tenfootpole.org

By Michael Curtis
Goodman Games
DCC
Level 2

Long ago, Frygorix of the Thousand Lies, a foul demon, ruled with fear from atop a lonely tor, spreading death and plague across the land. Two brave siblings, one bearing an enchanted shield of great power, challenged the demon, vowing to slay it and free the land. In their climactic battle, black towers of six-sided stone arose from the hilltop, an eerie outcropping called the Demon Crown by some. Stories hold that the shield lies untouched within the Demon Crown, but who knows what else might dwell within those weird, dark pillars of unearthly rock?

This twenty page digest adventure details a dungeon with about thirteen rooms in it. Workmanlike, it feels constructed rather than imagined. 

You hear about a magic shield in a cliffside area similar to the Devils Postpile/Giants Causeway, etc. IE: a bunch of hexagon stone “tubes” all mashed together. You wander about inside of them until you fight a demon and some rock monsters. 

Goodman does a good job with their DriveThru descriptions, noting page count, levels, and so on. Further, they don’t fuck around in the adventure with a long boring backstory and a lot of meaningless drivel about making it your own game, how to roll dice, etc. It is, essentially, unpadded. Just like that short and sweet into to G1, there IS a little backstory, but it’s not excessive and it doesn’t get in the way of running the adventure.

Curtis understands the genre and his events and scenes fit in well stylistically. At one point you (could be) meeting with a trog queen sitting on a throne of skulls. The skulls speak in unison and translate her speech to common. There are multiple classic elements there, from the throne of skulls to them speaking in unison to the translation. In other places a sword can be imbued with the spirit of a long dead warrior. Things are embedded in walls (which seems to be a favorite of Curtis …) and sometimes pull themselves free. The elements are there.

But, I also find Curtis to be one of the more inconsistent DCC writers. While he understands the material, whatever it is, is doesn’t always get translated on to the page well. Some adventures, like the Chained Coffin, really translate the style well from Curtis, to the page, and back to the DM. Others don’t. Still others feel more constructed than imagined. And that’s the case with this one.

It feels more like a series a rooms each with something in them. It doesn’t feel like a whole but rather separate parts. The setting location should be fantastic, but it comes off as a little dry and boring, not interesting to explore. (Which could be writing or the design, this is the old “the dwarves are stoic builders” trap; they then come off as boring Brutalist. Looking good from the outside, but that’s all they got.)

Woven bags, not of human skin but just woven. Rock monsters pulling themselves out of the rock walls … who just do slam attacks. That’s boring. (As opposed to the fire harpies in another area that breathe fire gouts. That’s cool!) There’s just not a lot going on, and that leads to a kind of matter of fact nature of the rooms and their contents. Not exactly bad, but not really something to recommend it either. Also ran, as it were.

Dovetailing in to this are the Mighty Deeds. You need an interesting room to do these well. Something to work with. The brutalist architecture just doesn’t really you with anything much to work with. It’s an empty room. Try and do something.

One of the weaker, but not the weakest, of the Curtis adventures. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. You DO get a chance to see some of the adventure. Note the boring rock people art, and the last page of the preview, with its read-aloud and descriptive text. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310999/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-925-Dread-on-Demon-Crown-Hill?src=newest&filters=44544_2110_0_0_0?1892600

Bonus blog feature: Tower of the Hanged Men. This is a one pager that uses the art on the map to good effect. It’s a hard adventure to puzzle out, but, it DOES use the map art to help augment the adventure text to bring more than the sum of its parts to the adventure. Looks like maybe there’s some English as a Second Language issues. Remember one page designers … you also get the back of that page, if it’s printed two-sided!

By Allen Farr
WinterBlight's Challenge
Generic
Level ?

The River Of Frozen Souls has shattered. As the remnants of this once mighty frozen fortress drifts south on the Sea Of Broken Blades, it carries with it the Anvil of Ice, a powerful artefact capable of bringing eternal winter to the world. Will this winter be your last?

This 49 page adventure tries to describe a northern town in the middle of winter, along with a series of dungeons in iceberg fragments. It’s very creative and has all of the elements required for a good adventure, it’s just that the designer has absolutely no idea at all how to put them together in to a coherent package for use. And I mean that more than I usually mean that. 

You get hired on as town guards. You get sent to a northern town for a few months. Your first day you get assigned to a murder that is causing a gang war. That leads to a series of dungeon fragments contained in icebergs off the coast. 

There is a pattern to these. After mountains of text laid out in a near-incoherent paragraph form, with embedded encounters, there will be a period of more free form player action. These are supported by terrific little vignettes for the party to interact with. There is a surrounding world here, or at the feel of one, that is terrific. It’s alive and full of potential energy. This is augmented by “themes” for the various sections, which are usually just environments conditions or some such. This adds to moods trying to be created, like the hostility of the weather or the strangeness of the north. Evocative writing can be almost good in places, like “At the far end of the room is an ancient throne entwined by the dragon’s tail and bedecked by large luxurious furs.” 

As guardsmen some of the “one liner” encounter range from a group of children challenging the party to a snowball fight to a distraught woman begging the party for help, because a ship sailing out has her son on it as a stowaway. There’s nothing else, that’s it. And it’s clear that you mind can run away with these little things. They are full of energy. Likewise things like your sword freezing to its scabbard, or an increasing number of villagers found froze to death in their homes, to bring home the severity of the winter. A great job.

Of course, the formatting is atrocious and makes the entire thing almost incomprehensible.

Columns of information, combining backstory, justifications, multiple plot events, and the like are the normal course of business. It almost makes you think that you are reading a summary of whats to come, but, you soon find out, no, this is the actual adventure. Arriving in town, hired on, ambushed by thugs, trained by the guard sergeant, these get just a couple of words each, almost as much as I just typed about them, embedded in longer paragraphs. This is no way to run a railroad, or format an adventure for use. 

Bold italics for read-aloud sections making it hard to read. An appendix compsigin almost half the page count, subtracting from actual value. A generic adventure, with no stats, written in an almost abstracted way, making it hard to pick out traps and creatures and certainly no detail on what they could be. Just stat the fucking thing for D&D man! Any decent DM can convert it and the non-decent ones are not going to use it anyway, in its generic form.

“The entrance to this room is constructed from the open maw of Blizzard, an ancient dragon that pledged its services in death to the master of the fortress.” You can see, from this section, how we both get a nice little feature, an entrance from a dragon maw, and how its ruined by all the backstory. And this is one of the more terse backstory elements. They go on and on, adding depth that will never be encountered during play. “… his hand outstretched as if holding something defensively. That something was the Rod of Thunderous Upheaval. It was the Rod of Thunderous Upheaval used in the heat of combat that shattered the River of Frozen Souls and Fortress Frostfang, see Arcanum.” There we go, a load of backstory for a corpse that adds nothing to the adventure. The adventure does this time and time again. 

It’s a shame because there’s some interesting things going on in this. It needs a TOTAL rework, with a complete focus on running it at the table and the expansion of the section where the party investigates the murder and the factions in the town compete. Then this would be an adventure to write home about!

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages and gives you a look at some of the seventeen “iceburg dungeon fragment” locations. These tend to tbe the shorter elements, with some decently evocative writing in places. It’s good for getting a eel for the generic nature of the adventure, as in system neutral, and how that detracts from the adventure overall.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/343301/River-Of-Frozen-Souls?1892600

By Scott Myers
Self Published
Castles & Crusades
Level 1

This 33 page adventure features a ten room dungeon with two monsters in it. It is boring.

Ok, it tries in a couple of places. There’s a Tomb Worm that has egg sacks that burst worth with a larvae swarm monster. Gross! One encounter has a zombie with its back legs missing, crawling towards you, eyes glowing yellow. And there’s a ghost child looking for its mommy as a throw away wanderer.  That’s it. And even that is not that well done.

The ghost child gets almost nothing to it, which, normally, I’d be fine with. But if you’re going to make something like this, something that stays with the party a bit, then you need to provide a little bit more to it. And this don’t do that.

Ok, so, you start out as caravan guards. Boring. You get paid 20gp for 2 days work. Sweet work if you can get it, I guess. Making bank! Your latest caravan includes a corpse going to the next town for burial. At this point, as a player, I’ve already defiled that corpse, chopped it up, burnt it, etc. But, I guess your players are stupid and wait for it to reanimate and attack. Which it does. Boring. Along the way to the next town you are attacked by 4 skeletons. “Sometime after midnight the PCs are attacked by 4 Armored Skeletons, their eye sockets glow a mysterious yellow.” Can you contain your excitement yet? No? Bored? Yes. That’s after three pages of read aloud and a couple of paragraphs of DM notes. Just “attacked by skeletons in the night.” *Sigh* 

Halfway in and you’re attacked by those four skeletons and the corpse you were escorting. You reach a town where the Level 0 innkeeper woman has a ring of invisibility, an amulet of protection and ring of protection. It pays, it seems, to have questionable morals in D&D. I’d stab her. 

I guess you go to the dungeon nearby out of the goodness of your heart. The locals don’t really seem to care that the dead are reanimating. No local outage, or worry. Just a “thanks man, for killing that corpse” and off you go to the dungeon, I guess.

The dungeon thankfully does away with the (long) read aloud and has none, but transitions in to boring room descriptions with nothing going on. There’s a combat with a dog and another with that Tomb Worm/Larvae thing. A six hd tomb worm, for a first level party. WIth a 3hd swarm of larvae added on. Uh huh. First level. Right. I’m all for not balancing, but, there’s a limit.

“The first thing you notice in this room … is rather typical. It’s a loose writing style full of this sort of padding. “If you defeat the skeletons then they can be searched …” This is how we get multiple DM text paragraphs for a simple sety up. A joy to wade through. A boring boring boring of boringness. 

Why the fuck do I do this? I’m just killing time until I die. There must be something better.

This is $2 at DriveThru. To it’s credit the preview is the entire thing. Check out page fourteen, for that first encounter. The long read-aloud. The simple combat. The lengthy DM notes.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/330437/Under-a-Funeral-Moon?1892600

By Tollkraft
Dondrobat Productions
OSR (5e?)
Levels 4-6

In a secluded corner of the countryside, on top of a hill stands Mount Saint-Mikkel. An ancient power awakened there and since then, the region has been subject to raids by the undead.

You have been assigned to solve the problem… Baron Solreigh was surprisingly honest when he recruited you: if he offers a pouch of gold to whom will end the troubles that afflicts the mount Saint-Mikkel area, it is because it’s very dangerous. He has not received news from any of the two groups of men — one of soldiers, the others composed of its five best knights—he successively sent there. And if he’s going to lose more men, he’d rather they not be his own!

Reports mention an ever-growing troop of the undead swarming the villages around mount Saint-Mikkel—an old priory and pilgrimage destination long declining— leaving only death and ruin in its wake. Listening to the call of adventure and your lust for gold, your group of Adventurers is on its way through the countryside. After a few quiet days, you can finally see the lonely and age-old silhouette of the priory sitting at the top of the hill through the morning mist…

This 26 page adventure uses six pages to describe sixteen linear encounters in a “dungeon” with undead. It’s ok for something linear like this; the encounters don’t overstay their welcome. But, neither are they particularly interesting (with two exceptions.) I wouldn’t Hate Life(™) if given this to run five minutes before a con game. Nor would I EVAR go out of my way to run this though. 

For the rest of this review let us assume a minimal level of competency by the designer. Descriptions are not too long, some ok use of bolding, etc. Nothing to write home about or change the existence on earth, but doesn’t make you hate life either. Great, now we can ignore that boring shit (that is usually the easiest to fix, hence my harping on it.) Also, this isn’t really an OSR adventure. It’s written for some French RPG, but essentially converted to 5e while being labeled OSR. The linear nature (and forced combats) would therefore make it more 5e than OSR.

The adventure does two interesting things. First, it occasionally handles a skill check well. In one notable example, you find a cave if you are following footsteps … OR you can make a PER check if you are not. That’s how you handle a skill check in the OSR. If you search you find the fucking trap, otherwise you fling yourself to the fickle hand of fate. There’s also a read-aloud or two that is done right, noting that a roof looks unstable implies donger when exploring the room, for example. Hints in the description to the player are what develops true player skill, not the min/max CharOp bullshit that passes for player skill.

There are also The Knights Who Went Before. You end up meeting three of the five. The first, in a cave, a broken man who you can bring out of his misery, perhaps. The second, a ghost, who tries to possess a party member so he can continue his oath to defeat the evil. The third, currently possessed by The Demon (and thus the big bad) can actually be saved by separating him from a cursed sword, and keeping him separated for an hour or two as he regains his senses. This is so much different than the usual “corrupted forever” or “just fight and stab stuff cause thats the part of the game were in” dreck that usually happens. There’s more nuance here. It FEELS more real because of it. It’s not just a pretext for a combat. That’s good design.

It makes some of the usual mistakes. Long sections of italics in the read-aloud. The read-aloud says things like “you are startled” and “you see”, both using a “you” perspective and telling the players what their characters think/feel instead of writing something that MAKES the players feel that feel. You have to make a STR test to walk up a hill. It uses a fancy illuminated font for the keys in the text, making it harder to find the associated key.

A couple of things of special interest. First, the maps here are … interesting. Rather, they kind of LOOK interesting. There’s a decent overland map (that I think is probably never used?) and a detailed dungeon map. Both of which are essentially illegible. Too dark, not enough detail, or, perhaps, the pertinent detail is lost in the colors. You just can’t make out what is going on, where the cliffs are, etc. Which is too bad, it looks like it could have been an interesting complimentary map. I mean, if it weren’t a linear dungeon.

Then there’s the handwaving. I saw this in the context of the page count. Six pages for the adventure, recall. And yet certain parts of the adventure are handwaved, essentially everything but the room keys proper. Asking around in villages gets you that undead block the road and that there are mines under the monastery that you can use to get in. It’s literally handled in one sentence, also verbatim for what I typed there. And there’s nothing about the region around the monastery, the undead on the road, etc. If your party wants to try that there’s nothing there to support the DM. GO DOWN THE LINEAR DUNGEON BECAUSE THATS WHAT THE dESIGNER WANTED YOU TO DO. A page, to cover rumors in the village and/or the region around the monastery, the undead attacks, etc, would have been great. Just a fucking page, for context. To add something for the DM to run and support them. But, no.

So, is it offensive? Well, no, not overly so. Is it something that I would ever want to run in a million years? No. Not at all. The knight thing can be stolen for a better adventure, but that’s about it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is ten pages and you get to see the map and the first three or four rooms. This gives yo ua good idea of what you are buying, so, a good preview. Take a look at that map; looks interesting, right? And the formatting of the room keys is ok also. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/340889/Mount-SaintMikkel?1892600