By Brad Kerr
Swordlords Publishing
OSE
"Low Levels" (2? Maybe?
Enter a garden of earthly delights. The sun has stopped setting over the king’s favorite garden. It seemed like a harmless curiosity at first but the animals have turned violent and strange alien beings have appeared. The duke has placed a bounty for enterprising sell-swords to end the curse of endless daylight.
This 34 page adventure details about twenty hexes in a walled off garden, along with two “dungeons” (a cave under a well and a hedge maze) of about ten rooms each. The writing is well organized and the situations imaginative, with no “right” way to proceed. A remarkable little gem.
This blog focuses a lot on design. Not out of choice. I would love to just DISCOVER great little adventures and be delighted by them. That seldom happens and, as a result of the origin story, I devolve in to discussing design issues because the vast VAST majority of adventures are ruined by simple things that are seen over and over and over again. But this adventure? It’s exactly the kind of thing you are looking for. Some dude just shows up and drops a bomb of an adventure.
The setting here is a garden area a couple of miles on a side, surrounded by a wall. There’s the usual things inside, a hedge maze, fountains, rose garden, etc. It’s pushing the edge of the mythological Land of Knights from romantic fiction, much in the same way that Gone FIshin did, although to a lesser degree. While Fishin was squarely in the Folklore category of setting, this could just be “real”, or at the hyper-real of some D&D settings. And then, to that, you add in the fantastic elements. It FEELS like someplace else, because of the descriptions, the writing, and the situations placed in front of the party.
And the situation is NOT linear. You can explore, return to locations, see what
S going on in the next hex … and be seen by the denizens. There’s a monstrously large rat prowling around, always a threat to the party, to keep them on their toes. You discover things, both from the main plot and from what feels like a dozen different little situations going on. And this is in light of most hexes just having one or two things going on. For example, one hex is idyllic hills. With carnivorous deer, bloody mouthed (from that fabulous cover!) But … there’s also a dead body, partially eaten by the deer. With possessions and a note, that leads to other mysteries. Other mysteries that could turn very very poorly for the party AFTER the adventure is over.
This is a not-so-whimsical Alice in Wonderland setting, with weirdos, dead bodies, a giant rat and what feels like a thousand other things prowling around and to investigate. The backstory, the only part of an adventure meant to be actually read, is actually engaging, revealing human foibles and people doing their best. The room/hex formats are generally on the shorter side, without being terse, with good use of bolding, summaries, section headings and the like. Perhaps it tends to the longish side, but not to the extreme to make it unrunnable.
Delightful!
And yet …
The hex map has little art pieces to show you whats in the hex/remind you. Important, because you can see and be seen from adjacent hexes, for the most part. Those little diagrams could be a little clearer. For while the hedge maze is easy to remember, a few other things, like the corpse pile, could be better, particularly when there are things to see, smell, hear, chase.
Some rooms have a “secret” in them and that is generally related through italics to the DM. Several sentences of italics. Like the DM text, in general, this tends to the long side but doesn’t go off the rails. In both cases, though, alternative formatting choices would have been clearer.
And, treasure is a bit light, with some “intentional” handwaving in a major treasure room coming to mind. No No No. Stick in the treasure, dude! Made it complete! Just as, for example, a table of “things found on bodies” or a couple of sample “adventuring parties” would have made the wandering monster table complete, instead of asking the DM to prep ahead of time. Do the work, so we don’t have to. Put the imagination seeds in for us, so we can build upon them during play, as you have for the rest of the adventure.
Still, an excellent adventure; the exact kind you hope to stumble upon when making purchasing decisions. Better than most of he Best Of on this blog. I’m excited to run this.
This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages, showing you the (somewhat incomplete) wandering table as well as three of the hexes on the last page. They are excellent example of the writing you are to encounter, with a little whimsy, a little snark to the DM, and a lot of interesting shit/situations to handle.
The last bastion of light and hope in a mist-covered accursed land, the Occluded Valley is threatened by an ancient colossus. Can a stalwart group of adventurers traverse the divided valley and scale the Colossus before it leaves annihilation in its wake?
This 116 page adventure has the party travelling a valley to gather the components for a ritual to stop a giant marauding colossus. It uses its page count well, using the space to provide clarity to the content. A decent enough format combines with passable descriptions to produce chapter two of an ongoing 5e adventure path … that doesn’t suck.
Another place another train another bottle in the brain another girl another fight another drive all night!
So, you’re in this pseudo-ravenloft setting with an evil vampire chick in the background. You come to this mostly peaceful valley only to find a giant mountain in the distance suddenly get up and start walking towards the only town. Druid chick tells you that you got ten days till it reaches it, and to stop it you have to do the blahblahblah ritual on top of it … and to do THAT you have to gather the four keys to time, or black ravens, or whatever. Then with the power of HEART you’ll … oh, no, that’s Captain Planet. Anyway, run around the valley collecting stuff (the valley conveniently has just about the exact number of locations in it as major components …) and do your Shadow of Colossus-type climb to stop the thing … hopefully BEFORE it destroys the town … and then the druids lair: the Rock Needle.
You see, the valley is protecting from vampires chicks evil getting in by the eastern and western beacons, the western one being the druid chicks stone needle. The eastern one went dead last year and now evil is creeping in. Oh, and the elves in the valley are wild ones. And no ones heard from the dwarves in their (23 room dungeon) fortress for awhile.
Up front: the design here is pretty good. The page count is long but that’s mostly because of the good use of white space and organizing the text. There is a decent number of page cross-references. NPC descriptions are short and well done, like a smith “stooped over, toughened skin pocked with old scars. Wheezes when he talks.” Good things you can hang your hat on to run. There’s an EXCELLENT timeline sidebar with travel times and so on, as well as a time tracker, to help the DM run the thing. There’s no right path, although there is an expected path. There’s a nice little section on consequences to the parties actions at the end. This is a good adventure. So, of course, I’m going to ignore all of the good things and nitpick it to death. Because if it’s one thing I know, maybe I’m just like my mother … Actually, no, it’s not that she’s never satisfied. I’m estranged because of her religious beliefs. But, anyway, the point is, there are at least three people writing good 5e adventures: this dude, MT Black, and Kelsey Dionne. But, anyway, back to my other point: if it’s not the best Deep Fried Deviled Egg you’ve ever had in your life (Boone’s Tavern, Berea) then what’s the point? Quick! To the Unrealistic Expectations-mobile!
I’m a dick: Sit locations A & B are missing from the valley map. Yu can figure it out. I don’t want to figure it out; I want it on the map.
The wanderers are pretty decent. “Ettin sleeping around a campfire; one of the heads is awake.” or “Ogre zombie bursts from a ruined cottage.” These are certainly better than the usual dreck one would expect in an adventure. I feel, like, though, that there could be just two or three more words. Perhaps its the implied “and attacks!” aspect, or, more specifically, the lack of motivation/action/potential energy in the encounters. I know, I know “bursts form ruined cottage” sounds like action. But I think it could be better. Another encounter has a dying hill giant swarmed by undead … and I think it needs something like “with blah blah blah wisdom” or something. They need just a little extra OOMPH. An extra descriptor, an extra action. Just a little more. “A green hag lures you in to the darkness with whispers.” You’re almost there man! You’re almost over the next hurdle!
The setting is a mixed bag. Up front we get a one page intro to the realm and the major players … none of whom, not even the general realm, appear in this adventure. (It is, after all, a protected vale.) There is an oblique reference to The Evil One by the Evil High Priest, and the Elf Queen chick might mention a wizard to you. And, of course, the humans fled in to the vale to get away from Evil Vampire Chick. I’m doing the setting a disservice by the flippant comparisons to Ravenloft, but “Evil vampire in charge of everything” has precedent. The setting is ALMOST good. And by Good I mean “REALLY good.” Things are hinted at. There’s just the barest glimpse of a larger world. Generally, this is good, but I think that the adventure needs a little more. Maybe there’s a setting guide I’m unaware of? The villagers could use a little more “fled from the evil queen” in them, their rumors and stories. The larger evil could use a little bump, maybe. And there’s NOTHING about the world outside the vale except for “under control of evil chick.” A little more. Just a little more. Another page. A few more rumors, and the setting would on the way to a home run.
The party is on a timer. The timer mechanic is well laid out. How long travel takes. How long the various adventure sites can take. How long a long rest takes. There is, however, one thing missing, I think. The party knows the monster is on its way but they don’t really know how much time they have. Or how long travel takes. This is, I think, a rather large mistake. Without knowing how long they have, or how long things take, they are left, I think, with throwing their hands up in the air. Timers work better when people know they have one and can make decisions around expiring the timer. Do we long rest or not? Do we take the morally problematic expedient route or the longer harder one? The work around this aspect could be better.
The format, for its worth, falls down in place. The read-alou/dsummary might mention, for example, a sheltered pond and charred remains … only to have the text mention a shimmering pool and burned remains. When using the bold/follow-up mechanism it is, I think, critical to keep the words consistent. It’s a cross-reference and that works better when the words don’t change, cognitavilly, at least.
Finally, the text can be disconnected in places. A prime example of this is the first collectible: the Earthen Willstone. The text just suddenly, out of nowhere, mentioned it, as a major section heading, with a couple of bullets on it. Then, elsewhere, there is a table listing the collectibles, with the WIllstone mentioned. There is a place for telling the story through the text, instead of in summaries, background, etc, but care must be taken to ensure that random fats don’t just pop up in the middle of nowhere. This is a common issue in the adventure.
Finally, I mentioned again the evocative text. And/or lack thereof. The text descriptions, while not exactly bland, do skew to the more nondescript side of the spectrum. Evocative writing is hard, and the designers efforts are not yet up to High Brycian standards.
This is $11 ast DriveThru. The preview is thirty pages(!). In fact, the first two pages show the example of the Earthen WIllstone that I mentioned. These first two pages are an excellent preview of the adventure. They show the read-aloud, the format, with all the good and ill to its style, including the “timer” column. GREAT preview.
By Tyler Thompson
Sad Fishe Games
Zweihander
Level ?
An estate improperly acquired, an orchard besieged by vengeful spirits and decay, a labrynth of trees and a haunted house. Blackacre Orchard was once the producer of the finest apples and cider in the Marches, but no longer- now it lay abandoned, with foul beings prowling its tree rows and manor halls. The estate much be purged of such evils, or the evils appeased with the life of the one who wronged them, if the cider is the flow freely once more. Whether the new owner, Tostein, or the widow of the prior owner, Amalia, survives the night depends on the actions of the player Character, but either way a warm cup of cider awaits them once the job is done.
It’s the New Year! Let’s start it off right, shall we?! I see a lot of Zweihander flooding my feeds … for the past fucking year. Let’s take a looksee!
This 28 page adventure details a haunted orchard and cidery with a dozen or so locations. Abstracted. Devoid of interesting writing. Engaging in the typical issues with writing. I wish I wish I hadn’t killed that fish.
I don’t even know where to start.
The map to this is half numbered. Meaning that dude took a Dyson map and numbered about half or so of the rooms and then, rather than numbering the rest, tries to describe them in the text. “The smaller room on the floor is a …” Why people do this I don’t know. It’s fairly easy to throw some numbers on a map. And some numbers WERE thrown on the map in this case. But not all of them. Which leaves the DM to number and highlight themselves or try and navigate the text during play, hunting for the room descriptions in long paragraphs of text. I’d love to fuck know why people do this.
Some dude wants you to take care of ghost/curse problem in his orchard. There’s no reward mentioned AT ALL. IE: a lack of care on the designers part with not even the basics being covered. The dude is gruff, short with the party. Hesitant to describe the events on the property. What the fuck? Why do designers do this? Ok, dude, Fuck You, I guess we won’t go investigate your orchard if you can’t be bothered toat least be polite to the people who are doing the job, evidentally for free.
The descriptions are abstracted, everywhere. “Local authorities” or “local leadership” is mentioned several times. Just give thema fucking name and three words of personality! “The nightmare phylactery is above the staff in the loft.” What is the phylactery? Fuck You, that’s what it is. No detail. None at all. Instead we get sentence after sentence of “The guesthouse was once where …” and then “Unfortunately much time has passed and now …” IE: the adventure is focused on telling a literary tale, creating a setting guide, rather than actually being an adventure to be used at the table. “In each bedroom a Tenebrae resides …” and that’s it. No description. No Ghosts of the Sins of the Past. Just generic monster shit. This is what drags horror adventures down, especially. Generic ghost instead of a realized PERSON that can bring horror to the encounter. It’s just fucking abstration. And there’s nothing good about abstraction.
To get to the house, at night, you have to endure a maze of orchard trees. Roll on a 10 entry table until you get a 10. If you get a 10 within the first five rolls, then ignore it, we are told. About six of the ten entries are monsters. So, just fight random abstracted baddies in the orchard until boredom threshold is reached. Why? WHY?
There’s little in the way of interesting writing. I think only one thing I found interesting. The widow of the former owner is now a drunk, in town, and will accost the players. SHe will get increasing agitated with them. Having encountered persistent people with increasing agitation before, I can tell you that THIS encounter is a good one. The entire adventure needs more evocative writing, less abstraction, more actual play, and some thought to the actual adventure mechanics.
Instead, get a single rat buried in the middle of a wall of text paragraph.
Such is life …
The preview is the entire thing, which is good. But you don’t get a level range, anywhere in the product, which is bad.
When you were young, you thought the great walls of Barrow Keep would keep you safe. But now you’re coming of age, and you realize how many troubles have been inside these walls all along: duplicitous courtiers, treacherous kin, and puritanical heresy-hunters. How will you protect yourself and your friends?
This 56 page digest thing is a setting for a Keep that deals with political intrigue and the sort. It comes with a 72 page localization pack for OSE, that includes 2 “adventures”, which are more adventure generators. It might be fun to add this in to the Keep on the Borderlands, or as a home base, but as a stand-along thing/setting in which to adventure it seems very lacking.
“Barrow Keep is a low-prep, old-school setting driven by playbooks and adaptable, easy-to-run scenarios.” Well … Kind of. It’s in the Adventures section of DriveThru and it notes adaptable easy-to-run scenarios and playbooks. By which it means “there’s a supplement that comes with it that has 14 pages which contains two adventure generator things.” By which I mean it has a general setup. “An AGENT with a nefarious mission arrives and blackmails, cajoles or convinces someone in the Barrow Keep to become a TRAITOR.” And then there’s some tables. Signs & Portents.Who arrived last week? WHi is the traitor? Who is the Agent? What is the Agents mission? Where does the traitor meet with the agent? Who requests the PC’s help and why? Who protects the agent? And then using all of that you run a scenario.
It is both magnificent and lame. There’s a degree of specificity in the tables that is marvelous. Rather than be a table that inspires, it basically gives you everything you need to run with it. Thus the scenario springs to life from the generator, fully formed. That’s great! And it’s also a complete waste. If each table has six entries, each of which are great, what do you do the SECOND time around? “Oh, great, who’s the traitor this week?” Imean, how many times are you going to run this Agent/Traitor scenario? Many times designers put these tables in when it would have been better just to lay a scenario out. “Put, MUH OLDSCK00L!” I hear you yelling. Yes, old school has tables, but not for this sort of thing. I’d rather see four one or two page adventures from this, that are thought out guidelines, than I would a few pages of tables. Too much is sacrificed on the alter of reusability when it will probably never/seldom be reused.
As a self-contained setting there’s just not enough here to run with. The extra classes, etc, that localize to OSE imply a romantic/intrigue thing, but I just don’t think that the book has enough in it to justify an entire campaign of that. It implies leveling every 2-4 sessions, but I just don’t see enough adventure here to do that.
But …
What I do see is a great supplement for the starting town the party is in. Taking, for example, the Keep on the Borderlands, the tables, intrigue, and details in this could provide a WONDERFUL environment to enhance play outside of the dungeon and back in town. People coming. People going. Little mysteries. Rivals, NPC”s that are well detailed and yet terse and mysterious.
To do this you’d need to mix things up a bit. Create a summary sheet of the NPC”s. As written, they are a little static and need some relationships to other people in the Keep. Doing that, and using the events and tables in the supplement, you’d have ag reat little enhancement to your parties starting/home base locale. It introduces them to the leadership and gets them involved in more subtle plots.
So, as an adventure, maybe a 3/10. I don’t review settings, but, as a stand-along setting (with airships and plasma pistols, a larger world setting that is never given enough attention to make sense) I’d also give this a low score. As a supplement to your homebase play, though, I think it’s great. I might even say that I would, without hesitation, add a lot of it my Kyshal campaign setting 3-ring binder, from the locations and mysterious to the tables. The two “Adventures” included would be a great thing to spice up home base play as well.
This is $9 at DriveThru. I think it’s worth it as a home base addition. There is no preview. Boo! Boo I saw sir! Shame on you!
Beginning with an encounter with a disguised god, Moon Daughter’s Fate brings the characters into the province of Sheng Xi Gui, “Whisper Valley,” where divine matters have taken a dangerous turn.
This 34 page adventure is a confusing wall of text nightmare. Errr, I mean, a multi-act investigation of the usual sort, but with Chinese folklore theming. I have no comprehension on why someone would buy this, other than as a novelty, or how they could run this. Caveat: there’s a two page backstory in very tiny font that I didn’t read. Because I don’t care about backstory.
It’s a level 5-7 adventure in a Chinese setting. (Not that you’d fucking know that since the fucking Frogs don’t tell you, either from the cover or from the description, that it is level 5-7. Fucking Frogs and their bullshit.) How does that happen? Do the mists come and take you away? Have you been playing OA for thirty years now and suddenly find yourself needing a level 5-7 adventure to fill in? I loved the OA adventures in Dungeon, for the most part. The folklore vibe is one of my favorites, be it European, Chinese, African, whatever. But I just don’t understand who this adventure is targeted at. Who’s buying a high level OA adventure these days, to run? This is the same problem with ANY heavily themed adventure. If your take on elves is that they are mutant cannibals, and the adventure depends on that being the casein the world, then who’s your target audience? I recall a high level Robin Hood adventure in Dungeon. It may have been great, but who’s running it as anything other than a one shot? Assuming, of course, you have the support materials to run it as a one-shot, with spell lists, character classes, races, etc. A level one adventure? Ok. I can see that.
Problem two, and the far more serious issue, is the adventure is a COMPLETE MESS and nigh incomprehensible. The writing shows inexperience and a lack of understanding of key concepts in usability. Adding to this is WHERE THE FUCK WAS THE FUCKING EDITOR? Oh, wait, it’s the fucking Frogs. Why do the hard work of editing (inexperienced writing or not) when you can just slap a $10 price on the PDF and sell it to the suckers? Hooked on Phonics worked for me!
The basics of the adventure is that you travel to an inn, maybe find signs of violence, and a ghost bull with 14HD who, I hope, you figure out is a god who is poisoned. This is probably all explained to you by a dragon living in the bottom of a well. You go in to the hills to fight cultists, then to a city, and down in to a coal mine.
Read aloud is LONG. A column in some cases and multiple paragraphs are not uncommon. Long read-aloud is bad. It causes players to loose focus. They pull out their phones. You get two, maybe three sentences of read-aloud, that’s it. Even WOTC knows this, even those they frequently forget, and cited it in an article about read-aloud.
The read-aloud is full of “You are travelling …” or “You see a … “ or “You shake the rain off … “ and other sorts of phrasings. This is terrible. Good adventure writing doesn’t refer to characters like this. You don’t embed the players actions. This is some sort of hold-over from novelizations. You paint a picture with words, but you don’t include the party.
“Along the road, however, you run in to a strange encounter.” no No NO! You don’t fucking do this! You don’t tell the players that an encounter is strange. You run the encounter in such as way that the party comes to the conclusion that it is strange.
At one point the adventure says “the characters should understand a few things at his point …” and then cites three or four bullets of weirdness. No one greeted them when they came in to the inn. This is very rude. You should pray at the shrine. You should leave an offering. How are the characters supposed to understand this? Am I, the DM, supposed to tell them? DO they have a rich background in the history of Chinese roadhouses? It’s not the specifics I have an issue with, it’s the way that these, rather obscure, facts are presented. If something hinges on the party knowing X then you need to find a way to get X to the parties knowledge. Otherwise you’re just flat out telling them. Which is lame. And not a thing a good adventure does.
Long, long read-aloud. Even longer DM text. And all in a small font, to fit even more on to the page. It’s all a disorganized mess.
At one point we’re told “any character with some kind of divine attunement can get a sense that the man is more than he appears to be.” But, this BEFORE the man is introduced. A section about a well start, in DM text, with “This appears to be a normal well.” You mean, it IS a normal well? Because it is. Why is this text included? Why are you telling the DM that the well APPEARS to be normal? They have access to the text. They know its not. The read-aloud for this section is even more confusing, giving, I think, a description of the well bucket instead of the well. The bucket that I think is down at the bottom of the well? I don’t know. None of it makes any sense. It’s like someone write an adventure in my own stream of consciousness “adventure review” style, with even less coherence than I have. It’s not that the content of the adventure is necessarily bad, but that it is so disorganized, and so much formatted to be a Wall of Text, that it just doesn’t make sense to try and wade through it.
And the baddies are a cult. Great. Maybe they hide in a sewer also? No? How about a diary? How about we feature a diary in the inn as a part of the adventure? NO DIARIES! Find another fucking way to communicate information!
The adventure can be summed up in one design choice. At the bottom of the well, in a cave, is a dragon. His interactions with the party are, essential, and he essentially tells then what to do, step by step. The adventure almost certainly doesn’t happen without him. And there are not good clues that he’s down there. Unless you miss him. Then the next morning you hear moans coming from the bottom of the well. Everything else is pretext. The dragon tells you wat to do. If you miss him he is shoved at you. (I’m not mad at the last part, if you have to have something happen then a fail condition is ok.) This thing is just going through the motions, surrounding itself in MOUNTAINS of unnecessary text that detract from the adventure instead of enhancing it. The key is for the writing to be evocative, and easy to scan and use at the table. And this isn’t. And you can’t play an adventure that you can’t use at the table. (At least not without a degree of prep work that is untenable.)
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is the first few pages of the adventure, which is mostly useless. At best, you get to see the two page backstory. While this isn’t helpful, it does give you can idea of the font and formatting and Wall of Text issues. This style is present throughout.
By Directsun
Self Published
BX/Lab Lord, etc
Levels 1-4
Tis 22 page digest adventure details a ten room dungeon with an eyeball theme. Interactivity is very high, rivaling the best of adventure in that area. This is combined with good ease of use, leading to evocative environment. A few minor points mar it (as always), but, overall, a dungeon that is pretty decent.
I know, I usually harp on ease of use. I’m going to mostly hand wave it here. It does a good job. The summary of the room appears at the top of the page, with a gree-chartreuse background to offset it. Certain words, the major room features, are bolded in that summary, with a little more detail in “normal font” after the keyword. The Room description then contains large section heading, bolded, for various things in the room, and, again uses bolding to help call out things like monsters and other important features. A little pic of the room is also present. Monsters then get their own little offset, with a yellow-chartreuse background. I know this because I was trying to buy green and yellow chartreuse liquor two days ago. While the giant liquor store is the best stocked one I’ve ever seen, their aperitif section is quite sad.) Rooms start on new pagesIt’s a good format, I think the less is more approach leads to a minimum level of evocative descriptions. If you were looking for a format to copy then you could do A LOT worse than this one. It may fall down in longer dungeons, but it’s fine for a little digest thing.
Interactivity here is great, as one might expect from a dungeon with the preamble title of “Puzzle Dungeon.” Or, maybe not. Maybe you expected it to be shitty. I did. Far too often “Puzzle Dungeons” and interactivity is simple something like a riddle or some other forced concept that is divorced, mostly, from the theming of the adventure. “This dungeon built by the cult as a test to challenge …” Yeah. No. Fuck You. This dungeon doesn’t do that. It’s less puzzle, in that definition and more “the dude who built this house was really in to eyeballs.” The dude, in case, being the eyeball religious cult that used to live here.
So, you end up with a lot of vision related stuff, but not exclusively that. One room has a secret door that you can’t use while you look at it. It leads to a dead end room with the return door having the same issue. Also the room has some floating eyeballs in it, so, someone is always going to be looking at the secret door, unless you do something about those eyeballs.The ones that don’t attack unless you attack them. Or try to remove room treasure. But, they can be fooled if they think you are cult members. Hilarity is likely to ensue. No, not a traditional puzzle, but a puzzle-like thing. Another room has a demon that only comes to life when you look at it and returns to stone when you are not. Another has a deep pool of water in a pit dividing the room. A lever can drain the water. Pulling the level back refills the fit. And lets a Gel Cube in. Also, the water level is about a foot higher now, with it spilling over the top of the pit. Wonder if anyone will notice, or they’ll just get cubed? It’s these sorts of things that lead to the dungeons interactivity. Great, great interactivity, that, while a little odd, isn’t TOO forced and out of place.
But all is not perfect in the land of the one-eyed man.
Treasure is abstracted. One room has “Treasure Pile: Coins, gems, golden monkeys” Yeah. Abstracted. And, that’s about the only room with treasure. This is quite light for an OSR game. Yeah, you can put some in. Put I like to feel like I’d getting the whole package when I buy something. I might have run with that golden monkey thing and also put in an ebony falcon, and whatever other tropes I could come up with. There is one GREAT magic item, a stick with an eyeball on top that you can use as a periscope. Score! (This may have come from Goblin Punch; there’s a footnote to find more minor magic items there. idk.) Not droning on about mechanics, etc. Just that simple line. Perfect!
The format is also a bit wonky at times. Some rooms note “slippery floor” or “operating table” or “surgical tools” in their overview descriptions. No! Wrong! It’s more like “Floor with sheen” that the unbolded text tells us is slick with slime, instead of the other way around the way the text is actually formatted here. The same with the surgical tools and operating table. The table should have glinting objects on it, or the table with blood has glinting objects on it. The follow up text then can tell us they are surgical tools/an OR table. Otherwise, you’re giving too much information away up front, destroy the back and forth of DM/player interactivity that is the key to a good game.
There’s other things. There’s no actual entrance to the dungeon. The pretext/outside is essentially non-existent. There’s a couple of details missing here or there, like a fountain that makes you sick if you drink from it. Like … what kind of sick? The Planer ravel puzzle in this is also a bit confusing. You get the gist easily enough but not the specifics.
But, the interactivity, again, is where I rest my hat for faults. It’s a little tight. Gann was this large dungeon complex that contained the same sorts of interactive rooms. Ans also just rooms with monsters. And empty rooms. The whole deal, leading to a whole experience. This, though, being so small, feels like it is lacking just that sort of random baddie thing that a complete dungeon environment needs. I get it “I wanted to make a puzzle dungeon.” Sure. But that’s a gimmick as much as a one page dungeon is a gimmick.
Still, it’s great to see a dungeon with real interactivity in it,e ven if it is a little cramped in there. It’s a good place to go if you want to send the party on a planer hop or long teleport. It’s also a little rough for level 1’s; they would have to rely on their wits. There’s a lot of 3HD monsters in there. I might say it’s level 3 or so.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $6. It’s worth that. The preview is all 22 pages. A look at room 1, on preview page 8, will give yo ua great idea of what to expect. Let’s hope we see more, more complete offerings from this designer in the future.
Rumors spread of a mysterious group at the top of Mukkiya Mountain paying high bounties for live halflings—not just gold coins but even items imbued with magic. Raiders far and wide have started abducting whole settlements of smallfolk yet the village of Stillwater is trying to stand up to these foul kidnappers, seeking out hardened protectors to defend them. Whatever side the adventurers take brings them to the mountain but ascending it is no simple matter and the party must bypass the baring horde, climb the Cliffs of Madness, cross the territory of a dreaded ayutam, or maneuver up the Spiked Slopes. When they reach their destination the PCs discover the truth behind the halfling bounty and face perhaps the mightiest creature they’ve ever seen!
This 26 page adventure uses about three pages to describe a five room dragon lair. It hints at some interesting design decisions, perhaps by accident, and at least doesn’t enforce morality on the party. Poor quality, but interesting to me for the points it brings up.
Halfling village leader spies on you and tests you to see if you are good people. If so, she has you brought to the village to protect it from raiders abducting them. If not then a raider contacts you offering you gold for bringing in halflings. Either way, you either track captured halflings ot bring your own captives up a deathtrap mountain (conveniently ignoring how OTHER raiders get up the mountain) to a cave where someone buys them. A poly’d dragon. Fight fight fight.
Good things: The lack of enforced morality is nice. The adventure is clearly written for the party to be heroes, but it doesn’t ignore the alternative … and doesn’t just give a one sentence throw-away line about it either. Allowing for the party to be creative in their play, and supporting that, is a Good Thing(™.) The mountain has four paths up, each with a different challenge. A horde of beasts on one slope, a long mega monster on another, a treacherous climb on another, and a path full of super sharp rocks on another. This COULD have been iconic, and I like the concept of giving the party an actual choice in how to play things out instead of railroading them up only one path. There are, also, little bullet points at the end of each location section. These are one sentence things about the environment description for the DM to emphasize during that section. Easy to find, and easy to understand with strong themes. I sometimes note that these sort of “always on” things could be put on a map border, as an aid for the DM remembering them. In this case there is not map and so putting them at the bottom (or top, or whatever) and bulleting them serves the same purpose.
The whole thing ALMOST (with some major major major fucking caveats) comes across as an adventure outline. An adventure outline at almost EXACTLY the right level for detail to let the DM fill in and expand upon things. It’s a little loose, the bullets add to that vibe. Kind of sandboxy in way. Well, not really, in practice here, but I can see how with some major effort it could get closer to that … and you’d have something terse and evocative to run.
Just to be clear: that’s not what this is.
This is just, mostly, the usually 5e poor quality stuff. It’s listed in the OSR section but has nothing related to the OSR in it, so I’m unclear what the fuck is up with that. Just more marketing bullshit, I guess.
The descriptions of the “Scenes” are long and stuffed full of mechanics and “then this happens and then this happens and then this happens” with little to no thought given to organizing it for ease of play at the table.
It includes one of my favorite things: the roll to continue. If you want to go on the adventure you better make a DC13 check to notice the X, or else you don’t get to continue on! Related to this is another thing this adventure does over and over again: hide interesting things behind DC checks. As an example, you have to make a trivial DC check to find a notice on a rock wall describing the payment for halflings. Why do this? Why hide something like that from the party? It amps up tension and realizes the threat, but, somehow, this isn’t worth noting to the party? Not every fucking thing in an adventure has to be behind a DC check. Use the checks to learn MORE about something. Don’t lose a good foreshadowing/tension builder because of a DC check. Those blog articles (Alexandrian?) on “how to actually use skills in 5e” should be in the next version of the PHB/DMG.
Oh, oh, did I mention that the halfling village raids happen every d4 raids … and three have to happen before the elder sends you to the mountain? Who the fuck is hanging around that long? And there’s NO content to help support a length of stay of even one day.
Congrats. You killed the dragon. You get a piece of raw mana, 120gp, 400sp, and one uncommon magic item. Fuck. You. Talk about sucking the joy out of the game.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages long. It shows you the “test” as well as the halfling village and raiders attack. I’m not sure any amount of pages, other then the entire thing, could fully explain the format and how it works.
For generations, the small village of Edgemere has held a tenuous balance with the Blood Mire. Children grew up knowing the folk tales and warnings about wandering out past the walls alone or at night, about a temple that used to be but had long since been swallowed by the Mire, and the strange and lonely family that had come to build a mansion in the Mire and then disappeared. No one knows what happened to the family, the lights just went out in the Mire one day and that was that.? Fifty years later, the lights are said to be on in the house once more and a strangeness like none have seen before has settling over the area. More are reporting hearing whispers and cries in the Mire late at night and seeing dancing lights when the moon is at its fullest. No one in the village dares enter the Mire in these strange times but now the children are starting to go missing. Grieving families are convinced that it is the lost children that they hear whispering in the Mire. Others believe it’s something much worse. ?
This 51 page adventure describes a multi-level manor home in a swamp. It’s trying, with good interactivity and an attempt at good formatting and evocative descriptions. This is marred, though, by room/key numbering that doesn’t match up and some more minor issues that I’ll give too much emphasis to in the review. I’ll probably regert it without the room/key numbering issue. Tegal continues to haunt the hobby, for good and ill.
This is supposed to be a gothic horror type thing in a swamp/moor. It tells us as much and you can see where it is trying to go in this direction, sometimes to great effect and generally to lesser. I’m going to pick this thing apart on some fine points, but let’s remember that I think this adventure is generally quite a bit above average. It’s trying hard to make things easy on the DM, using bullet points and so on. (Maybe too much so; there seems to be a new trend to ONLY use bullet points for encounters. That’s not a terrible decision, but I think that a traditional sentence format, with bullets for emphasis, does make more sense, generally.) Writing is generally above average and you can, in places, get some really good mental imagery from places described in just a brief sentence or so. This IS the goal of the Evocative pillar. The ability to shove a strong image in to the DMs head so that they can take the room and run with it using their own imagination. More on that in a bit. I’m going to handwave the interactivity here and just say that it meets my needs. There are some things labeled “Factions” that, while not a traditional faction play that I think of, are more like “motivations of the groups” and can provide some strong roleplay possibilities … even with the blood tree that animates children’s bodies. And this is done in a reasonable way, for all groups, that make sense. I wouldn’t call it a traditional faction element, like is fund in a large underground dungeon, but , close enough. It’s talking an negotiating notes. This sort of talky talky play is combined with traditional puzzles, statues, OBVIOUS TRAPS and so on to give an environment that has more than just killing in it. The way a D&D adventure should be.
It’s doing another quite interesting thing also. There’s a small village, briefly described to good effect, generally. Then there’s a very short overland thing, to the manor home. But the faction homes of two groups are then described, on about one page each. Even though they are not located on the map. There are way, it would seem, in the manor home, to contact at least one of them (which could lead to the second) if not both. This is quite interesting. It has these two groups, also involved in the backstory, that you MAY not interact with, but there are a couple of ties and it IS possible. And then it spares two pages to give you more on those. Given the propensity of players to break the game, this was a great choice. There’s MORE to explore, interact with, etc, you just have to go looking, and the adventure is there to support the DM in this, but doesn’t over-emphasize it. I might make a comparison to the “After the adventure is over” section of some adventures, noting the implications of the choices the characters made in the particular adventure. It’s supporting the world outside the adventure proper, but not going on and on. It’s a good thing.
The evocative writing is ALMOST good enough for me, and probably good enough for most people. The town, for example, has some shops which are sparsely described. We get a note tat the blacksmiths daughter is missing. Or the general store persons niece is missing. From this we can infer a roleplay style, but the NPC tude, proper, is missing. Just a word or two more would have been appreciated. Distraught. Sullen. Resigned. Something.
Another example of this are the various room descriptions. They are generally anchored to a concept but, I feel, need just a little bit more to make it over the hump the Best Of land. The Wine Room: “ A small narrow room dominated by wine shelves on either side except for the door on the far end of the western wall.” Lets’ ignore the second clause, with the door, since it just repeats information from the map. (Yes, I know some of you like this. You’re wrong. Words are precious resources. To reuse my analogy, it is POSSIBLE that a story in the Paris Review is not depressing, but we all know that’s not true. Academically it might be possible to include, but in practice it’s an example of the weak writing skills of a designer, not understanding the purpose of the room description or how to use it. Also, Fuck You, I’m right. 🙂
Anyway, “a small narrow room dominated by wine shelves.” Not bad. I get an image. It could be better. Towering wine shelves would evoke something better in my mind. Rickety wine shelves would both evoke something AND provide some implied potential energy, even if not another word was mentioned, mechanically, about collapse. Many adventures could benefit from taking another look at their nouns and verbs and seeing if they can add an adjective/adverb to them to evoke a better mental image, or imply some action/leverage some potential energy. I don’t say that this should be done for EVERY noun (well, ok, I think, yes, you should slave away over every noun and try to add some, at least to see what the impact would be, even if you decide to NOT include it) … if that’s done then you’re in the opposite territory where its obvious that this done mechanically and with rigor. Rigor is good … a vision if good … but you need to know when to bend it/break it/diverge. It’s in SERVICE of something and that end goal can never be lost sight of.
There are other descriptive gaps also. One faction has a holy symbol left behind at one encounter. “Their religious symbol is laying …” is all we get. I odn’t believe it is ever described, anywhere in the adventure, and even if it were it should have still been included in that sentence/section.
It does a good job with a Flesh Golem, the most Frankensteiny version I’ve seen in an adventure thus far, I believe. And that’s GOOD! These things SHOULD be brought to life and not just monster stat blocks. It also, as a house, presents doors and windows to explore and balconies to break in from. Well, mentions them in the text anyway if not on the map. I suspect that, as a newer designer, there were map program issues and a learning curve there that has not yet been overcome. Still; some thought was given.
This thing is also NOT for level 1’s. It’s full of groups of 3HD and 4HD monsters, even mobs of 4d4 .5 HD monsters. I’m all for unbalanced encounters, but this one is a little rough for me. I like the concept of running away and coming back and exploring the factions, etc, but, still, those are some rough encounters. And a lot of them.
Really though, while the writing is above average I’m not willing to put it in the Best category. And It’s going to miss a Regert because of … map/key issues. There are multiple instances in the adventure where the text is referring to, I think, the wrong room. Hidden passages that end up … in which room? It’s never mentioned, and happens several times in the adventure. Stairs going … where? Who knows. Traps doors going to … who knows. And references to other rooms that just seem to be wrong. IE: refer to room #3. Or refer to room #11. Except it seems that those cross-references are wrong and they actually mean different rooms. This is super frustrating. Yes, you can fix it. No, I’m not going to put in the effort to fix it. I’m going to pick something else to play.
There are times in this in which the gothic horror is thick. Children in nightclothes at the edge of a clearing, staring at you. How can you get more gothic that that? Even the village and the boardwalk out of town, walled off, with a arcing bridge. Never really described but implied through text and maps and art. But, more practice is needed to bring this thing together, and at a minimum, not referring to one of the largest rooms on the map, the wine cellar, as “small.” 😉 Or surfaces mentioned as gleaming and then described as dusty. Logic issue. The whispers in the blood mire are not emphasized enough to fully realize the gothic, although it gets close.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview shows thirteen pages. You get to see the factions and the town, but not the actual encounters. That’s a miss, Bob. We needed to see a couple of the actual encounters in the house. Still, if you read the preview that IS offered, at least up to and including the town, you get a great idea of how the gothic atmosphere is both present/implied and also JUST missing the mark.
By David Henley
David Henley Productions
Generic
Level ?
Here are some tags/keywords to get your imagination going. Fugitive Heretics, Cursed worshippers, Ancient shrine, Jungle, Dust, cobwebs, and artifacts Abnu’s Children is written for Agoth-Agog a new campaign setting in development by David Henley Productions. It is a short dungeon crawl in the classic style and playable with any game system. “Beware the children of Abnu, for they bear his curse…”
This seventeen page adventure describes an eight-ish room abandoned shrine with some cultists in it. It explores an interesting concept in presenting the rooms, but fails by being generic, abstracted, and not really having anything other than combat.
This thing had me worked up, in a good way, at first. It presented an old shine off the beaten track. Jungle to be hacked through to get there. Cursed people in the woods hanging around outside, looking for salvation at the shrine, harrying the party to protect what they see as the salvation to their curse. This is all done in very quick hit sentences. “Vine choked paths leading to and around the area”, for example. Then it follows that up with a format that has the room diagram at the top of the page, followed by some bullets, and then a heading for Objective or Threats. One room per page can be an interesting way to present encounters, with lots of room for clear formatting, etc.
Except the adventure falls down at nearly every opportunity. Starting with the map. It’s unnumbered. The designer tells us that: “Locations aren’t numbered so that there isn’t a feeling of the right path.” Uh huh. Except there is very clearly an entrance, and many, may adventures use a numbered key and don’t have a right path. What this does is cause the DM to have to annotate everything to get a numbered/keyed entry. THis is NOT ease of use. THis makes things substantially harder to run at the table as you dig through the adventure pages looking for the little picture that matches the room on the larger map. Just number the fucking thing. Sure, there ARE cases where room/key isn’t appropriate. This ain’t it.
The room text is … vague? Inaccurate? Lacking? Padding? “”This room is empty except for …” or “In fact this is a …” This sor of text does nothing but pad out the text. It needs to be tighter. Ray’s books addresses this in some detail. Then some of the room descriptions are inaccurate. The first room is listed as 10×15, when in fact it’s not, it’s larger, according to the map, if we use standard 5’ or 10’ squares.
More importantly though, the rooms lack specificity. The descriptions are abstracted and use inconsistent words. There’s a wood carving in a room. The text then refers to a statue. This is not conducive to scanning the text and had me scratching my head for a bit. Did I miss something? No, they are one and the same. In another room it mentions that the rooms objective is to descend the crumbling stairs. Except there are no stairs? In the room or on the map? No. That wood carving, it’s just a wood carving. A statue. Of a young man, Anu. What position? Anything notable? Anything specific AT ALL? No. Just description after description of this abstracted text. Specificity is a good thing. It anchors the mind and in doing so it lets the mind run wild. But no.
This extends to what little (non-combat) interactivity there is in the adventure. To open a door make three arcane checks. Weeeee! It turns out the answer IS on the character sheet after all.
Threats are usually monsters, and not listed in the room description. SO a room full of heretics gets a boring old description and then, later on, maybe on the next page, it mentions Heretics under threats. (Yes, it’s not ACTUALLY one page per room. Which turns the format from promising to TERRIBLE.) People? In the temple? I guess there’s an order or battle or how they react to the party? No. Not present.
“What you came for is behind this door.” Sigh. No real treasure to speak of. Not real magic. No real loot. Are you sure this is an OSR adventure? Margins are wide, room names are generic. There was A LOT of room here to add flavour without expanding page count or expanding the text to an unusable extent.
“Objective: Explore the room.” That’s original. I thought that was USUALLY the objective? A salve to format is never a good idea.
It’s too bad. The initial overview had me worked up and excited. But the execution shows all of the classic signs of generic OSR content and writing that plagues the marketplace.
This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the overview, that got me excited, on page five and then two rooms, showing the general layout/style of writing. So, at least in that regard, it’s a good preview.
By Joseph Robert Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSR/5e
Levels 1-3
Everyone says the world is dying. Today you meet a stranger who has already seen it happen. She has traveled back through time to save the world…but only if you can save her! An eldritch woman from the future begs you to save her from her sister, who wants to drag her back to her own time. To close the time portal, you must climb down through the buried corpse of a kraken. The prize? A giant diamond worth 10,000 GP…if you can pull it out of the portal!
This 28 page adventure features a dungeon in a fossilized kraken with about 22 or so rooms. It has a kind of airy, dreamlike thing going on. Mythic, but not in an epic way, you feel like you’re somewhere else. Excellent writing, interactivity, and all the rest combine to create something that you’re excited to run and share with your players. Dungeon Age seldom disappoints.
What is “good”? This is one of those things I like, even in real life, that drives the people around me crazy. See a movie with the girlfriend and she asks “Did you like it?” and I respond “What does like mean?” … in all seriousness. This thing, though, is clearly good … whatever that means. 😉
It has this kind of mythic, airy feel. Almost dreamlike. Not EPIC, although the set up could be construed as that. Not a dream, but this otherworldliness feeling even though it is, essentially, a dungeon. It’s a combination of the elements used and the style in which they are presented that deliver on it all.
A cracked mud flat. Delicate blue flowers with tiny red crabs, a tower leaning dangerously askew. Three huge grey tendrils wrap around it. A flash of blue light from an upper window, whisps of violet smoke, a woman shouting in anger. This is the opening scene. The ground floor, a cloud of violet smoke, a dream-fox, barking at you to not interfere as it climbs a stone tentacle to the upper floor. Blue light flickers, the ceiling booms, dusts rains down on you. A weird woman, tale, golden, with small tentacle begs for your help. Her world, the future is ending, and she needs you to close the portal below, wedged open by a diamond as big as your head, to keep her sister from hunting her down while she tries to save her own future. WHich, the adventure notes, doesn’t matter. Dreamy. Ethereal. You KNOW shit is going down. And yet, the stakes are minor, it’s impossibly far in the future. You’re not actually saving the world, not in the way trope fiction would have you.
The format is three column, about one column per room. A small read-aloud, easy to grok, a quick hit of a few sentences, quite evocative. Words are underlined and then those words have their details explained in bolded bullets below. It’s easy to scan. And, in the less is more category, the imagery is strong Strong STRONG. You KNOW these places. These things.
Creatures are well described, interesting, with interesting new effects. The dream fox, when it dies, looks you in the eyes and describes the time (soon) and place (aweful) of your death. [DM Note: this is always false.] Oh, but what a wonderful effect for the party to deal with!
Magic is new and interesting. The Remora’s Necklace is a seahorse pendant and makes you invulnerable whenever you are asleep. The drowning flare is a candle that only works underwater and goes out when removed from it. Described. Interesting effects. Described in terms of what they do, not in terms of mechanics. The way a fucking magic item should be! Mundane treasure is prevalent and hard to remove, but maybe the logistics benefit organizing a way to get all of those pearls, or obsidian …
“Knowledge, wealth, power!” whisperers her sister … ready to give you a Wish if you will just bring her sister to her … there’s no right answers in this adventure. It just IS. Oozing with evocative descriptions. A format that makes it trivial to run … I dare say without even reading it (which, while not a requirement, is testament to how clear it is.) People to talk to. Things to do. Creatures to hack. Temptations to explore.
I’m flaming out on this review, the way I always do when something is really good. This is really good.
This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is sixteen pages, showing you everything to need to see to make a buy decision. And, it’s only $2? Pffft.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
