucking thing. I would love nothing more than to torture each of these people with each others adventures. Hand them some other dude artsy fartsy K0oL font and background adventure and sit them down in front of people and tell them to run the fucking thing. 

There’s no fucking adventure here. “Hey, there’s a castle with some mercs in it. Five of them. They sent a messenger to someone” That’s supposed to be a fucking adventure? No map? No real indication of how they treat the party? I didn’t even know they were baddies until I noted that their stat blocks lists them as Enemies. 

I don’t know what the fuck is going on here. This looks like an idea I might have for a nights play before I started fleshing it out, generally, with a few extra sentences scribbled down. It’s not a fucking adventure. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages and you get to see the artsy fartsy background/newsprint and fancy font and a few paragraphs of text for the background. That should tell you more than enough to let you know to stay far FAR away from this.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/458682/Shadows-of-the-Sunken-Dread?1892600

By Vance Atkins
Leicester's Rambles
OSE
Levels 3-4

Brother Sigeric, head of a local “charity organization” has asked the party to retrieve an idol as a favor. Break into the hidden temple, snag the artifact, and back to the pub. Simple. But the complex is still full of hazards, and, oh yeah, another party has gotten there first. Dangit.

This seven page adventure uses three pages to describe eleven rooms in an abandoned temple. It starts SUPER strong in tone, and has a couple of highlights, but ultimately is more than a little disappointing in its room descriptions and a little slow in its encounters. Perhaps an adventure for a more realistic campaign, but not for me.

I’m trying hard to like this one. A lot. But it’s not gonna happen. My joy here starts out QUITE strong, with the hook/intro. It is, without a doubt, one of the strongest I’ve ever seen. Let me take that back, the TONE appeals to me so much that I’ve stars in my eyes. You’re in an orphanage, upstairs in Brother Asshats room. His OPULENT room. ““Glad you stopped by. Got a little ‘charitable task’ for you on behalf of St. Vivinna’s Home for the Wayward” Uh huh. How the fuck can anything start with that and not be a joy to behold? He’s favor swapping with someone else and needs to get an idol from an old abandoned temple. He sent a couple of his boys (literally!) but they didn’t come back. There’s a little bit more to emphasize the tone, and then off to the temple you go!

Inside we find a young boy with a broken leg, trapped in a covered pit. Sweet! He heard some dudes come by a few hours ago, but they didn’t try to help him. Also, his leg is broken. WHat ya doing with him? Later on we meet said mercenaries, a strong party of … twelve? With two mages and a captain and some grunts. There could be a great little battle in a partially collapsed room while they try to escape the place with the idol they just picked up. Partially collapsed doesn’t really cover it; a room with a mound of HIGH rubble in the middle … and thus two exits. The rubble mound providing a means for the party to attack from behind or, if they come through the main doors, for the mercenaries to escape over to cover their retreat with the idol. 

Other than this, there are a couple of undead dudes and a small handful of traps. We’re not talking stellar interactivity here. Maybe appropriate for a small abandoned temple, but, realism sucks ass. And, if we were going for a realistic temple, then I’d need the human element to be beefed up even a bit more, in tone and situation if not in numbers. As is, this feels like a one trick pony. 

The map supporting play is not bad for something this size. Same level stairs, collapsed rooms and hallways, partial collapses and so on. Variety spices up play and makes an exploration in to the unknown less staid. 

Other than that … meh?

There are wandering tables but the creatures are a little .. well, bandits “lurking” and skeletons “clatterring” might fulfill the letter of the law of having them do something, but another word or two would really spice things up here. 

More importantly, though, the room descriptions are a let down after that stellar intro/hook. I’m not even really sure that the rooms HAVE descriptions? Dank and bare? A wide sloping passageway? These are a little too fact based for me. I don’t think they really communicate, well the environment in which the party is encountering. And, without that, we must lean more heavily on the DM to bring the adventure to life. And while that’s always the case, the central conceit of the tenfootpole is that the adventure exists to support the DM during play at the table. And my definitions of support must also include helping to bring the adventuring environment to life. There’s certainly a spectrum here, but Dank and dark and wide & sloping aint’ gonna cut it for me. And while that latter also include “bas-reliefs of jackals lining the western wall”, I’m still not sure thats much more than fact based reporting. 

Great opening here, with the orphans, sending in the boys, the charitable contribution, and the hag. And, the kid in the pit is a good touch. But that kind of colour just isn’t present anywhere else to the degree it is in the opening. And while I’m not suggesting that the opening two paragraphs are the correct amount of words, or detail, for an room entry, I do think that the vibe of the rooms must tend to that end of the spectrum rather than the more minimal end that this adventures encounters tend to. “Room 9: Another undead priest [stats]” just isn’t for me.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $2. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/463343/The-Temple-of-Kalonius?1892600

By Garnett Elliott
Self Published
Barbarians of Lemuria

An advanced siege-engine, centuries ahead of its time, lies unclaimed on a bloody battlefield. But when heroes set forth to salvage the Brazen Beast, they discover a festering evil, much worse than the mundane horrors of war—and it wants the Beast for itself!

This 21 page adventure has … two fights? And a couple of talky talky encounters, all on a battlefield overrun by a death cult led by an Elder Vampire. I guess Barbarians of Lemuria is some kind of cinematic/story game? This adventure is, anyway. Padded to fuck and back, there’s nothing to see here.

General Buttmunch is in charge of the armies of the city of Loofa. They just fought a battle yesterday and killed off the evil Other City that was invading. Oh, also, General Buttmuchasaurus brews beer. Sure. Whatever. Anyway, you’re sent out to get the siege engine thingy the other side had. Also, be careful, the gleaners that went out didn’t come back. Also, he’s just too busy to send his own men to go do this important task. Sure. Whatever. Off you go. 

Let’s see … you see some ghouls running away from the battlefield. You maybe find a kid hiding; their parents were abducted by the evil Clorox cult. That’s their tents over there, and you could go save them if you wanted. Then you find the siege engine and its crazed inventor inside. Then four waves of CLorox cultists attack the siege engine. Then you’re done. Yeah you! You plotted the plot!

Yeah, there’s cringe shit here that don’t make sense. But, the game design decisions are THE WURST. At multiple points in the adventure you are called on to make perception checks. And if you fail then you don’t get to do something interesting. That kid, hiding? I hope you made your skill check or you don’t find them. And then you don’t get the interaction with them, the moral quandary, and the subplot of the cultists ceremony to sacrifice the parents. It does this in other places as well, making you pass a perception check to find the adventure. This is exactly the same as putting your entire dungeon behind a secret door. These sorts of complications are a major part of D&D. THAT”S the interactivity that we’re looking for. You don’t put that behind a skill check. You put boons behind one, maybe. But the interesting parts of the adventure? You don’t put that behind one. Unless you’re this crappy thing.

Those Clorox cultists? Same thing. They are having this big ceremony in the middle of the carnage. They got a stage and shit. Like a rock concert, we’re told several times. They got that kids parents are are gonna sacrifice. We’re told several times of the overwhelming numbers of cultists. And, yet, the adventure wants the party to rush the stage and free the parents … because the cultists are “distracted” with their ceremony. What fucking party is going to come up with that as a plan? Rushing overwhelming numbers?

Let’s see here. General Asshat refers to the gleaners as The Dregs. Humph. I think you mean free enterprise oriented individuals on the lower rungs of your social economic ladder whose wealth inequality has forced them to find inefficiencies in your system to exploit and make more productive? Is that what you mean by dregs? It’s the old game; underspend on post-battlefield guards and memorials and then complain to score political points.

Lets see … other shitty things. The CLorox cult is led by an elder vampire .. who uses a parasol to go out in the sun. Bleach. New school vamp suck ass. Long sections of italcs for read-aloud; that’s always fun to suffer through. Oh,oh, you can meet the vampire on the battlefield as a wanderer! And then “As soon as the fight starts going badly, Lucretia burns a Rival/Villain Point to make a Timely Escape. She’ll be seeing the heroes again soon enough!” No agency for you, puny players! Just stick your fucking asses to the chairs and play on your phones, unengaged, until the game is over. Why bother playing when your actions have no impact? And did I mention “As luck would have it, PCs run into the vampire aboard her carnage chariot (if still intact) at some dramatically appropriate time, accompanied by a warrior priestess and Chorax’s avatar (if summoned” Uh huh. Dramatically appropriate. Fuck you. Oh, and the vampire burns some kind of villain/story point thing in order to force the players to listen to their soliloquy. What the fuck? There’s a game mechanic just to torture the players? Why would anyone ever do this?

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/463129/SC8-The-Brazen-Beast

By Kobe Potter
Self Published
5e
Level 1

Chase cultists through the streets and canals of the city, delve into the labrynthine sewers, and save innocents from the terrible powers of the Chaos Gods.

This nine page adventure presents three encounters with cultists in a city.It is everything that an adventure should not be. 

I don’t know how I ended up here. This thing was next on my HD, which means I bought it at some point, even though I’m trying to avoid non-OSR things lately. Maybe because it’s a city adventure? I do love those. Although, calling this a city adventure is somewhat dubious. 

There’s this overview of whats going on that it full of half names and titles and therefore a little hard to follow. Basically, in Venice, Frank and Mary turn to demon worship to overthrow Councilman Bob. They do this by summoning demons to attack his charity organizations to make him bankrupt. Sure. Whatever. It’s a pretext, I guess. It’s lame as all fuck. But, like I said, whatever. 

This all manifests as the party walking down the street near an aqueduct overhead next to a hospital, when they hear screams. A couple of cultists are driving a demon toward an aqueduct column. The demon will destroy it in 1d4 rounds, killing everyone in the hospital. Fight fight fight. Fight fight fight. Some Imperial Cop shows up and charges you with finding out whos behind it. You go to a warehouse and solve a riddle and then go to a sewer room and fight the cultists and demons there. Again, in 1d4 rounds a portal to the demon world opens and they all spill through, so, get your ass in gear I guess. The end.

Yup, two combats and a puzzle. That;’s what this is. This is nothing more than a scene based adventure, and not a very good one. The scenes are literally “Combat! Roll for init!” This is basest of all types of D&D. Minis combat. Ug. I really cant emphasize enough how much of a pretext the combats are. Minimal. Something right out of Vampire Queen. “2 cultists drive a demon toward an aqueduct pillar; it will destroy the piller in 1d4 rounds unless easily distracted.” That’s your encounter. There is simply no adventure here. No investigation. Just screaming ROLL FOR INIT! At the players. 

I am, I guess, in awe of the 1d4 rounds things. Fucking dude is going for it I guess. Let the fuckers in the hispital die! We get a note that says “At this level, characters have few options for stopping a flood. Encourage creativity, and allow them to imagine using lumber from the timberyard to build a dam, getting help from the inn, or using the potter’s clay to clog the aqueduct” Maybe I don’t understand how a flash flood works, but, I think that fucking hispital is toast in 1d4 rounds if that aqueduct breaks and building a dam ain’t gonna do nothing but maybe help you find the rotting bodies of dead babies in the incubators. 

Dude doesn’t even put the adventure in this own adventure. After the aqueduct thing you have to track the cultists back to their warehouse. But this is ALL up to the DM. The designer can’t be bothered. “Maybe one or more of the Chaos Cultists got away, and a chase scene ensues. Maybe the gondoliers could be persuaded to remember if they saw something suspicious  n. How exactly the characters find the Bloody Pearl is up to you,“ And, maybe, the fucking designer did his job and put this in the adventure? What the fuck do you think we’re paying you for?

Single column wall of text with no real formatting. Read-aloud in italics that over-reveals the scene. Because here is no investigation or back and forth, there’s just rolling dice for combat. The baddies are cultists, in a warehouse. My. That’s original. No alchemist available? I don’t know. I’m a pretty die hard atheist, and even I think that fantasy rpg’s are going a little hard down the Religion is Bad path. Whatever happened to greed? Or revenge? Or boredom? Boredom is a great motivation. Showing off? Lots of good stuff. But, sure, use an evil cult in a warehouse. That leads to the sewers. Literally do not try at all. Just fucking garbage, even in the ranks of garbage adventures. I blame someone other than myself, as all good hypocrites should.

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

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/462773/Confusion-in-Kaelian-Hill?1892600

By Terke Nordiin
Svartnost
OSR
Levels ... ? 2?

The wizard Amalantra, known as the Master of Mirrors, is said to have hid all his secrets and treasures in a place that could only be accessed with a special key.

This nine page adventure describes a mirror that can lead to …six different rooms? There’s not much to it. Which makes the long form paragraph presentation all the worse. 

This is another of the Rope Trick adventures. Or, maybe they are Leomund’s Tiny Hut adventures? Anyway, you find a thing and it leads to a small extradimensional space that you explore. I’m aware that something like this has existed for quite some time, form the earliest dungeon Mr Living Room. I can’t help but wonder if anyone has ever done one of these that is not boring as all fuck?

You find a large mirror. It has five sides. Point it at a door and you can open the door in the mirror and step through to a different room. Stick the mirror on a different side and you open the door to a new room. Five sides, so five rooms in total, with another one if you open the door in darkness and another one if you are IN the other room and use the door in it that you just came through. What is that? Seven rooms? The point it at a door thing is interesting. Everything else is not.

There’s nothing new here. Nothing interesting. Nothing particularly well done. The environments are not wondrous. Or even well described. It’s all what you would expect. Shadows. Mirror images of yourself. A mirror golem, of course. It’s all long paragraph form with little formatting to break things up. Just mountains and mountains of text for what you are getting. This is prime one-pager territory.

I guess I’ve got two complaints here. The first is … Why? Why do this thing in the way it was done? It’s small. There’s just no room here to give life to anything that is inside of it. A couple of rooms? Disconnected by each other? You’ve got no space at all to anything interesting. There are SO many adventures like this. Rather than actually sit down and take the time to put something interesting together instead they take the one idea they had and do a six or seven room dungeon with it. If that much. That sucks ass. I’m sure its possible to do that well, but, its going to be far more interesting if you give yourself, and your creation a little breathing room. Let it expand. You need space to develop things. To give room for the kind of play that D&D thrives on. And a few isolated rooms doesn’t do that. Do you have to come up with something new? No. But you have to make an effort to do what you ARE doing well. I love a well-implemented trope. Well Implemented.

Why do this? Why do something mediocre? For the $2 that this thing is going to bring in? Wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice! Because of some compulsion to create? I can get behind that. But, something like this? This is what you felt compelled to create? I know I’m going a little harsh on this designer, but, also, you’re standing in for every designer that has even been or will be who does something like this. Why not let this grow? Develop it? Polish it? Build on it? Do something that you are really really proud of. Make sure that every aspect of it is exactly what you think it should be, that everything delivers on the promise of a new dawn, that everything will bring delight to those who explore it? 

I don;t know. Long paragraphs. Blah blah blah. No formatting to speak of. Blah blah blah. Anything mildly interesting, like the eyeball dude, not given enough room to breathe. No foreshadowing. Blah blah blah. Why would I ever try? To put effort in for something that had none to create?

This is $2 at DriveThru. The review is two pages. You get to see the first room and part of the second. Enjoy that wall of text.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/461510/The-Key-of-Amalantra?1892600