tenfootpole.org

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

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

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

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

Tim Bannock
Self Published
B/X or 1e
Levels 10-14!!!

The reclusive Brightwell family has been corrupted by the whispers of a vengeful sorceress-turned-fiend. When this newfound master suddenly grows silent, the madness infecting the household is no longer focused, and cannot be contained. Mayhem spills across the countryside. Meanwhile, deep below the Brightwell estate, the family’s patriarch Eldon Brightwell inflicts horrifying experiments on both servants and family…

This 53 page adventure uses about thirteen pages to describe about sixty rooms in a manor home with a couple of basement levels. It’s minimally keyed, bland, and a 5e conversion.

It’s got clean and clear maps that are easily read, and uses a landscape format to provide easy to read three-column text. It doesn’t mess around with too much backstory, and puts most things like that in an appendix, which also has a reference for NPC’s to be found in the manor. It’s extensively hyperlinked. The first of the map pages also describes the general features of the house, like windows and doors, which is useful to have on a map so that they are “always on” for the DM to reference duringplay.

Now that the good is over with …

First, it’s a 5e conversion, it looks like. It calls for rolls with advantage, making perception checks, and so on. I get it, 5e sells more than anything else so make the adventure for that. And, of course, just like with Roll to Continue, this kind of stuff can be easily ignored by a DM and/or converted on the fly. But it shows a lack of caring. If you’re converting to another system shouldn’t you actually convert it to that system? Especially if you claim in the the introduction that “This adventure uses 1E and B/X style OSR mechanics …” Uh. No. It uses 5e mechanics. Anyway, that’s me being petty. As I said, just as with a lopsided page count of adventure to supporting material, which this has, I think it tends to be indicative of those things that don’t bode well.

You are a 14th level adventuring party in 1e/B/X. In both cases you’ve all probably got your own keeps, etc. In B/X, in particular, I think you’re walking godlings, based on my experiences with my players. So one of the hook is that the village hires you to look in to the goings-on at the manor. *sigh* By giving us each new land holdings? There’s one hook that makes sense, as you visit looking for lore/alchemical components. Again, who cares? But, again, it shows a general lack of level awareness in the conversion. Time and again adventures are produced for high levels that should be lower level adventures, and their strain to make them high level shows.

“Room 2: Foyer – Unwatched and unguarded.”

“Room 1: Porch – Three scarecrows nailed to the porch columns (actually corpses!). 

“2-1. Stairway & Hall – Signs of carnage, blood trails leading to Area 2-2”

This then is a minimally keyed adventure. Take the 1e DMG and roll for “dungeon dressing.” Ideally, this would serve as inspiration, the designer riffing off of the rolls and their imagination coming up with something to put in the room. Or, you could just put “Signs of carnage” as the description. It’s an abstracted description. No specifics. “Dried foodstuffs, but supplies are getting low.” You could do so much more with that. Replace that sentence. Add another one. Done! But you’d have something much livelier, something that danced in the DMs head. 

Traps? “One of the steps is creaky. Roll a save or the next monsters are alerted.” The alerting is good, and a creaky step is a classic, but the traps in this tend to be of the “Gotcha!” variety. There’s little to no warning. Thus they are just punishments for not min/maxing your save rather than a dose of interactivity that you can explore and play around with.

In general you need between about 200k and 400k xp to gain a new level at levels 13-14. Let’s say 200k. With a party of four that’s 800k experience to gain a level. Let’s say you’re leveling every … 6 sessions? You need 133,000 xp. Do you think that there’s 133,000 gold in this adventure? Do you think this adventure is a true 1e conversion?

Creature descriptions are boring. Magic items descriptions are boring. Treasure descriptions are boring. Everything is abstracted descriptions. “Zombies are mindless creatures.” 1d6 gemstones with 500gp each. A potion usable by all classes. At one point there are two gibbering mouthers in a room. I THINK they are supposed to be the wife of the manor lord? It doesn’t say, but might imply it if I squint. No personalization. No touches like “wearing his wife’s dress” or  “combing its hair.” Just two gibbering mouthers in a room. Why two? I don’t know, that would require effort.

The focus here is misplaced. It’s not overwritten, to be sure, and I appreciate that. It’s clear that some care was taken in trying to do a few design related things. But the room descriptions and encounters are so bland. Abstracted descriptions. Mundane interactivity. No focus on the wonder that is D&D.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is all nineteen pages of the encounters/dungeon. This is good. You can tell exactly what you are buying beforehand. Nice clean layout.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/351315/DD02-The-Darkness-Beneath-Brightwell-Manor-for-1st-Edition-and-BX?1892600

By Derek Jones
Self Published
Castles & Crusades
Levels 4-6

Blovar Thistletine, a wealthy halfling, decided recently to remodel the wine cellar in his summer home.  Work progressed well for a few days until the crew arrived one morning to find a tunnel had mysteriously appeared in the floor of the cellar.  The crew tied a rope to one of the workers and lowered him down the shaft to explore.  A few minutes later, they could hear the poor worker’s brief scream of agony and the rope went slack.  All they recovered when they pulled up the rope was a charred end.  The workers refused to continue their work.  Mr. Thistletine is offering a handsome reward for a party of adventurers to explore the shaft and eliminate any threats to his beloved wines.

This nineteen page adventure uses six pages to describe 31 rooms in an underground bandit lair. It’s a hack-fest. It has some hints of knowing how to format things, but falls down on implementation.

I’m not going to judge this negatively for just being a hack. Some people like that. And, not even an exploratory game has to explore all the time, hacking IS a part of the game after all. This IS a little lop-sided in that direction, but then again so were the B2 kobold caves, I guess. (Although its been fifteen years since I looked at it.) So, it’s a hack. At the end there will scores and scores of slaughtered 1hd gecko-men and the water floors will run red with blood. The gecko-men looks like normal men, mostly, and can stick to the walls. That’s kind of fun. It combines both the “use a lot of humans” stuff that I generally prefer with actually having some monsters. Eel-men, etc would all do the same, I think? It’s aking to using chaos-men and mutants in Warhammer, I think. Keeping it grounded. And, there’s an order of battle for their getting indeed, which is nice to see. 

The map is hand drawn and clear enough. The adventure notes that all but two areas are flooded to 4” of standing water, and others have lights on. This should have been noted either on the map or by text on the map. These sorts of “always on” things should be front and center for the DM to refer to throughout the game. Either shade the map, etc (not feasible in this case since its hand drawn, at least not easily) or just put the text on the map. I note, without comment, the abundance of magical torches in the hallway that light the way … that only work inside THIS lair. *sigh* There goes immersion. Wait, now I’ve commented. Fuck.

Wanderers are doing something, although they are almost always gecko-men. A hint of humor is present in places, with them tormenting small cute animals or their leader pissed at the magic tapestries that show his mens devotion being transferred to his fire priests. Treasure is … ok? There’s about 5k in “normal” treasure and then also a scroll work 10k to certain buyers. That feels low for a a hack, and a little strange that its so portable.  And the 10k scroll could use more to it, given the lopsided nature. It would add a lot to a game if it were.

The adventure is using room names in combination to the room keys. So, something like “10. Larder.” Using room names is good, but they could be overloaded with a descriptor, such as “Viscera Larder” or some such. Set the DM’s framing early so they absorb the text in that context. There’s also a decent number of rooms that are empty. Such as that larder. And by empty I mean “the room has no text at all.” So you get “Larder” and nothing more. Or, for a living quarters “Empty. They are all out raiding.” Thus the descriptions of the rooms are VERY MUCH on the extreme minimalism side of the spectrum. So much so that I would suggest that there is not much here at all to work with. This is one step more than Palace of the Vampire Queen, and not a big step at that. 

This feels like the outline of an adventure. Something that gets produced that the final draft is then created from. While it states its a hack, it could do a little more to enhance SOME interactivity to break things up. And it could do more with its writing to create evocative descriptions. You’ve got a lot of choices in what you use at the table, why not choose something that does those things?

This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is all nineteen pages. I can’t fault the dude for either the preview or the price. Like I said, the designer has some ideas of how to do things right but just isn’t there yet in implementing them.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/350997/Fire-in-the-Hole?1892600

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