The Heart of the Misty Island

Posted on May 1, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Rodrigo Oliveira
O Mochileiro
Shard Swords & Sinister Spells
"Try to survive"

A long time ago, an ancient civilization inhabited the world. Nothing is known about them, except for the ancient scriptures that they left. They used an ancestral dialect, which was forgotten, along with themselves. Some powerful wizards who researched ancient knowledge, know how to speak and read this language, because they believe that they possessed enormous magical knowledge.  Popular belief says that this civilization ceased to exist overnight, simply disappearing. No one knows how, no one knows why.  Many believe that this civilization was transported to another dimension by means of very powerful magic, and whoever manages to find out how to find it, will probably have access to all this knowledge, in addition to countless riches.

This 38 page adventure to a misty island has about ten pages of content that describes the trip and the natives, sacrificing people, on the island. It’s a simple oneshot that lacks much in the way of adventure due to its flowchart like plot.

This is using a flowchart like mechanism to run the adventure. If you stay on the ship then go to scene STAY or if you explore the island go to scene EXPLORE If you try to escape the prison cell go to scene BREAKOUT, or go to scene SACRIFICE if you stay in the cell. There’s maybe ten or so scenes, most of them take about a third of a page to describe, with the rest of the single-column page being devoted to giant art pieces from what looks like old word masters. 

You start on the ship, on the voyage which, I must say, has some interesting rumors Things like a map hidden in the library or the captain alone on the deck muttering to himself. These are great because they spark roleplaying on the ship. The party searches the library or watches/interacts with the captain. If only … the crew and passengers had anything to them. No names or personalities, just the number noted, so nothing here to help actually run the adventure.

The ship runs ashore in a mist on an island and this is where the flowchart like scenes start. Some of them can be quite railroady like “If the characters are in the AMBUSH scene, everything happens very fast, they will be strongly hit and passed out before they even understand what is going on.” So … ok. Why do this? There are plenty of other scenes that don’t do this but just have notes about the natives capturing the characters … so why force it in one particular scene? This sort of removal of player agency is never a good thing (outside of a hook, sometimes.)

The height of evocative writing is in the sentence “On the island’s soil there are trails made by different creatures, some of them can be known by the characters, like giant spider, giant centipedes.” There’s clearly a second language issue here, but I don’t really care about the awkward phrasing, Mr. Jefferson. What’s more to the point is the straight forward fact based writing that carries little to spark the imagination and wonder of the DM, the thing that an adventure lives and dies on. You just wander from scene to scene, fight natives, fall in a pit, and eventually arrive at a sacrifice ceremony where, maybe, an alien magician shows up.

It’s all just more than a bit boring. I’m sure it doesn’t match the vision the designer had, but there were, as is usual, issues in communicating that vision to the purchaser. It’s a few steps above a Steve WIllet adventure.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview, which would have clued the buyer in to what they were thinking about purchasing.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/354012/The-Heart-of-The-Misty-Island?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

Castle of Mirror, 5e adventure review

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
Runehammer Games
5e/"OSR" (not really OSR)
"Mid Levels"

 The sinister influence of an ageless dragon is plagueing the Westlands with vampiric evil. Can the heroes confront these undying dooms, and solve the riddle of the magic mirrors?

This 39 page adventure describes a castle with a fuck ton of rooms. It’s doing it in a new manner and I can’t, for the life of me, decipher how this thing is supposed to be run. It looks like it’s mostly combat with a lot of abstracted detail, to the point of being an outline. Which doesn’t have to be bad, but in this case is.

Most people run a sort of plot-based game, especially in 5e, and I’m always interested in how those adventures could be done better, to more align with their style  without throwing out the important parts of the game. This adventure is trying something new towards that, but it just doesn’t come off right, for with a traditional exploration game or a more common plot-based one with light exploration.

As best as I can figure out, each major part of the castle is called a “scene.” It’s not like you’d think, based on that word. It’s more like a zone in a dungeon, an area. Each “scene” then has “zones” in it, which you could think of as unnumbered, but labeled, rooms in which something could occur. When you move between castle “scenes” (which are just major parts of the castle) you make a kind of survival roll for the transition, with a failure indicating an encounter before transition and a success meaning you simply transition, with the whole thing being narrated as a montaage. Each scene has about 3-5 zones, just labels like “Causeway, Gatehouse, Crumpled Gate, Battlement, Interior Court”, for example, for the “Main Gate” scene. There are bulleted notes (Yeah) in each scene about “action.” There are about three major areas in this (we’ll call them “levels”) with about eight or so scenes per level. I have absolutely NO fucking clue how the action is supposed to fit in. Are these the things that happen if you fail a survival check? Or they happen in each zone? How do you move between zones? The maps are, essentially, abstracted, although they look like maps, so it’s not real clear how you move from zone to zone or transition to a new scene, or know that you COULD transition to a new scene. Maybe the action happens throughout the scene, with zones just there as “fluff” for the DM to narrate as the action takes place? I have no fucking clue. There’s a supplement, called “5e Hard Mode” that is a separate product that maybe goes in to more detail. In any event, there’s an overview in this on how the scenes and zones are supposed to work, but it still isn’t clear, so that could be improved.  

It’s also not real clear to me that there’s much more than fighting in this. The “Action” notes are GREATLY abstracted, to the point of it being almost an outline, in spite of the scenes being about a column each.  At one point one early room tells us “The machine can be used to glean all kinds of secrets about the castle.” Uh … like what? How does this all fit together? There’s o real summary, or overview. There’s no understanding of why the gate guards attack you but then there are miners in one room that will help you. There’s no order of battle for responses, or even, I can’t tell, if there should be one. 

There is a section early on about themes in the adventure to get the DM to use while describing. Many worlds, vampires, and a dragon. But it’s not really themes, as I would think of them, more “this is in the castle.” There is a dragon under the castle. Uh, ok, great? How does that theming work? There’s nothing here to suggest how to do it, or how to frame it, and it’s described as a fact about the castle rather than a theme. 

There’s a bright spot or two in the town description, with some of the NPC’s having the right kind of description. One dude always seems to be relieving himself outside. ANother is a group of loyalist troops looking for a reason. Those are GREAT NPC’s, they provide a lot for a DM to work with. You instantly know how to run them. To my surprise, about half of them were decent like that, so the designer clearly has some idea of how to write something good, even if the rooms/scenes/zones themselves are a fucking mess. There’s also a hook or two that is more than a little interesting. 

I think I get what the designer was trying to do. Major areas with common elements, and then some sub-elements in ear areas, the rooms. Some things that could happen there. I get it, and I think it has potential as a good format for these sorts of games. As implemented, though, it’s a disaster. There’ nore real anchoring concepts. No real anchoring interactivity (although there does seem to be more than a few role playing encounters, or potential ones, to the designers credit.) The amount of interactivity beyond that is lacking. There’s no real summary of how things fit together, or are supposed to work, as in how the castle and its various groups function. It TOO devoted to the bullet point to convey information, and each scene needs a little overview for the DM, rather than everything laid out in bullets. And the Magic Mirrors? The thing that is supposed to be a major element of the adventure? That’s a WHOLE confusing mess. 

The format here is more than half done. The designer is one to something. It needs more work though, on communicating the ideas to someone OTHER than the designer. 

This is $3.50 at DriveThru. The same is ten pages, with the last two showing four of the zones. I strongly encourage you to check out the preview and those two pages. It’s interesting. The one that makes the most sense is the last, the watch tower. From that you can get, I think, the best idea of how things are supposed to play out. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/312984/Castle-of-Mirrors?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 13 Comments

Rangers of Arkwood, adventure review

Posted on April 26, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Matt Kline
Creation's Edge Games
S&W
Levels 4-6

For years, a benevolent group of hunters stalked the trails of Arkwood, keeping the forest clear of dangerous creatures. Now however the group has vanished, and some very concerned people want you to find out why.

This sixteen page adventure features a manor with thirteen rooms. It harkens back to the early days of the OSR craze, with abstracted details, laundry list contents, and implausible contorted situations. A real classic!

The backstory has a ranger being attacked by phase spiders and creating The Rangers of Arkwood to protect the forest. He will get no prize for originality. Three rangers fight werewolves and are nonchalant about it in the backstory …. Which is itself weird. This is not the low fantasy of dreams but the high fantasy of RenFaire D&D. The only interesting thing in the lead up is the party being offered 3k cash by the Bards guild to find out why the rangers aren’t active anymore … because without them there’s no new songs. I guess it pays well to be a bard? Then some holy sisters show up to offer the party 2k to find out what happened to them. That’s the end of it, but I’d push this to absurdity if I were running it, having the local lord, the MU’s guild, the assassins and thieves, the executioners, the alewives, the gravediggers, and some kid with a mangy dog all show up to offer the party cash. Cause I’m a little fuck sometime.s

You wander around the forest rolling wandering monster checks until ten hours have passed, meaning you encounter, on average, eight wandering monsters. Seems high, but, no one is going to do that anyway, so we’ll just ignore it also.

You finally ind the rangers fortress and a brave badger man confronts you. He tells you they are all werewolves now and here, wouldn’t you like some potions that turn your weapons silver? This is my life. This is what D&D is, to a large portion of the population. This smells a lot like the designers own PC.

Inside the rooms are stuffed with werewolves. They won’t have names. They don’t react to sounds of combat in adjoining rooms. They just sit in their rooms and get killed, I guess. Long the way you get long descriptions of rooms that amount to nothing. A cloakroom takes up a quarter of page, listing how its used in detail, only to tell us it now only has a quiver of arrows on a hook.

It’s full of “this room was once.” that are meaningless to the adventure.
It’s full of laundry lists of rooms contents that are trivial and meaningless.

It has no joy. It’s just a hackfest. 

No names. No relationships. No factions. No interactivity. No interpersonal struggle. Nothing.

Just a minimally keyed adventure full of werewolves that has been expanded with trivia and padding.

The end has a bright point. There’s a list of further things that could happen, which is a bit interesting. If you took money from the halfling cook werewolves, and killed them, then they haunt you. Likewise bards follow the party around making fun of the party. Or telling how the rangers had to save THEM from werewolves. This is no way to run a railroad. This is the way you compel the party to slaughter NPC’s. Which, to be clear, I’m ok with both as a player and a DM, when this kind of shit is pulled. For a simple laugh? Ok. To build up the party and have fun WITH them? Ok. For punitive measures? No. Adversarial DM’ing with your 30/30/30 Gish Orphan Protectors is fucking lame. 

This is a throwback product to the early days of the OSR, where people just wrote the same stuff as always and stated it for OSR play. There’s nothing here.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There is no preview. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/315836/Rangers-of-Arkwood-A-Swords–Wizardry-MiniDungeon?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 3 Comments

Keep of the Blood Countess, adventure review

Posted on April 24, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jesse Burneko
Bloodthorn Press
Generic/Universal

Exsanguinated merchant families found dead, their homes stripped of all wealth. A mysterious benefactor leaving gifts for the poor. And rumors of activity near the sealed up old keep deep in the forest, stir barely forgotten memories of a countess, her demon child, and an act of mob justice.

This 27 page digest adventure is a clumsy attempt to present a dungeon adventure environment that also has a moral/ethical component to it. It’s clumsy in its dungeon elements and the form and function of the dungeon, with a couple of conceptually nice ideas that just never get explored in any meaningful way.

I’m a fan of a little moral complexity in an adventure. Not orc babies. Those just get stabbed. But, a witch who you are pretty sure is evil, but has nice heals. Or a friendly ogre offering protection who you are pretty sure has bread with an interesting texture. Dungeons & Dilemmas tries to help a DM with that. This isn’t Dungeons & Dilemmas, but rather an adventure that uses that zine to try to make something more interesting than the usual stab fest. It doesn’t succeed in that.

Dude loves his wife. Makes pact with demon to keep her young looking forever at cost of first-born child. Child is born, looks like demon, wife kills husband for it, and she and kid get bricked up inside house, where she turns in to a half-vampire and he just loves his mommy. Robin Hood shows up, worries about demons in house, tries to kill them, ends up figuring out how to make vampire lady give birth to demon children who kill the (merchant) families that Robin Hood leaves them at, making his looting of their manors much easier. 

Thus our personalities are: crazed vampire lady; mostly an animal. Crazed vampire lady babies; just mindless beats to be killed (although some beg to held. Nice!) Original demon kid; mostly just loves mom and the only innocent here, probably. Robin Hood, slaughtering people and using a vampire as a resource to do it … as well as feeding his own men to her.

None of these issues or themes are really explored in the adventure. They are just stated as facts up front, mostly in a multi-page backstory, and then the actual adventure text is just standard stuff. The horrors of the Robin Hood are not explored. There’s no meaningful interaction with him, his men, the demon kid, or the mom.  It’s just room after room of boring typical text and no opportunities to get in to the meat of thing. Not that, as written, there IS any meat to this. You have mom, a vampire. That’s an easy decision. You have a Robin Hood slaughtering families, feeding his men to the vampire (in secret) and mining the vampire lady for babies. That’s an easy decision. The demon kid looks like a full on Tim Curry Legend demon, but with the mind of a adolescent. He can get a pass, morally, but the party is unlikely to know that. 

The best stuff is a throw away line here and there. Like the demon babies begging to be held, or the kids room full of kid drawings (which the party is unlikely to know is his, given the disparity.) Best of all are a throw-away hook. Most of the hooks are the boring old “hired to investigate” type of crap, but, one is different. You meet bandits, who have split from Robin Hoods group because of his evil. Taking this further, I would make them desperate to take him down, rough men who have done evil things who are faced with a more serious problem, maybe their brothers/friends were disappeared buy Robin Hood. THIS is the sort of ambiguity that can lead to good morality play.

But the adventure. No. A half page taken up describing the room exits? That’s where you want to spend your effort? No order of battle for the bandits. No notes on how to run the bandits or kid or mom. It’s presented as just another hack. The height of encounter description is “During the day and into the early evening, a group of Tristan’s bandits (a few more than the PCs) sit at the table illuminated by lanterns. They are eating off crude tableware that doesn’t match the splendor of the rest of the room.” Better than nothing, I guess, but nothing there. One room will say that the creature within reacts to noises in room one or two, instead of rooms one or two telling us that. In oneplace we’re told the bandits are gambling with coins taken from merchant homes. But, that’s not relevant, is it? Unless the party is talking to them But they are not? It’s just stab stab stab. IN another place you get a note that Robin Hood is arguing with his second in command. But no notes on the argument, or notes in other rooms that it can be heard.

It’s all just clumsy like that. Jst vague ideas not integrated together. You could do something with this, but as written its going to take a complete redesign to make it come together. It’s really just an idea with the actual adventure text almost completely disconnected from that idea.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages. You get to see the backstory (ug!) and the throw-away hooks and the one little hook that I thought had potential. A previews purpose is to let the buyer know if they want to buy the thing. That means it needs to show encounters. This don’t do that.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/352575/Dungeons–Dilemmas-Keep-of-the-Blood-Countess?1892600

I leave you with some marketing quotes from D&D:

Dungeons & Dilemmas treats deeper emotional engagement as an additive dimension of play on top of the exploration, hazard avoidance, monster fighting, and treasure collection elements of traditional fantasy adventure games. All the ideas, tools, and techniques presented speak to the strengths of existing rule systems in common use. GMs and players won’t have to hand-wave away or house rule their games to accommodate this materi

“You are exploring a tomb in search of a mirror fabled to foretell the future. You discover the tomb is inhabited by an undead queen and her spectral knights. In your exploration you have learned that she was murdered by the patriarchal structures of her own holy order. The method of her execution has denied her eternal rest. She plans murderous vengeance against the living but offers mercy under two conditions. First, help install her as an eternal monarch upon the religious throne. Second, eradicate the bloodline of those who betrayed her. What do you do?”

I stab her and taker her stuff.

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 10 Comments

Trespassers of the Full Moon Tower, adventure review

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Bryce Lynch

In the deep woods just outside of Middleport, there stands the Full Moon Tower. In the days when the tower was new, children from Middleport began to disappear in the dead of night. The villagers tracked the missing children to the tower, but not a single one was to be found inside. Only a beautiful woman, a witch, who would not tell where the children had gone. Generations have passed since the children left. Still, the villagers do not go near the tower, for none have entered it and returned.

This 26 page adventure features a six level tower with six rooms, one per floor. It has a nice turn of phrase here and there but overall comes off as longwinded, mostly due to the embedded plot and conversational style of the text.

The basic idea here is that there’s this tower in the woods and bandits in it that sometimes raid the town to capture people and goods. Inside is the evil presence of a witch who takes over bodies and makes them her thralls, having several of them. A cage of prisoners at the top of the tower, her evil coven in the basement, and the bandits kept in check by hostages the incorporeal witch has taken. 

The village, which several pages are spent on, doesn’t really get much to distinguish it. It’s both the first sign of good things from the adventure and of the bad that plagues this one. The village takes about two pages, of which is ¾ rumors, but there’s still nothing much of note for all that content. A lot of content that tells us nothing interesting … with a couple of exceptions. The innkeeper had his son taken and he’s sharpening his sword. Or, to quote directly “Gert spends all day sharpening an old iron sword, wishing the bandits would show up again. He mumbles that it will be worth it them doing it, if he can catch them doing it.” Mumbling to himself, on the edge of loosing it, sharpening that old sword obsessively. Not really paying attention to anyone. I can run that guy.  There’s another point of two thats interesting as well. The locals call the tower Full Moon Tower, or The Dark Spire, or The Witches Castle. Nice having different names, a real local color sort of thing. That’s the sort of specificity that can make some place seem alive and real, both the tower and the village. 

Those little specifics are quite interesting. AT one point we learn that the witch cut out her own tongue to become a witch. Nice! Good detail! It’s worthless, in the adventure, since she’s incorporal and exists only as a vague glowing purple light in peoples eyes that she takes over. This is quite sad. Good detail, but worthless to the adventure. There’s also a nice little art piece of a mosaic on the first floor of the tower.

After this things are just downhill.

The door disappears after you go inside. *sigh* There’s plot embedded in the entire thing, making the rooms long and involved. The style of text is conversations, with a lot of “If the party open the door then they see” sorts of text. The elements with the witch manifesting as a glowing purple in her thralls eyes is lost in all of this. Instead of doubling down on the theming it goes all over the place, with the nicer bits getting lost. 

And then some of the descriptions are just plain confusing. One thrall, a person I guess, has a tail that it shots spines from? I don’t get that all. And a DIE! Situation where the first party member probably dies in one room. The door slams shut after they go in and then the DM is instructed to just give the sounds of fighting and to kill the PC. That’s uncool. At one point you find a glass eye that doesn’t really do much but detect evil. The final battle in the basement notes “if the witch sees the party throwing the eye around she will cause it to burst in mid air the next time they do.” Why would they be throwing the eye around? It doesn’t make sense. 

There’s supposed to be this embedded plot with a bandit leader led captive, his brother talking to the party (after they’ve killed all his men, I assume, knowing how most things go.)

It’s just words words words, conversational without the great specific highs it reaches in place. The plot is not integrated well, not thought out, and just feels tacked on and not well developed. 

That’s a shame. You can see where the designer wanted to go. Local “haunted” tower. Bandits forced to kidnap people. Thralls, eyes glowing purple. A bandit desperate to save his brother. A strong moonlight element to power magic, etc. But it just doesn’t come off, at all.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview doesn’t work. Neither does the print version of the downloaded files. 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/352453/Trespassers-of-the-Full-Moon-Tower

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

A Blaze in the Northern Sky, adventure review

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By D.S. Myers
Self Published
Old Sword Reign
Levels 1-2

An introductory, mini-dungeon crawl

This 21 page adventure has a nine room dungeon that takes two pages to describe. It reminds me of the early OSR adventures, where generic text was in generic adventures. 

The clue, gentle readers, is in the marketing blurb. “An introductory mini-dungeon crawl.” That certainly gets your juices flowing, doesn’t it! I can’t wait to run this! If you can’t be bothered to even market your adventure, just a little bit, then why would we think that the inside of the adventure would be any better? I hate marketing also but I do recognize you have to play the game.

The map is symmetrical. Just one hallway with two central rooms and six rooms having off of the hallway, three on each side, mirror images. *sigh* No complexity. No tactics. Just go from door to door and stab the goblins. Stab stab stab. 

There’s a 4hd ogre, a 5hd winter wolf and a wraith in the dungeon. For a party of levels 1 & 2. I get it, you can run away in the OSR. But in a symmetrical dungeon without tactical options? What exactly are you supposed to do? 

You meet an 8th level cleric on the (very short) trip to the dungeon. I guess he doesn’t give a shit about all the dead farmers in the burnt down copse of trees you encounter? 

“The local ranger fought and killed 3 goblins before succumbing to his wounds.” and “the dead rangers wife will gift them his elven chain mail and magic +1 sword named Fortune.” 

THIS IS NOT HOW YOU WRITE A FCKING ADVENTURE! Give the fucking dude a name. Give the fucking wife a name. DDon’t call him a ranger. Call him the local hermit, or weird loner, or whatever. He’s te scruffy dude people in the village avoid who smells like piss and then kills a bunch of gobbo’s when they show up. Jesus H … add some fucking specificty. 

I fucking hate my life. I FUCKING HATE IT. 

Two pages for nine rooms. “A large pile of anima bones near the entry door” That’s what passes for part of a description. “Large”, the most generic term there is. Generic words. Generic descriptions. No specificity. “Sh’Nakt’s pet winter wolf guards his treasures here. Sh’nakt raised the beast from a young age and it is loyal to him.” This is the height of evocative text for this adventure. The goblin, who you never have a chance of learning his name, has a name and the fucking dead loner dude whose wife give you his stuff doesn’t. 

This killed me. This is what broke me. This shit is what turned me from your average normal everyday happy go lucky D&D consumer in to the fucking idiot I am today. Thisi s the stuff I encountered when I discovered the OSR. Everyone said these adventures were great. Specific recommendations fot specific products … which were all written like this. Expansive generic text.

Yeah? Well Fuck You too. Why should your lives be any better than mine? If I have to sit through this fucking shit why should you get a pass just because I’m engaged in some curation. Yeah, no fucking shit my reviews suck lately. 

Ok, look, I’m going to try and turn this around. I’m gonna have breakfast.

This is a classic example of misplaced effort. When you write an adventure you need to focus your energy. If your adventure text is two pages long and your supporting pages are nineteen then it might be the case that you should spend some more time on your adventure text. A map of the countryside (present here) is a great addition! Except it should actually offer something to the adventure, unlike in this adventure. As it stands, it adds nothing and is just another art piece. The actual text of the encounters  should be something you SLAVE over. I mean, really agonize over. Are you sick and tired and looking at the words? If not, you’ve not spent enough time polishing them. You want to include specificity, not detail. You want evocative settings tht spring to life. You want encounters full of potential energy and possibilities. You want interactivity beyond stabbing. (And beyond talking, which is also relatively easy to achieve) Why is the ogre being controlled with a collar of control? Why isn’t he in charge? Or an ally? Or anything other than “magic item controls him?” “Smells of burnt hair and flesh” is a good description. You need more like that. You need to build on that. Agitated is not an evocative word for wounded goblins. 

Agonize over your creation. Pretend that this isthe only thing for which you will ever be known for or remembered by, by even your family.

IMAGINE, don’t design. 

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/352899/A-Blaze-in-the-Northern-Sky?manufacturers_id=17986?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 8 Comments

A Simple Dungeon, adventure review

Posted on April 17, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Micah Anderson
Self Published
Generic/Universal

Seven rooms filled with traps, magic, monsters, and treasure. Fight a Troll! Help a Halfling! Defeat an Undead Curse! For the Bastards. RPG system, although easily converted to any game.

This sixteen page adventure features seven rooms in a tomb as well as a page of hex encounters. It does have some decent descriptions in places but it suffers from its art house focus, simplistic interactivity, and treasure abstraction. It suffers, mostly, from not knowing what it wants to be.

Someone asked that I review this so I picked it up. Then the designer said my name three times while standing in front of a mirror and I said I was going to review it.[EDIT] Maybe it’s an ego thing? I would certainly understand that, mine being fragile enough. I may wallow in shit all day but it’s MY shit.

I say that this adventure doesn’t know what it wants to be. This gets to the core point of what an adventure is supposed to be: a tool for running a game at the table. Let us say I make a crowbar. It’s a beautiful crowbar. Perfect in every way. Except for the fact it’s made out of tinfoil. Useless as an actual crowbar but fine if you just want a coffee-table crowbar. Or, perhaps, if it brought me joy in making it? There’s certainly merit in that. But, then, I sell it as a crowbar, to be used as a crowbar. Now, lets change the material the crowbar is made out of but stillkeep it a damn sext coffee-table-worthy crowbar. Copper. Glass. Iron. Steel. Hardened railroad steel. There’s a spectrum here. At what point could we generally consider the crowbar useful to most people in most common situations?

There’s a large segment of the diy/osr/indie scene that likes to make beautiful things. That’s great. I don’t need an ugly crowbar in my life. But, it does have to actually be useful as a crowbar. Doesn’t it? Any none of this “but it’s useful to ME” stuff. It has to be useful to 80% of crowbar users. There’s really no difference between Paizo, DMSGuild and the DIY scene, they all are focusing on something other than the actual fucking adventure. 

And that’s how you get sixteen pages for a seven room dungeon. You do wide margins. You do digest format. You use large font sizes. You fill it with art. You do an abstracted map with fun font. That’s all great, none of it is bad. But, at what point does your creation become performance art? Because performance art is not an adventure to be used at the table. It has its own merits, but not labeled as “adventure.” (A trap a lot of one page dungeons fall in to, especially the contest ones.)

The map has a list of omens on it.  “Cackling” , “Chitterring”, and so on. They just exist as window dressing, adding nothing at all to the adventure. There’s little there to riff on. Why not, instead of perfunctory dropping it, add more to it to make it come alive and help the DM? Why say “place a treasure here” instead of actually listing a treasure to engage your creativity? Or “he knows d3 spells”? Why not list them? Why not engage totally with the creative process? 

Because when the creative process is engaged in then it is good. “Ten foot pit trap long ago sprung. Flimsy, rotten boards cover it. Corpse inside has dissolved into a grey jelly, will attempt to schlorp out and drag in interlopers feebly.” That’s great content! When I talk about specifics THATS what I’m talking about. Already sprung, boards over the pit, the ooze is an actual dead body. THATS good! It’s like the grells in Many Gates of the Gann. An extremely tall skeleton a mostly gilt free throne” Krom is the gift that keeps on giving. A lead coffer IN THE MUCK at the bottom of the pool releases a paralyzing MIASMA and contains a random treasure.

You can easily see the quality there. As well as bullshit like “a random treasure.” 

But there’s not enough of that. That lead coffer interactivity is lacking. Sure, there’s decent fighting. And there’s decent talking to things (thank fucking god.) But the other interactivity is rather low. It’s more watching things happen than fucking around with lead cofferrs buried in muck releasing paralyzing miasmas. And the writing FORMAT could be more solid. “Conspicuous sword upright in front of skeleton, actually lead painted gold.” This is a short example, but note that an important feature, it’s GOLD is in the second clause. Conspicuous GOLDEN sword upright in front of skeleton, actually lead.” would avoid the cognitive load that putting the descriptor in the second clause. The sword can turn one metal to another … Cool! That’s a good treasure … the kind that is lacking in this adventure.

The final room is the one that is the worst, the treasure room. Beyond the abstracted treasure, the main description is “The chapel built in to the tomb.” That’s the extent of your description. Well, a small amount of loot piled up, let’s call it 1000gp on average. “Piled with hoarded treasure” is an image that is in opposition to “1000 gp.” But, there’s no chapel description at all, which is not cool.

And the hex encounters range from good to poor. A bandit camp UNDER A FALLEN TREE. That’s good. HOSTAGE SITUATION. Thats good. Maybe could use, literally, one or two words more, about the situation. That’s a very good encounter. But dense trees and spiderwebs? Or surly wizard under a stuffed alligator? Ruined fort with valuable eggs? There’s no potential energy in those, not in the way of the bandit camp. You need an energy. That’s what interactivity brings. 

This is PWYW itch.io.  Yeah, I don’t know how much it was before. $4 maybe? Or maybe free? I can’t remember. I’m gonna try and talk with the designer and see what’s up. Also, please put in a good preview of your adventure. WIthout a preview then the only way of know what we are potentially buying is to either buy it or buy in to the marketing, which is always puffery. The preview helps us make an informed buying decision. You can support that, right?

https://micah-anderson.itch.io/a-simple-dungeon

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 44 Comments

The House of the Hollow, adventure review

Posted on April 17, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Dylan Mangini
DAMM Design
Mork Borg

In The House of the Hollow, players will investigate a mysterious moonlit manor, home to a retired adventurer in the midst of a terrible transformation. Even before they encounter the moon-bound horrors lurking between the walls, navigating a decrepit house on the brink of collapse provides the players a significant challenge. A haunting revelation awaits travelers who enter the mansion, along with a powerful artifact ripe for the plucking.

This twenty page adventure uses about fifteen pages to describe fourteen rooms in a manor home. It’s using a format that tries to be helpful but comes off a little clumsy, with the text descriptions having a similar problem. I would call this a very simple adventure that is fine for those people who only eat California Rolls.

Yes, thank you, I know it’s Mork Borg. But they keep telling me that the sample adventure is a decent one. Besides, the cover is ripping off Spirited Away and its supposed to feature the moon as a theme and I luv Diana, she’s my fav.Also, do they not put fucking challenge levels or character levels or XP or anything Mork Borg? Are all adventures suitable for all fucking levels? Because the designer has not noted, anywhere, what level this adventure is suitable for. PUT THE FUCKING LEVEL RANGE IN. This, gentle reader, is a clue: I’m going to hold this one to one a much higher standard than other adventures. Because this one is trying to do good things. From the interactivity, to the descriptions, to the format used for usability, it’s clearly trying to do things right. It just generally fails at it. This is educational because you can’t just mimic the forms and succeed. Oh, I mean, you can. I’m going to give this one a No Regerts [I lied, I’m not.], so, you CAN mimic the forms and succeed to a certain degree. You’ll write something that is not an absolute horror, differentiating yourself from 95% of other adventures. But if you want over the hump you need to focus. The form is not the goal, the end state is. So, for an adventure that tries to do everything right I’m going to make an example of it while at the same time saying It’s Fine.

The encounters here, the rooms of the manor, generally take half a page, with some stretching to page if a lot is going on. It’s digest, with a lot of section headers, bullets, whitespace, etc. This things tend to indicate, and I wouldn’t say, it’s overwritten, as most “2 encounters per page” adventures would be. 

For most rooms we get a RoomKey and name, which is the right things to do. This is followed by a short little room description of about a sentence. Then you get these big black bolded sections that list things in the rooms, with some keywords that describe them. In theory this is a good thing, and it’s a format I tend to like. Tend to. Here’s an example:

Room 6. Laboratory (Secret): Sour, sulfuric vapors waft through the air. Laboratory Contents: Scattered (tool & bone fragments) Glowing (vials of liquid.) Specimens: Rare (Dead insects) Dissected (animals) Masses (or hair and teeth)

There’s some bolding and white space formatting in there, I’m just listing the descriptions for this example. But, let’s take that description. Is that a good description? You can see some hints of good writing and inspiration. Sulfuric fumes. Masses of hair and teeth. But the overall effect, I would suggest, is one of abstraction and Yet Another Boring Lab. Dissected animals. Glowing vials. Tool and bone fragments. This comes off more as a laundry list of things in the room rather than something to hang your hat on, for interactivity and evocativeness. Each item gets, I think, too much attention. A full sentence for fumes? That would seem like “Sulphuric fumes waft past …” … something else. Dissected animals would be better with an example, and scattered tools and bones as a secondary, like the fumes.  A lot of little things that add up nothing, the focus on the minor secondary items rather than a primary thing. And all of the descriptions are essentially like that; some ok ideas but used wrong with little MAIN focus, either in interactivity or evocative description.

And the format. In theory, a good thing, but in practice … it’s too much for the content present. I get it, separate ideas, keywords, bolding, bullets, whitespace. Normally I’d be all over it. But in practice there’s not enough content to justify it. It comes off as overly expansive, taking up too much space for the content available, and, I think, detracts from comprehension because of it.

There are some decent things in this. The wanderers are ok, there are allusions to things like a bridges of moonlight and moonlit vibrational lullabies. But that’s never explored and the moon theme isn’t really there at all, or moonlight for that matter, except for maybe two or three sentences. 

The thing lacks impact. Interactivity is staid, a highlight being a grandfather clocker with the number 13 on t that you can set to 13 to open a secret door. “Stitched Mutt: Stitched aberrant dogs with extra limbs and eyes in all the wrong places.” Yeah, sure, ok I guess. Abstracted, not specific. And abstracted content is boring content. It generalizes and does nothing for the DM.

So, it tries for interactivity but comes off in a VERY basic form, for things like the clock. The descriptions are note evocative and focus on secondary rooms things rather than primary things. The format is probably overwrought for a fourteen room dungeon this simple. It’s abstracted description and abstracted content. De rigueur. So, better than a poke in the eye but not something you’re excited to run.

You can follow the forms and get to a certain quality level, but after that you have to DESIGN. Imagination must be primary focus, with the forms just bringing comprehension to the vision.

This is $4 at DriveThru. AND THERE:S NO FUCKIGN PREVIEW! PUT IN A FUCKING PREVIEW TO GO WITH YOUR LEVEL RANGE! DOWNGRADED! NO NO REGERTS FOR YOU!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348976/The-House-of-the-Hollow-compatible-with-MORK-BORG?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 5 Comments

Electric Friends, adventure review

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jonathan Snodgrass
Tuesday Night Fiends Club
Star Crawl/MCC/DCC
Level 3

You’ve been hired to scavenge a long-forgotten robot factory and failure is not an option!

This forty page digest adventure uses about eight pages to describe about seven rooms. LONG walls of text make sure that the DM will have a hard time understanding the rooms in order to run them. A fairly low combat/high environmental danger adventure with little going for it.

My saltines sleeve had no salt on it. Life sucks. What to do? Be one of those people who return a $.79 box of crackers to the store because there wasn’t enough/any salt? Or, glumly accept that this is the way life is, devoid of joy? ARE friends electric? (You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to make that reference. I finally caved and bought the adventure just so I could.)

So, Star Crawl, MCC, and DCC adventure. Not really any decent way for this to be DCC, but its listed none the less. SciFi is HARD, imo. Characters get planet busting gear quickly and thats hard to deal with as a DM without just nerfing them. This adventure is a fetch quest, but still, how many fetch quests can you handle in a campaign in order to keep the party from just nuking sites with their ship? Sounds like a needed scifi reference book: 101 ways to keep your scifi party from just nuking everything. Anyway, this is an automated factory, as all Gamma World/SciFi factories are, and the party is going their, as mutants or starship overlords, to find a new power core. You get one hook for MCC and a different one for Star Crawl. The STars one is more interesting, with an insanely wealthy android needing a new power core and offering to “take care” a problem the party has. This recognizes, rightly so, that complication arise in the parties life as they adventure and the party needs a way to handle that. Wishes work in fantasy, but patrons work in scifi pretty well. The MCC one is a lot less interesting: the healer bot in a village is running out of power, go to the factory in the woods to get a new one. Meh. The Star one is also like six pages long, which is excessive and no fucknig way I’m digging through all of that during the game.

Which is the problem with this adventure. Digging through the text. At one point there’s a page of text, with no paragraph breaks, that you’re gonna need to dig through to find the information about the room. And this is routine, as a six page hook would tend to indicate. AT one point there’s a kind of order of battle for robot response. Security, repair, fire bots, etc. All mixed together in one long paragraph of text. Jesus H Christ man, use a fucking bullet list or some white space or the tab key at least! Room after room you dog through in order to run it, in order to get even the most basic overview of what’s going on. Want to know what the outside of the factory is like? Ready the entire adventure and take notes to answer the inevitable question from the approaching party group.

Room with the automated sales robot. Swerve tunnel full of slimes and toxic acid waste. Assembly floor with abstracted automation hazards. Control room with computer to hack. Powerplant with nothing. Ore processing with monkey monsters and crusher/etc conveyor belt. Warehouse with the part you’re after and some robo freaks.  There’s not a whole lot here

And yet, there are a couple of bright spots. Some italics is used to highlight what a creature knows, if you talk to someone, essentially bullet point formating to better separate information. At least three of the encounters have some decent ideas: one with a swarm of robot-freaks of spare parts, like crawling hands and heads on arms and the like. Another has the ability for the party to intercept a communication signal to forge some credentials for a peaceful resolution … a nice touch. And, finally, a moment of true horror, which I suspect inspired the entire adventure. On the assembly floor you watch an android getting made. You watch it comes to life. “Am I alive? Is this what it means to breathe? Hell, who are you …” and then the robots immediately vivisect it as it screams, in order to reprocess it … there is no one left to buy the robots so its an endless cycle of assembly, new life, and horrible vivisection. 

A major problem with the adventure is its abstraction. It like to describe generally things. For example, the showroom just says something like “the sales bot moves along showcasing different body parts and styles while making comments.” with one exambpe of each for eyes. But that’s really all the guidance the DM gets to run this. This happens in room after room after room, just general abstracted description instead of specifics. The heavy lift of creation is on the DM, which begs the question … why buy this at all?

“On entering the showroom, the most apparent feature is its lack of features: it is stark and empty, with highly reflective black walls.”  So, you mean, Stark and Empty with highly reflective black walls? At least two thirds of the contents of this are empty words. More emphasis on the adventure and less on the supporting material was sorely needed.

What do you do when there is no salt on your adventure sleeve?

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. I can haz sad. 🙁

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/321199/Star-Crawl-Electric-Friends?1892600

Posted in Reviews, SciFi | 1 Comment

Madam Maze’s Cabaret of Carrion Delights, D&D adventure review

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nick Milton
Nick Milton Publishing
Generic/Universal/No Stats

Deep inside the bowels of an Elderwolf god lies a crumbling cabaret. Like an intergalactic traveling circus, the cabaret is constructed from ingested realities, only the truly bizarre and profane making the cut. Haunted monasteries stand side-by-side with chateaus run by monstrous flies. Preceding over the amusements is the mysterious Madam Maze, and she has a business opportunity for you. She hands you a spool of Alchemist Twine and offers you riches and safe passage back to your reality if you can frankenstein together a new act for her. Use whatever limbs from forgotten entities you can find still roaming about her kingdom. Time is running out and the seedier elements of her cabaret are awakening. Stretch Lords sharpen their fingers and Hemogoblins sniff the air for blood. Can you make it out in time or will you be consumed by the madness?

This 29 page “adventure” describes … I don’t know what the fuck it describes. An interdimensional freaky-deaky place with five sites each with a about a half dozen or less locations in them, all with a body horror theme and that light slight winking style so popular in some circles. 

You’re in a bar. The people inside starting screaming, tearing at and off their clothes, to reveal a message on their skin “Madame Maze’s Cabaret of Carrion Delights! Outside an emaciated 29 story direwolf show up, knees, opens her mouth, and a skeleton in a tophat steps out and chains her mouth open. To get in to the cabaret you have to offer him a part of your body. Well, that’s one of the hooks anyway.

A Berlin song? A Mo simpsons quote? Commentary about our artist friends? A kind of exquisite cadaver of parts, art, and words, the tone of this one makes it hard to stomach. Get it?! Get it?! It takes place in a stomach! A quote from the designer states “I’m a firm believer that body horror can be hilarious and quirky.” A common theme among artists, and this one certainly channels the artist nature of the the paroxysms of intoxication. So, we’rve got a body horror cabaret inside of a demi-god star wolf constellation. It’s run by a virus blob woman who wants you to stitch together a new act, literally, to amuse the bored dilettantes of the star wolfs pups, who sit in the front row of the cabaret. One of the acts of which is “a monstrous hairless cat with a nub tail licks itself casually as a weeping naked man begs it to clean him.” Successfully channeling the post modern nature of stage plays and the artist body horror, this may be the best supplement yet to refer to when you are looking to spice up your characters journeys through the planes of hell. Otherwise, you’ll need a group that can handle the nod-nod wink-wink nature of the cabaret and its locations … all set inside the stomach of a cosmic dire wolf. 

The writing herein can be frustrating. There can be long sections of italics ro ruin the eyes. There can be information related in paragraph form, events and plot and details that are hard to pick out. And yet parts are bolded to draw the eye. And yet that bolding doesn’t have enough weight to REALLY draw the eye. The ideas, always interesting, range from the more mundane, like “a cultist who ha stitched a wolf pelt on to his skin (another hook)” to the REALLY out there. “Lively music can be heard from the end of the wolfs throat” (which appears in the throat scene but should be in the mouth scene, in order to lure the players in) Great imagery. Great thoughtfulness. But, poor implementation. There’s a gift shop in one location. One of the creatures has an attack that will “remove any element from your body that is not ABSOLUTELY necessary for you to be technically alive. Their blade fingers work quickly.” Ok ….

So, it’s weird, the way that only our art friends can be weird. It uses bolding and offset boxes, cross-references and so forth to help bring some organization to the weirdness. And yet … it justifies only have five cabaret patrons by saying that business has been down lately. No doubt, but, just like ancient dour dwarf fortress, perhaps in the infinite multiverse we could find one in which the business has been down but there are a few more than five patrons available to be present? 

In the end, you stumble about, to location after location, trying to find things to stitch together. A chef wants something daring, something forgotten and something fresh for his sauce. Tasting the sauce heals all your childhood trauma and turns poison effects to healing effects on you. This is the tone. These are the encounters and situations that you encounter. 

It’s system neutral, with no stats. Mayhap a good choice. I would suggest, though, that while it is system neutral, I don’t think it’s game genre neutral. I suspect it works better for those more indie type games and less well with stat heavy games. Polaris comes to mind, but the tone is off. Maybe Mork Borg. Reformatting it, throwing off the chains of “ The Standard D&D Adventure” and embracing the less structured play style of those other genres would have worked to this adventure’s favor, I think. 

This does a better job of describing an alien/hellish environment than other supplement I’ve seen. All of those decadent drow cities and hell planes supplements pale in comparison. If you can handle the tone then you’ll find some truly off the wall things, with full on body horror present everywhere. Rough to follow in places and with encounters that are a lot more opened (on purpose) and subject to interpretation, it struggles with that, I think. It’s not TOO open ended, mostly, but its really close to the line of being pointless. Or, pointless in a way that Alice in Wonderland is pointless. You have a task and are trying to bend a truly bizarre world to your ends. 

“An unmotivated beam of light shines on a statue of an adorable baby Lich on the south wall. The space from statue to door is 25 ft. Approaching the statue will cause you to grow younger and the Lich Statue to grow older, its cherub-like form swelling with carved hatred. By the time you get to the foot of the now monstrous Lich you are a toddler with the equivalent mental capacities. Crawling into the Lich’s folded hands will reverse the magic and a token will plop out of the Lich’s back. The struggle is convincing a toddler to crawl into the hands.”

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the entire thing. The art gives you a good indication of whats to come. For writing, I’d check out page five of the preview for the descriptions of the maw and throat. Some bolding, some boxes to bring order to the chaos, but still too rough to scan quickly. I would note, as well, that these are the more mundane of the encounters. It never really falls over on to the Weird for the Sake of Being Weird side of things, but it’s really really close. This isn’t the “normal” weirdness of avant guarde adventure, of the poser weirdness of some Venger stuff, but weird as only the exquisite corpse can be; with structure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/350009/Madam-Mazes-Cabaret-of-Carrion-Delights?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 12 Comments