The Sleep of Reason, dungeons and dragons 5e adventure review

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By James Hanna, Brett Sullivan, Isaac Warren
Fey Light Studio
5e
Levels 2-4

The towns of Bassu and Inloc are at each other’s throats. But behind their mutual loathing lies a threat greater than either knows. A fiend in the form of a nighthag invades the sleep of the town leaders night after night, haunting their dreams and transforming them into nightmares.

This 54 page adventure uses 32 pages to describe about 24 encounters, the vast majority of which are social. The designers had a vision, but it fell far far short of that in implementation, leaving you with something that is nigh unrunnable in its present form. Which is too bad, the basic idea is decent. I’m considering changing my life goals, after reading this, and adding “beating in to people how to use skill checks” as a new project.

Two houses, alike in dignity in fair Ver … oh wait, no. This thing has the elements of adventure that I like. Or, at least, it claims to have them. A hex crawl exploration of the wilderness. A strong social element as you work the factions and NPCs within two towns, rallying them to your cause! Who wouldn’t like that? A little intrigue, a little social, a nice crawl, and then stabbing the shit out of something and looting some fucking treasure! Well, that was the promise anyway. No doubt the vision of the designers. That’s what made me leave my nice safe little bubble of shitty OSR adventure and venture once more in to the land of shitty 5e adventures. In practice, its garbage, of course.

I have now said just about everything nice that I will about this adventure. Good concept. There are a couple of VERY nice art pieces, by Tithi Luadthong and rangizz, that seem out of place. Not tonally. They work for that. But it’s like Aya Kato did your Get Well Soon card for a coworker that you feel apathetic about. Conceptually, there are a few decent ideas, like the hag living in a dead and rotting GIANT snake in the swamp. The descriptions are shit, but conceptually its good. The recruitment of allies, again good in concept but shitty in execution. There’s a hint, here of there, or decent writing. At one point if you mention “The Maiden”, a swamp ghost-like apparition/myth, then the guards and their goats both shift uneasily, the goats bleat softly, and the captain says something like “Nothing good comes from that swamp.” in order to twarn the party off of The Maiden. That’s fucking great! That’s what I’m talking about when I mention specificity and detail. No the color of the fucking innkeeps trouser buttons, but things that add to the actual game experience. 

The back cover contains the marketing blurb while the drivethru description is just bunch of little JPG images, with no text. Well, the images have a few words of text. WHo’s fuckingidea was that? You’re burying your marketing blurb on the back cover where it will never be seen and essentially nothing NOTHING about it in the actual storefront? I’m not a fucking expert on this shit but that seems counterproductive? In the extreme?

It’s full, FULL of shitty skill checks. Which is weird because they claim to have a system of “social moves” for you to use which, no doubt, turns the heart of D&D, roleplaying, in to even more of a dice fest and rules mastery then it already is. This thing is LITTERED will skill checks. I guess because it’s a social adventure, or thinks it is one? And I’m pretty sure that nearly every single one of them is implemented badly. Every one. Every single one. There are about twenty rolle to continues in this adventure. Twenty. These are places where you can’t continue the adventure unless you pass a skill check. In practice, this never happens. If you fail then the DM fridges and the game moves on. So why the fuck do you have a roll to continue? You’re forcing people to make dice rolls for no reason other than making a contest against a skill check. It doesn’t make fucking sense. The outcomes are all the fucking same. It’s unreal.

Try to use your intimidation skill? Roll a 24+? (Which I’m pretty sure is good …) then the DM is told it doesn’t work and the NPC works around it. What the fuck man? Why? Becusa it will break the designers vision for the fucking adventure? Jesus H … let the fucking party enjoy their fucking success! And, those eighty gazillion skill checks you make? They are essentially meaningless. Just little window dressing bits of information for the most part, teasing out descriptions and tone. Which, again, works against the fcking adventure. You WANT the tone out there. You WANT the details out there to set the tone. Don’t hide the heart of the fucking adventure behind a fucking skill check. 

It starts with combat. Lame. “STart your adventure with a combat to get the party going” says all of the bad old advice. Pfft! You bring the body to the nearest town. The gate guards say “Hello strangers who have just admitted to killing one of our town members. Please come in and enjoy yourselves!” What the fuck! Seriously?! 

NPC descriptions are bad, long and hard to use. The hex crawl has like one sentence for each hex, most of which are just boring “asps attack” or “roll a DC19 to avoid hazard” types. No detail. Nothing interesting. 

The actual format is TRYING to be helpful, but has gone COMPLETELY overboard with boxed and offset text. The page is COVERED with it, so much so that you can’t actually tell what the fuck is supposed to be going on in the encounter. Why are we here? Whats the line of path to follow? It TRIES to tell you that, but its so seriously broken … I know I mention putting this stuff in a lot, but, there’s a fucking limit. It’s supposed to help you find and run it, not obfuscate the game. 

The hag is an actual monster instead of an old women. Lame. The snake description, the sum total of it while inside, is “Within the snake, its ribs curve around to create a grim hallway illuminated by green glowing orbs along its length. The floor shifts slightly underfoot, pressing into the unspoiled viscera below.” The viscera part is good, but, fuck man, we’re inside a giant snake, how about a little more? Oh! Oh! And the subplots?! They are LITERALLY in a place called the Town Quest Center. Seriously. The questgiver gives them quests. Well, it’s a townsperson, but thats how its referred to. If you do enough fetch quests then you unlock the plot quests. Ug.

So. Good concept. It knows what its trying to do. It has just made every single bad choice possible to get there.

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview doesn’t fucking work.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/347134/The-Sleep-of-Reason-adventure-only?1892600

I leave you with this screenshot of one of the scenes. I dare you to figure the fuck out what is going on here and how to run it. I dare you. Go ahead. You’re running the game. The players are sitting the fuck in front of you. Right now. They are staring at you. They glance nervously at their phones, ready to pick them the fuck up if you stray for thirty fucking seconds. Run this fucking encounter.  Where the fuck is the actual plot to this encounter? I know where, but you have to fucking hunt for it. Seriously, you get … five seconds. Set up a time. Starts it and then glance at the page for five seconds then tell me what the scene is about and how to get it going well. And, I’m being GENEROUS in giving you five seconds. I really think it should be less than two. No fucking cheating!

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

A Tomb to Plunder, dungeons and dragons adventure review

Posted on April 3, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By FEI Games
FEI Games Inc
OSR 
Levels 1-3

one-off 1st-3rd level OSR hack-n-slash mini-adventure. Includes the new monster “Guardian Statue”

… Your party is traveling from one place to another when you spot a rotting backpack that is still worn by a decomposing body partially hidden in some tall grass. Closer inspection reveals a hand drawn map that hints to a location that might be a small tomb or crypt. Could this be worth checking out? From the various landmarks drawn on the map this location appears to be in this area. The next village is not far away and they might have some idea on where this is located …

This eight page dungeon describes three rooms, a door, and two hallways. The shovelware industry is alive and well, with little content, no good descriptions, and padding and abstraction galore. Plus, FEI Games can’t be a man cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me, DEVO version. 

The first sentence up there, the one that doesn’t start with a capital letter? The one that inspires the imagination with it’s “includes the new monster …” statement? That’s the publisher blurb on DriveThru that’s supposed to make you want to buy the product. Look, I dont’ marketing either. As a good midwesterner it feels wrong. But you have to do SOMETHING to let people know what they are buying and get them interested. I mean, I might not like to do it, and it might feel wrong to me, but you need to engage in it to get people to want to buy the thing, right? Even _I_ recognize that. The second paragraph up there is the first one in the adventure, all in italics as read-aloud, and serves, I think, as a much better blurb. I mean, there’s nothing to that encounter other than what it says. And, it’s a masterful work of abstraction. You are travelling “from one place to another”. Wow! Exciting! “Hints at a location …” Sign me up! “Various landmarks …” Oh boy! I can’t wait! This is textbook abstraction. It’s nothing but padding. I suspect it’s written like that to insert in to any world, but specificity is the soul of narrative. It still sucks. 

The adventure is full of such abstractions and padding. Rooms “appear” to be empty. Which we all know is never the case. And it just padding. Everything in the world “appears to be “ something. It’s the way your senses work in a world cursed by consciousness. Padding and abstracted.

“Put in your treasure” a column of text tells us. Joy. Not even the loot is done. Why would you want this? If you had to do the work yourself then why would you buy the adventure? Does it make sense that a DM is going to creature interesting treasure on the spot for a party that just reached the end? No, of course not. 

“These tattered banners are worthless but may be of interest to a historian” … with no treasure value listed. Making something worth more to one party than another is an good concept, but you need enough to put in to make it worthwhile. Likewise, another room has unknown writing. The fucking game has a spell that has a decippher language impact. What the fuck does it state, even generally? We’ll never know. 

“You feel like something bad is about to happen.” and “as the last person enters the room the door slams shuts and locks.” OMG these are bad. You don’t address the party in read-aloud. You don’t, especially, tell them what they feel. You describe an encounter in such a way that the PLAYERS says “oh, wow, I feel like something bad is about to happen …” THATS what makes a good description. And, the old it slams shut and locks trick? LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! LAME! 

“The monsters have no treasure” the adventure tells us. Well no fucking shit, man. That’s why there is none listed. That’s not how one spends their word budget! Most of one column is spent describing one simple poison gas trap. This ain’t no way to run a railroad.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/351127/A-Tomb-To-Plunder?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | Leave a comment

Gang Lords of Lankhmar, DCC adventure review

Posted on March 31, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Harley Stroh
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 1

The City of the Black Toga: Home to hundreds of back alley courts, rotting tenements, and an endless number of gangs, whose fortunes rise and fall as surely as the tides of the Inner Sea. Each gang vies against the others, pitting beggar against bravo, slayer against thug, and gang lord against gang lord. It’s a Lankhmar story that’s been told a thousand times, and would be entirely forgettable, save for one key element: the characters. The initial stakes are small as the gangs vie for control of a small slum. But as bodies begin to appear in the Hlal and the shadow war threatens to spill over into street violence, the price of blood favors those who trade in swordwork and black magic. If they hope to survive, the PCs will need to be both deadly and cunning by turns. For when the first rule of thieves is to never kill the hen that lays brown eggs with ruby in the yolk, old hands know it won’t be long before the Thieves’ Guild moves to protect their interests. May Death himself have mercy on those who stand in their way.  

This 32 page adventure outlines a gang war in a neighborhood slum. It has most of the gameplay elements down right, if flavorful,  but doesn’t quite know how to present them in a way that makes it easy to run. Highlighter City.

A slum neighborhood. Three minor gangs. One gets uppity ands hires the pc’s to shake things up, he wants total control of the neighborhood. Things go downhill in a series of strikes, retaliations, and escalating events that cause others from outside the neighborhood to notice. It ends with, perhaps, the party in charge of one of the gangs, setting up a fine fine city adventure campaign. And I do LUV me a city adventure campaign! 

A city adventure campaign forces the party in to a more cautious play style. Uh, hopefully, anyway, since it IS the party. No more wanderers, they get to learn of, and live with, the consequences of their actions. Their own neighborhood. How the other people in the city react and so on. It places back the social control of Keeping up with the Jones’s and not being ostracized by everyone else around you. Like the fence. Or the temple. And, of course, not getting squished like a bug but those MUCH higher up on the ladder.

And that’s what this adventure is trying to do, and largely accomplishes, I think. In a tortured way. There’s a neighborhood tension tracker. The more people you kill, etc the higher the tension in the neighborhood. As it gets higher things in the neighborhood start to change, people get wary. As it gets higher the criminal element in charge of the city tells you to cool it. And then assassins show up. And the city guard starts hassling you more, singling you out. And then they stop hassling you and actually start doing their job. And finally, if left to get high enough, the Overlord notices, puts the neighborhood under martial law, and the guard goes house to house in a brutal crackdown to find the party … and the neighborhood isn’t going to appreciate that, I’m sure. Thus the social element returns to D&D. Yeah!

Other elements help feed in to the overall vibe. There’s more than a few encounters with scouts on rooftops, keeping track of the party. There are good summary overviews of the what’s going to take place. The core of the adventure is events, on a timeline, that the DM drops in, supplements by a few location descriptions, of the three gangs and a few other “notable” places in the neighborhood. There is a web of relationships, in places, and a great sense of flavour. The doorway to one of the gang hideouts has a bunch of rusty knives, cleavers, etc hanging over it by strings, or an old crone at the tavern who is brought dead vermin by the neighborhood orphans to cook … and fight to defend her. Great great ideas and situations in this in to which the party can then dip their toes to pour their own brand of gas on things. It’s a sandbox driven by a timeline. 

But, alas …

There are two things wrong here. First, the trivial. Goodman clearly has a style guide which states that read aloud is in italics. LAME! Hard to read! There’s not a lot of it, but there are multiple sentences when it shows up. Lame! Well, at least in 2018 they had it that way.

More importantly, they don’t know how to format an adventure like this, or, Harley doesn’t know how to write one like this, in order to make it easily playable. There’s just too much for the “standard text paragraph” to handle. “Here’s everything about the place in paragraph format” is too much to hold in your head. It’s hard to find things. It’s hard to grab elements to shove in to your game and enhance it. I don’t think I’d be able to keep in my head the shopkeepers general reactions to the party, the old crone, the orphans running around, in addition to the main plot elements. But THOSE things are what is going to make the adventure immersive. Those things are what is going to make this one of the best adventures the party has ever played in. But, the DM has to be able to find it, remember to include it, remember to enhance the adventure with that flavor. And that just breaks down after a certain point. You can’t hold everything in your head. That’s why “always on” map text is important. That’s why summary sheets for NPC’s are important. That’s why its important to have a format other than paragraph form for longer and/or more complicated sections. 

This is a GREAT city adventure. It oozes with flavor. It can set up things that the party will be enjoying for a LONG time and talk about forever. (Also, remember, i LUV city adventures.) But, I don’t think you can run it in a way that takes advantage of it all, without some serious highlighting and creating your own notes and summary sheets. Are you willing to put in the work? 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. You get the overview/summary, the timeline of events, and the first event laid out. From that you can get a good idea of both the flavor and a hint of the difficulty in running the thing to maximum effect.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/291026/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-Lankhmar-1-Gang-Lords-of-Lankhmar?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 14 Comments

Snotsoil Mire, Dungeon and Dragons adventure review

Posted on March 29, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Sean F. Smith
Self Published
Mork Borg
Level ?

Quality writing like this and a willing to spend $6 on a four page adventure comes from the support of my generous Patreon supports. Support me today. Uh … For support, or something.
https://www.patreon.com/join/tenfootpole?

The edge of the Bergen Chrypt is flooded. Into that slick swamp, the ducal twins of Schleswig fled. Bring them back. (Or at least their signet rings. We’ll pay the same.)

Uh.

This four page hexcrawl is devoid of content?

The designer write something I kind of liked. I saw this pop up and was like, “Woooah, six dollars for four pages?!?!” But, as you should all know by now, I am a dreamer. I believe in a world in which a four page adventure is worth six dollars. This is part of the lies I tell myself to make it through the day. A short page count doesn’t necessarily mean a bad adventure! Money is meaningless, mostly, these things cost less than half of one cocktail in a bar, so the cost is trivial. The person who just came up to me at the gas station is telling the truth and really did just run out of gas and needs $5 to get back to Forth Wayne, home of Taylor and Winter Fantasy. I have the luxury of living these small lies; it keeps me optimistic and, in spite of what you generally read here, from being a bitter old man. You, gentle readers, get to peek inside that optimism and see it continually shat upon. I know my lies are not true, but I want to live in a world in which they are. You get to see me deal with my own hypocrisy three times a week.

Mork Borg: a decent idea currently being flooded with shit. Near the beginning of the OSR there was a trend where publishers converted their adventures for old school play. They just took whatever they had, some pathfinder or 3.x adventure they wrote fifteen years ago, and just did a stat conversion to Labyrinth Lord or OSRIC or something. They usually forgot to remove the skill checks and had things like “Make a DC32 perception check to find the giant cave entrance.” One adventure published for 23 different systems. It was a blatant low effort money grab. My true contempt is reserved for those publishers. I usually try to separate critique of the creation from critique of the creator. You may have written something bad but that doesn’t mean you are a bad writer. Those money grabs are a time where I give myself permission to break those rules. Sure, they all do it, but you have to retain a bit of plausible deniability or else the optimists get pissed.

Which brings us to todays review of Snotsoil Mire. 

The adventure has four pages. Single column, digest I think, with A LOT of whitespace in there. There is no art to take up space, or justify the cover price. It’s done in garish hot pink background that burns the eyes. A nice light baby blue is used, as well as yellow, just in case the hot pink color scheme should not give your eyeballs nightmares. Each of the six hexes has three possible encounters. The landwhale attacks, the aire if full of cold light rain (etc), or someone twists their ankle. Just about dix words for each of the three entries, most repeated on other tables. That’s it. 

RPG’s can teach us a lot. The vocabulary in the 1e DMG for example. I learned the definition of chutzpah from the 1e Paranoia game, geez, must have been in the eighties. A person who kills their parents and then begs for mercy because they are an orphan, I seem to recall. Chutzpah.

Is this thing a fucking joke? Did Sean have some kind of bet going with someone else where the point was to write the pointless thing ever and give it a high price tag? What the fuck is the point of something like this? This sort of garbage is the kind of thing people wave around as a banner. “Look, THIS is what can happen so you should ban X!” 

Mayhap the designer can fill us in on their thinking? See! See! I’m STILL optimistic that this isn’t some fucking troll product.

Congratulations Sean. You have written something iconic. You will now forever be associated with this. Bloodymage, Alfonso Warden, FATAL, Smugglers Cove. Snotsoil Mire & Sean Smith.

This is $6 at DriveThru.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/328758/SNOTSOIL-MIRE?1892600

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 24 Comments

The Cape of Old Daemons, Dungeons & dragons adventure review

Posted on March 27, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael Raston
Gorgzo Games
Ordure Fantasy d6/OSR
Lower Levels

The Cape of Old Daemons is on the fringes of The Red Sun Kingdom. Ancient wrecks and ruins of an age filled with magic and technology are littered across the cape. The Prodigal Caravan, a nomadic tribe of wizards has settled here, attempting to pick clean the ruins. A camp of Red Sun Agents watches over them, ensuring anything of value is returned to the King. Tension simmers between the two groups, while beneath the earth The Hookmen plot the downfall of all …

Let’s see …
A one page Mork Borg called Putrud Dungeon Rites of Pestilence? PASS.
A Frog God adventure about St Patrick’s Day? PASS.
A Joseph Mohr adventure about the city sewers? PASS.
See, I CAN learn new tricks!
A vaguely science fantasy setting that seems to be a mashup of Gamma World and Dark Sun? TAKE MY MONEY!!!!

This 21 page “hexcrawl”/setting describes 24 adventure regions and seven home base regions. It is flavorful enough, but its use of random tables detracts from play rather than enhancing it, reading to an incomplete vision. I’ve got three things to talk about here. The mythology of the setting, the use of random tables, and the nature of hex crawl encounters. 

We’ve got the Prodigal caravan a group of wizards that live in towers on top of giant wagons. A huge camp gathering. They act as a kind of home base and faction. Then there’s the Red Sun Men, agents of The Undying Autarch, The Red Sun King. Skin tight leotards covered by voluminous robes. Another faction. This, alone, should give you an idea of the ideas set forth in the booklet and how they hint at deeper mysterious, and the joy that brings to the DMs mind. The designer starts off solid here. He hints at things. Brief imagery, that encourages your mind to race to fill in the gaps. Which is exactly what good writing should do. 

The setting is a kind of Gamma World/Dark Sun thing. Oracle of War made me view Dark Sun in a new light, scavvers on the edge of civilization, but was still a little too … staid. Slightly less control was needed on the edges, a Deadwood like place with little government … but slightly more than the implied Gamma World setting of “only your TL1 village of twenty huts remains.” 

And the setting isn’t exactly post-apoc, at least not how its generally imagined. This isn’t the magical ren-faire post apoc of Dark Sun or the recognizable future post-apoc of Gamma World. There are no guns or cars. It’s more “here are three small pink pyramid crystals.” It’s more like a crashed spaceship tech in which you have absolutely no foundation in figuring out what things could do. This is great since it multiplies the mystery, and, it also begs the question What is Post Apoc? Why is this setting post-apoc? It is because its described that way. Ruins, finding weird things in them. That’s post-apoc. But, if you find some ioun stones in a fantasy dungeon is it post-apoc? With just a little tweaking what you could have here is a kick ass Points of Light game, just like in most other “borderlands” types games, but without the implied tech. Hmmm, maybe that’s it: this is a post- apoc setting without the implied futurism of Gamma World or the retro-steampunk shit of Dark Sun. It’s DIFFERENT. 

Oh random table, what hath thou wrought? Everything in this is generated by a random table. Each of the “hexes” gets three rolls of a d6, and three different d6 tables describe the hex. There are six of each type of hex and six entries on the tables. Thus you are getting some kind of unique combination, but not much else. Thus you might roll what the exterior of a Bone Ruin looks like, “sloppy slag heaps cooled molten metal dripping from exhaust pipes jutting from the ruin. Combine this with a roll on the interior table “Choked with metal middens of cogs, chains, screws, bolts and the like. These crawl with palm sized rustmites (Health 1), fat and vicious from the neverending feast of scrap. Rustmites will attack if their middens are disturbed, swarming and easily melting flesh with acid dripping mandibles.” And then a roll on the “filled with” table: “A thick iridescent dream fog – stalked by rainbow drenched silhouettes who shimmer out of existence when examined.” Ok Mr DM, run that!

But, why is this content being generated randomly? These are a couple of sentences each, for each of the three tables. This is not a minimalistic wandering table with another motivations tables in order to spark some in-game riffing quickly. These are the core locations. They are finite. Why are they random? I have to think that the content would have been better,m the locations more interesting and more interconnected, if the designer had kept this randomness out and had just rolled and created their own, and then tweaked them to build them in to more than the sum of their parts. The location map is set up for the DM to roll ahead of time and record the results on it, which is nice, but why? Why random? It feels like people don’t know how to use random tables anymore. (Also, the map icons for two of the locations, the vat fields and vt gardens, are VERY similar. I might have given them a bit more differentiation.)

This is a hex crawl. It doesn’t have hexes and there are no crawl rules, but it’s a hex crawl. There are locations that you travel from place to place and you get a brief little snippet of text that the DM must then turn in to an adventure. That example I gave earlier, do reread it. That’s whats generated for one “hex” in the bone fields. (Ok, there’s two more tables for exploring chambers inside.)  From that the DM has to run the game. I’m not saying it’s bad, but what I am comparing it to is a typical hex crawl, because that’s what is most resembles. Not from the “we go visit locations outside standpoint” but rather from a “now run a game from this hit of text” standpoint. Is that an hour of gameplay? A session? Who knows, it depends on how much the DM riffs on it. And herein we have the hex crawl dilemma. Things like Carcosa, Isle of the Unknown have THINGS. “Here is a thing.” Here is a giant parrot bird. There is no action or situation implied. “This hex contains a giant bird that looks like a parrot.” Wilderlands and John Stater hexes tend to present situations. “12 dwarves are hunting a giant bird; they started as 100.” One implies a static thing while the other implies a dynamic situation. Guess which is better? This is less Wilderlands and more Isle. It’s generating locations to explore (which to be fair IS what its supposed to be doing) but they don’t feel like situations, they feel static. Really really well described/evocative, but, more static than dynamic. Again, I think, the nature of using a table to generate it rather than designing it. 

Faction play is present, as the publishing blurb implies, and the loot and “mutations” (unfair! They don’t seem like mutations at all. This just seems like a freaky place) are great. The whole fucking thing is great. I love the world this thing takes place in. I just don’t think it follows through to its potential because of the random generation and the static environments that tends to create. I REALLY fucking like it though, but, Gamma World is number one in my heart of hearts.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see how the tables are used in the generation of serfs in the home base area. Not a great example of locations explored, but it does give you an idea of how things are going to go.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/350007/The-Cape-of-Old-Daemons?1892600

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

Night of Blood, Warhammer adventure review

Posted on March 24, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jim Bambra, Lindsay Law
Cubicle 7
WFRP 4e
"Relatively new characters"

It’s a dark, stormy night, and the forest creaks as foul creatures howl through the undergrowth. As freezing rain slices from the roiling sky and attack threatens from all sides, the desperate adventurers stumble upon the warm glow of a fortified inn. But everything isn’t as it seems, and soon the unwitting heroes face deceit, betrayal, and horror as they strive to survive a terrifying Night of Blood.

This eleven page adventure details a small inn that has been taken over by cultists posing as the innkeeper & staff. It sets up some interesting situations and has some decent specificity and flavor, but could use a little less abstracted generalities and a little more traditional formatting. It comes to me as a request to review.

It looks like this adventure appeared in a 1987 edition of White Dwarf, and then was updated and released as a separate product in 2018 for the 4e version of the WFRPG. This explains the original writing credit (Bambra) and the updated one (Law.) I’m not sure how he original went. This one has some issues.

There is some great color in this adventure. That, and the setting up of situations, is one of its great strengths. It starts with the party caught out in a forest road, in a storm, at night. You can hear the braying of the beastmen in the distance. The braying gets closer, and closer. And then it stops, they having brought down the deer they were chasing. The party, of course, doesn’t know this. They are just shitting themselves by this point, this early in the adventure! They see an inn in the distance. The gates in the walls are locked. The ferryhouse, unlocked, shows signs of a struggle and blood, if investigated. Getting in through the side doors of the walls, the party hears unhappy horses from the stables through the storm, and sounds of laughter and mirth from the inn. 

What the adventure does very well is create tension and go back and forth between creating suspicion and plausible explanations. The horses could be loud because of the storm. The laughter in the inn dies when the party knocks on the door … which is to be expected. The innkeeper is portly and gruff, having well to do guests staying and not wanting the parties kind tonight. The roadwardern inside asks the party questions. A worker mops the floor. And … theres a mutie in the stable hayloft munching on the dead stable boy. The worker is actually mopping up blood. The portly innkeep is a fat mutie. The roadwardens outfit  has bloodstain at the base of his back. The floor upstairs to the common room is wet … hmmm, are those remnants of carpet where the hallway wood is now? Was a carpet just pulled up? 

Suspicion. Plausible deniability. Things that makes sense. With alternative facts …

 The adventure does this sort of brooding and tension building very very well. 

It also does a great job with its monster descriptions. Short and good. A beastman with a cattlehead (with a great little illustration) andmutie descriptions that are both short and decent enough to run with. A great description of a little situation and enough personality and mannerisms for the DM to run with it pretty well.

And it makes a lot, A LOT, of bad decisions.

To begin with, the location key. You get the standard numbered map. In a nice surprise, there’s a little key on the map to tell you which room is which. Room 11 is the stable, for example. But, then, the adventure text doesn’t use the numbers. It uses the room names. SO you have to go find “Bedroom” in the text. And it’s not in alpahbetical order. Instead it’s in some kind of plot order. The party will be outside first, as they approach the inn, so the ferry and stable are outside he inn, and the party might explore there first, so those descriptions come first. Then, in some fucked up decision that only its mother could love, we get a background/introduction section that explains what is going on in the rinn, what has happened and what will happen, kind of. Then we get the main floor inn descriptions. Them ots assumed the party goes upstairs to sleep, cause thats where the loose plot is taking us, so we then get the description of the upstairs of the inn. Then, more plot/timeline stuff and the cellar of the inn is described. It’s a completely fucke dup way to describe the place. Yeah, I get it. I get what is trying to be done. Butit’s nonsense. The monsters/staff/etc are all mixed up in there. This experimental formatting is NOT good. Room/Key format is not perfect for every adventure, but it DOES help you find things easier. Unlike this mess.

It’s also a little handwavey in areas that I think could have emphasized better. Cutting down the word count (A LOT) would have focused better what’s remaining, in the DM’s head. Emphasizing the storm and the chaos/sounds it creates would have gone a long way. As would more advice on playing up suspicion and plausible deniability. Teasing the entire thing out just a bit more. Maybe an order of batt;e/advice section for how things could go down in a couple of situations, just a few sentences each. 

In short, it’s an open ended situation. That’s GREAT. But it could have been focused on that and provided some hints to the DM about how to run that and be organized around that, with better break outs of the NPC”s, clues, and little events like the blood mopping. Instead you get this fucked up little plot thingy going on instead of a proper timeline. ANd then it ends with the cops showing up and taking the worst read possible on the situation and the party getting a decent chunk of XP for explaining to them. This partis totally handwaved, with almost no more words than I have typed here. A little more on the cops would have been much appreciated, especially given the XP reward it comes with. 

It’s a nice try, and I see the potential it has for a great night of gaming. Good concept here and one of the better “fucked up roadside inn” situations, but severely missing some things. 

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/259967/WFRP-Old-World-Adventures–Night-of-Blood?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 18 Comments

The Incandescent Grottos, Dungeons and Dragons adventure review

Posted on March 22, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gavin Norman
Necrotic Gnome
OSE/BX
Levels 1-2

A bubbling stream cascades into a hole in the earth, leading to a series of underground watercourses and scintillating grottoes. Adventurers who delve within may discover odd mosses and fungi, a ruined temple complex, and the lair of a crystal-eating dream dragon.

This 56 page adventure features a two level dungeon with about sixty rooms. Multiple factions and lair areas combine with some weirdo dungeon stuff (in the more traditional definition of weirdo dungeon stuff) to crate an excellent example of The Dungeon As A Weird Place To Go Down In To. A more sensible Operation Unfathomable, or something similar to the The Upper Caves in Fight On. The classic OD&D dungeon.

There’s an airy forest glade, wide and clear. A dream like atmosphere, where time seems to dawdle and a cheery stream running through the glade, bubbling over rocks. There’s a hole in the ground. The stream flows in to it, all misty waterfall style. There’s a pool at the bottom. There’s a rough cut set of stone steps going from the surface down to the pool. 

That, gentle readers, is a classic dungeon entrance. You get this idyllic little scene, with hints of otherworldliness, like the waterfall mist and the dawdling time. And then, the hole, with rough steps leading down. THE MYTHIC UNDERWORLD AWAITS. You know, as a player, that shit is about to get weird. Your heart beats a little faster. This is the waiting line to the ride at a Disney park. It sets you up for the experience to come. It’s done GREAT in this.

The map is a series of zones, on two levels. Different factions live in each zone. There’s some VTT maps, for this day and age. [As an aside, while I don’t VTT, I do appreciate it. It’s a recognition that a substantial number of people DO vtt, and they need/want a map suitable for the fog of war feature.] The map is clear, easy to read, has great details on it to help fire the DMs imagination. It’s keyed easily, has an underground river (!!! Always a staple of beginning dungeon!) Monsters are noted on the map. I like it. Glynn Seal is doing great work. I don’t know how the fuck they are pulling of the writing matching the cartography so well, but its working for me.

There’s a fine summary up front, a loot summary, a summary of the factions and what they think of each other. Wanderers doing something without them falling in to the gonzo end of the pool. The rooms use a boiled keyword format, with section heading following up on it. I think it works well, as I’ve said in the past. I might quibble with the monsters not being in the initial description but rather in large sections later on, but, maybe I just need to get used to it. There are extensive cross-references, so if the key says the monsters are heading toward the BLACK TOMB then it also tells you (#44) so you know where the fuck to have them going without having to dig for it. The rooms also have notes like what you can hear down a corridor to the next room, and so on. Nice. These sorts of details are present throughout, giving the DM exactly what they need to run it. 

A quick shout out to some of the art. The trogs herein are depicted as tall thin pot-bellied Gollum-types in hot pink. Reminiscent, in a good way, of the Kuo-toa. Other art has style that is reminiscent of … Adventure Time? I don’t know. I don’t know art. I probably just insulted someone. Anyway, it all fits in well with the MYTHIC WEIRDO (but not so weirdo as Operation Unfathomable) UNDERWORLD vibe. And, for the record, I fucking love OU.

There’s a degree of detail present in the rooms which is quite interesting. They are loaded with things to poke, prod, look at, touch, and interact with. Some of it is the classic interactivity that I’m looking for in an adventure (statues to twist, buttons to push, as the platonic examples) but others is just things to look under, in, read, and so on. The rooms are fucking loaded. A crystal grotto (lets fuck with/mine crystals!). Some of which are 2’ long, grey andkeening gently (weee special crystals to fuck with!) A sandy floor (eeek, whats under it!) with glowing purple moss BLANKETING the walls (note the word choice, blanketing, to evoke the imagery in the DM), a carved archway to the east of imposing stone (carvings? Of what?!) and a heavy stone fallen door to the west (with writing underneath it!) A spy fucking hole in the wall, with a metal grate. That is also crawling with bugs, spiders and centipedes. Oh, and then also the room has kobolds doing some shit. Like, what the fuck man, it’s like a magical fucking wonderland for the party! Even shitty book treasure like +! Arrows get a little detail, like “iridescent feather fletching”. Sweet! See, not hard at all to spice things up!

The rooms might be getting a bit long, but, whatever. THIS is what I want the baseline of our hobby to be. The fucking formatting and ease of use issues are essentially taken care of. The writing is evocative enough to be good. This then allows for concentration on the interactivity, the plot and that most elusive of all things, THE DESIGN. This should be the minimum acceptable baseline for our hobby.  Yeah, it’s pretty transparently the shit I continually harp about that they solved. And?

GnWell, Gnthe Gnomes Gnhave Gntheir Gnshit Gndown Gnpat Gnby Gnnow Gnit Gnseems. GnThree Gnreleases Gnand Gnall Gnthree Gnfiring Gnon Gnall Gncylinders. GnDare Gnit Gnbe Gnsaid Gnthat Gnthe GnUG Gnis Gna Gnpublisher Gnto Gnbe Gnrelied Gnupon? 

It’s $7.50 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages long. You get to see several rooms, so you know what kind of encounters and writing and formatting to expect. Great preview.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348878/The-Incandescent-Grottoes?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 18 Comments

Broken Bastion, D&D adventure review

Posted on March 20, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gus L
Ratking Productions
OSR/“the wayward offspring of older editions of the first roleplaying game and easily converted to retro-clones such as OSE”
Level 3

A derelict spire stands landmark on the Crystal Frontier’s Northern border. Glassy pink masonry shattered, pillars tumbled, and the entire edifice driven into the earth – an arrow from beyond the fixed stars. Ignored as too small and inaccessible by the larger bands of Gem Robbers, perhaps there’s still treasures beneath the Broken Bastion’s ruin? GAZE upon arcane works of the Empyreans! FLY from the ominous tread of their War Automata! SALVAGE wonders from beyond the terrestrial sphere!

This fifteen page adventure features a fourteen room dungeon with a substantial “learning” aspect to it. It’s a nice adventure, evocative and interactive, with some map & wall of text issues … unusual for Gus.

He explains that this is a bit of a departure and more of a “classic” dungeon, sans factions, etc. In essence, perhaps, a tomb dungeon, with some vermin and undead and the like prowling about along with traps, etc. All set in his Crystal Frontiers thing hes doing. He keeps it fresh and interesting, and, offers advice to GM’s and designers.

This advice is a major part of the adventure and, I suspect, makes up half to a third of the word count. In it, a kind of designers notes and DMs advice rolled in to one, he offers the rationale and intent behind several of the encounters as well as some suggestions on how to run them. In this way you might think of this as filling much the same role as Skerp-a-lurk-ding-dongs Serpent Kings (all of which makes a lot more sense if you imagine I’ve been listening to a Kasabian and MIA mashup, Galanga, for three days now. ‘Purple Haze, Seek a looka ding dong, lazy days, skerp a looka ding dong!) 

So, the very first encounter area is the front door. Sealed shut. Impossible to open. Well, unless you have a knock spell. Then it pops right open. The commentary from Gus notes the role of Blockades on an adventure (roll to continue) and how the intent here is to learn the power of the utility Spell. All that shit that is not combat (or, IMO, divination, which fits another purpose, I think) and how they let you break the rules of the game to come to creative solutions to problems. Some of which Gus states and some of which I’m filling in with. 🙂 He does over this sort of advice in room after room. One room notes that the Glass Spider monsters in it serve more as a trap than they do a standard combat encounter and explains that role and how it works. Good advice for DM’s and designers alike, and lessons for players to learn.

One of the major lessons, therein, is the timer. Walking around the place is a combat robot with 10HD. FAR too strong of an opponent for the party to handle face on. Gus goes in to detail on how the robot is more of a puzzle than a combat encounter. How avoiding it and play cat and mouse, and sneaking about, are the aspects that the robot encourages. He tells the DM how to handle it and how to present it to the players. I’ve talked in the past about the 20HD orc. In a group of five orcs you have one with 20HD. He looks just like all of others. This is not a fair encounter. There’s no way for the party to understand that they face something other than a combat encounter. Gus goes in to that and describes techniques to communicate its power. “Each step echoing and shaking like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park.” This, along with other techniques, helps communicate the nature of the encounter to the party and suggests that, perhaps, face on is not the correct approach. 

Gus does most things right, filling the place with interesting treasures and loot. He uses a “intro paragraph” format with bolded keywords that then get little break out sections of their own. This format is generally easy to scan and locate information. There’s good interactivity in both the traditional and nontraditional puzzles and traps and buttons to push. It’s not just all hacking.

There are some things that feel wrong though, which is unusual for a Gus adventure.

The first is the map. A key component of the adventure is avoiding the stalking war machine. I would suggest though that the map here is not as clear as it could be. It feels cramped to look at an pick transition details (doors, up & down stairs and grav tubes) out of. I’m not really sure what’s going on. Some combination of the selected style, the scale, and the color choices maybe? I might note, as well, if the font choices are going to be an ongoing thing, I might look in to some changes for the 4’s and 9’s; the 4’s look like 9’s and I don’t like spending my limited mental resources on cognatizing such  things. I can nitpick a few other issues as well, such as the lack of a good description of the glass spiders and lith wights. 

The much more serious issue, though, is a kind of wall of text issue. I’m not sure what is going on here, but I know it’s there. Gus is using a triple column approach and the intro/bullet format is a good one, time tested. The default “download” format is a double page layout, so there’s A LOT of text up on the screen. Triple columns. Magenta highlighted boxes. A smaller font? The eye wanders. It glazes over. So, while the individual elements are well done, the total effect is one of TOO MUCH! TOO MUCH! CAN NOT PROCESS TOO MUCH TEXT! I think this is interesting because I don’t recall seeing an adventure before that is well organized in which this happens. But, then again, there is the triple column text and the double page layouts. Thus, printed, maybe it’s NOT an issue? I don’t know. A weird combination of the double pages, triple columns, font size, and color scheme? Something is going on.

But, still, a fine interactive adventure. I’m going to err on the side of Regrets here, mainly because I think if its printed out its better, if for comprehension is not for my color toner cartridges. (I’m pretty sure my color laser uses the EAXCT cartridge colors Gus is using.)

This is $2 at DriveThru.The preview is all eight double pages. A great preview, and show you all of the content you ned to see, and perhaps hints at the wall of text issue? I don’t even know what to call it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/340122/Broken-Bastion?1892600

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

Halls of the Blood King, D&D adventure review

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Diogo Nogueira
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 3-5

With the rising of the Blood Moon, the accursed abode of the Blood King returns to this world. The lord of all vampires comes to claim the blood that is owed to him. His halls contain treasures and secrets that would make any ambitious adventurer abandon reason and caution to seek them out. Will you risk your soul for gold and glory in the Halls of the Blood King?

This 56 page adventure details about a forty page manor home of an interdimensional vampire king. Good formatting, stuff to do, and some decent imagery lead to mountains of fun for every blood bag that dares enter! 

So, vampire king lives in this little manor home and pops around the multiverse, demanding tribute from all the vampires on the world he lands in, before moving to the next. Things are going great! Well, except for the blood spiders that have gained an intelligence and have their own mock court. But they are fun to watch. Oh, and that vampire hunter living inside, plagued by the morally questionable stuff they’ve done. But, hey, they are fun to watch and torment also! (How fucking ennui is that! “Yeah, I keep a psycho around and, yeah,. They sometimes kill people. It keeps things interesting around here …”) And, then, there’s the alien fungi in the basement. Bu, it’s fun to experiment on. Hope it doesn’t get out of hand and destroy all life on the world. And, of course, then there’s hidden rebellion within the home, the princess wanting to go her own way, with her followers. Then there’s the visitors, a motley crue of vampires, people pretending to be vampires, people studying vampires, and the list goes on. Minor players, but they all have goals and personalities and can be leveraged. Mom is upstairs. She wants to be reunited with her vampire king son. She’s a banshee now. Is he REALLY her son, like she says? What happens when you introduce the two? Or, hey, that mirror upstairs? The one that the vampire king put all of the kind parts of his soul in to? What happens, do you think, when he looks in to THAT mirror? And then there’s the little scale model of a solar system. With a sun. And little planets. That are actually planets full of living people, just very tiny. Also, fuckng with it could create a black hole that sucks everything in in a 30’ radius. Also, that black hole could swallow up the vampire kings heart, that he keeps stored nearby in a safe place. 

From that we can gather more than a couple of type of interactivity. We’ve got some traditional faction play. Then we’ve got some good NPC’s thrown in, both with their own explicit interactions with the adventure (mom, the mirror) and some opportunities to non-specifically exploit (the guests come to visit.) These three type of people could all be leveraged by the party, or use the party to their own ends, or just eat/kill the party. Then we have more traditional environmental interactivity, with the solar system, cause and effect, and some flaws, like the heart, hanging around. Wanderers are doing something. The guard barracks has one thrall who is reading a love letter from home and has ALMOST broken out of his thralldom. Shit is going DOWN in this place. All we need now is a dumpster fire full of gasoline to be wheeled about!

It’s clearly been designed for ease of use at the table. I don’t know if it’s Gavin (publisher) Diogo (writer) or Geist/Crader/Urbanek (Editing) but it feels like someone actually gave a shit when putting this together. The map is interesting, easy to read, contains notes like locked doors, and has rooms with monsters clearly marked on it with their names. The map, a handy reference sheet of vampire traits/abilities, and the wanderers table are right up front, the first three pages of the adventure, so as to act as an easy to locate reference for the DM. There’s a decent and yet short summary of whats going on in side the manor, as well as a little section on expanding things and consequences. All of this is fucking greta. A poster child for how to do things. There’s even a summary of all the treasure in the adventure, added up, where it is, and then how hard it is to loot it. There’s a little timeline with a couple of entries to keep the party moving. The room entires, proper, have bolded keywords, followed up with more keywords in a less-is-more type room description. There are bullets to describe things to follow up with. Monsters and NPC’s have short and sweet keyword descriptions. Some things have explicit notes on how they react (Desires blood!) and what to do. The sections expanded upon are not formulaic, but rather situational. IE: not every room has an explicit Lighting section. Or every monster an Appeasement section. 

Looking at a monster description we get this for the Shadow Hounds: Dark as the night (reflects no light). A face that is largely its maw and small red eyes (can swallow a head). Long and tall but very lean (as if stretched). That will also actr a good example of a room description. Imagine room features as the bolded words and follow up/enhancement information as the stuff in the parens. It’s great. It leaves dark corners in your brain that it works quickly and efficiently to fill in. This sort of format is, as I’ve mentioned a few times now, one of my favorites. I think it’s one of the easiest for a beginner to use effectively. It’s by no means the ONLY way to do things, but it is an effective and I think easy to grasp way that necessarily keeps the verbosity to a minimum.  There’s so much more. Notes on windows and balconies and using them. The art in this is pretty well matched, pulling off the interdimensional vampire stuff decently well, and add to the descriptive text, especially for the monsters.

A few notes. 

The adventure notes that “Many vampires are within.” Yeah, no fucking shit man! Level 3 my ass. This are not fake vampires but the real fucking deal. I’m not even sure Level 5’s would fare well. I like an unbalanced situation, it forces the party to approach things obliquely. I THINK things are handled well here. The wanderers are not 7HD vamps but guards, spiders, and the like. The one wandering vampire encounter is with some dinner guests looking for the dining room, something that can clearly be a social encounter. But man, that dining room! Thats the Steading feast hall on steroids!

More importantly though …

There’s something missing. A vibe? A feeling? A joie de viv? Something like IMAGINED rather than designed. But none of that is fair, for it it IS designed then designed in a way to put the imaginative forward. This is not a hack job of an adventure. It was tuned and tweaked and sweated over and that effort shows, easily. But it just feels like there’s something lacking. I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the timer, with the place disappearing in ten hours. Or the party hooks being a bit weak (It appears, go inside and X!) It’s context, and then moving the parts around to more relate to that context? This is a very, very good adventure and yet I’m struggling. The lack of whatever it is I can’t name would in NO way keep me from running this. It’s better than 99% of the adventures out there, easily. I dn’t know, someone will tell me and then I’ll know, I guess. It’s not something that one can put their finger on, or even recognize, I think, easily. Most people won’t care, and that’s fine, because this is a good adventure.

This is $7.50 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages and shows you some interesting pages, to be sure, but none of the actual location pages. Bad Gnome! No mushrooms for you tonight!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/348880/Halls-of-the-Blood-King?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 4, Reviews, The Best | 46 Comments

Assault on Mistrunner Village, D&D adventure review

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ben Gibson
Coldlight Press
OSR/5e/Pathfinder
Level 2

The thunder of the falls is nearly deafening; the mist is nearly blinding. Even so, your mules seem cheerful as they pick their way up the narrow stone path. Another turn around the canyon, and before you stretch the great Mistrun Falls. It’s a breathtaking sight. But out of the houses’ windows, there is smoke curling. And over the roar of the falls suddenly you hear screams.

This 46 page adventure features about four pages detailing around twenty or so locations in a cliffside village with a thundering waterfall in it, that has been attacked by bandits. It is, essentially, a two-page adventure with a lot of stuff like battle maps, pre-gens, paper minis and the like. It uses its single page of room descriptions as well as is possible given that limitation, fighting above its weight class.

While strolling about on your way to somewhere you come across a small village of a few houses, built up the cliffside on either side of a waterfall, it splitting the cliffside village in half. “How quaint!” you say to each other. As you get closer some dudes on the right hand side start taking pot shots at you will some bows, while a door at the base on the left side opens with some villagers urging the characters to get inside with them before they get shot. The village is vertical, so stairs, or one sort or another, lead up from the ceiling of one room to the floor of another, with two bridges across to the other side. Lurking in the various rooms are things to discover, but, this is primarily an assault mission with perhaps some stealth. As the first room tells us: “This humid little room is packed with mules, women, and children, they would flee if they could but the archers stop them. Weeping, some of the adults beg the players for help.”

And that room description is a pretty good example of what this an above average adventure, even given it’s “one map page and one page of room keys” design. Humid. Little. Packed with bodies of mules, women, and children. No doubt very loud, chaotic, and smelly, is what that description says to me, as the DM. That’s what happens when you’ve written a good description. The DMs mind leads to other things. Implications are explored. The brain fills things in. The description is more than the sum of the words presented on the page. You automatically fill things in. Less is more. Plus, it’s easier to scan and run at the table! Amazing! The NPC descriptions are the same, using that little “three keywords” trick I like so much (sometimes two keywords.) Villagers are scared, Angry. Elder Folga is despairing, confused and resigned. Elder Wystle is Gruff, ashamed, and aggressive. You get a sense on how to run them, and run them WELL, with just a couple of words. No need for an entire paragraph to have to dig the fuck through while running it at the table. It’s all you need, right there. And it’s oriented towards play. Not just some bullshit words, but words that will lead to interesting play. Again, the DM’s mind leaps to fill in things and contort it to make some play.

The rooms here are not dungeon rooms. There are not really puzzles to solve. This is an assault on the bandits and maybe some stealth thrown in. The room descriptions support this. In one room there’s some bandits, keeping watch over the cliffside. But … there’s a wounded warrior from the village, hiding in a pile of blankets. You can imagine the party, a fight breaking out, the wounded warrior grabbing a bandit leg, or stabbing one, at some moment. SO the rooms are designed to kind of support this sort of assault style play, adding some freshness to what could otherwise become monotonous combat.

Oh, and then there’s village Elder FuckWit. He’s gone in to the cave, tha the waterfall comes out of, to summon the villages protectors to kill the bandits. Stone guardian statues. These have stats as gargoyles WHICH MAKES PERFECT SENSE! So, crazy old village dude goes off to summon mythical protectors, who ALSO end up showing up at opportune (inopportune?) times to kill everyone in sight and are especially fond of knocking people off of precarious spots and down the thundering waterfall, bandit, player, and villager alike. Nice touch with this part. 

The map here is interesting, with its verticality. That does, however, create a some issues with comprehension. There are some parts of the design that are tough to figure out where things lead. Stairs up and down are generally ok, but there are little rooms on the map art that are not obvious which they are, in the 2d, or where a certain area leads on the leads art rendering on the “normal” 2d map. And that mouth of the Waterfall. Oof!

That’s pretty light criticism though.

It’s an adventure designed around a single session. A single session of an RPG probably takes just a couple of pages to describe. MOST adventures drag that out to a bajillion pages of content. Ben focuses in. You get a couple of pages (one of maps, one of keyed locations) with a coupe of support pages like background and notes. That’s about the right size for a single session in what is a pretty much straight forward assault with some sneaking about between assaults. A one night assault adventure? Yeah, it should be short. And it is. I might suggest that the product description could be oriented a little more towards “four pages of adventure and a lot of pregens, maps, etc”, while emphasizing the “ready to run!” aspect, but, yeah, this is what you need for an adventure.I might call it a very journeyman effort. Not gonna be flashy, but gonna get the job done.

This is Pay What you Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview shows you the four pages of actual adventure content, so its a good preview. Take a look at that map and those keys. Nice job with them, eh?


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/237442/One-Session-Kit-K2-Assault-on-Mistrunner-Village?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 2 Comments