Thieves’ Guild Built in the Subterranean Ruin of [Insert Generic Anthropomorphic Urban Rodent God Of Your Choice]’s Temple

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Billy Longino
U.H.H.H. Games
OSE
Level ...?

Yeah, that’s the title of this thing. And kudos to the designer for using it frequently and consistently throughout the product. I recognize greatness of vision when I see it.

Welcome to the Thieves’ Guild! Things are not going so well. The thieves are incompetent and prone to in-fighting. The guild has become more like your local underworld supermarket than the den of intrigue and villainy you’d expect. So, obviously, it’d be a lot of fun to explore. Inside, you’ll find a decently fleshed-out adventure site for your would-be heroes and/or ne’er-do-wells to infiltrate, pillage, or die horrible deaths in. Also included are a handful of silly NPCs for use in your city campaign. And there’s ratmen. (Actually, I checked… There’s no ratmen. Sorry. They’re all dead before the PCs arrive.) This product is designed using all of the amateurish art, poorly considered humorous prose, and difficult-to-read (and use at the table) layout you’ve come to expect from a classic DIY adventure!

This 32 page digest adventure describes a dungeon with about forty rooms, a former ratman temple complex in the sewers that is now a thieves guild complex. It’s got a lighthearted beer & pretzels/DCC vibe going on, but gets thick in places and a little too loose with the facts and formatting for ease of use.

The designer states it’s a joke adventure. That the layout is half-assed. That the art is crap. That they have completely ignored any ease-of-use approach. Meh. Looks pretty much ok to me. Better than most adventures. And the encounter areas to have a certain panache to them; you know, as a DM, where to hang the adventures hat in the room. This is the same way as in the better DCC adventures … which is not too surprising since the designer has some credits listed in Gongfarmers Almanac. Furthering this evidence is the map. It’s an excellent piece of work, with a lot of interesting playable detail. Done by the designer it shows an art flair, that flair so common to the DCC house organs, and perhaps a designer that bends more toward art than writing or design. Which I tend to find attractive in an adventure. Art-centric projects tend to have a stronger vision and rely less on mechanics and more in inspiration, IMO. (And, one of my favorite cons, Con On The Cob, is an artist centric gaming con.)

There’s a pretty strong vision for almost every room and most wandering monster/event encounters. The former ratman temple (from the PHB cover) that’s now a brothel. Great unique magic items and NPC’s. These things have character. They give the DM inspiration to work with and from. Top shelf ideas abound in each room or NPC. This is augmented by a formatting style that, while it relies on paragraphs, uses bolding in them to call the DM’s attention. So in the sentence “Loos stones hide a treasure behind them” the words “Loose Stones” might be bolded, to help call attention to it as a separate thing in the room. It’s totally a workable style and I’ve seen a couple of good adventures use it. It gets to the core concept of making the adventure easy on the DM to run (in spite of the designers warnings to the contrary.) Room names help orient the DM to the content even before the text arrives in the paragraph, giving us an idea of where to go and how to properly receive the detail to come. And there’s a little humor embedded for the DM “Ratmen, were-rats, ratty human priests, and layfolk” describes one event encounter with a group coming to take back their temple. And that’s a theme here, a certain meta-ness for the DM, exploiting every trope for amusement. One section, on a ghost, gives his backstory and then says “or you could just use a standard book ghost and not an interesting one.” This designer gets it. Put something the fuck interesting in! And they do, over and over again.

But all is not well in art land. 

While the designer rails against brevity and so on, in their adventure overview, or, perhaps, chides and acknowledges they didn’t engage in it, that’s still no excuse For Their Sins.

“This passage was once …” happens over and over again in the text, telling us what the room was, or what a person once did … that has no impact on the adventure. The Bolding gets out of hand in places, with a couple of rooms having nearly 50% of their text bolded. That ghost history? A long section of text in italics. “This door leads to room i …” just as the map says it does. There’s enough of this that it almost seems on purpose, like a bad adventure design contest entry. And rooms are sometimes a little TOO loosy goosy on things, like numbers appearing, or even if there IS a creature in the room. If you mention a creature in bold, but don’t stat it, is it there? What if its in a forest and claps one hand while falling? Another two fucking hours in editing would have solved all of these problems, I think. Unless, I mean, the designer made a piece of performance art and then offered it up for sale in the adventure section of DriveThru. But they wouldn’t do that, would they? I mean, that’s not cool if they did. 

A larger issue is the adventure proper. While the individual elements are great I think it lacks a bit, holistically. It’s a thieves guild, underground. Do you explore it? Do you hack it down and loot shit? Are you there to make contacts, to fence something or some such? Its focus is more on that last part, making contacts. As a place to hack and slash, or visit, the orientation of the rooms and content is less effective. And, I wonder if the selected room/key format might better be left off if its more of a Thieves Guild resource guide than an adventure? I suppose by using room/key you get to use it for all three purposes, with the entire package not really being optimized for any of the three. But I can’t help but think it lacks on exploration or exploitation and is far too oriented towards “lets fence this and find a hooker.” I’m not sure there’s an answer to this. It FEELS off though, maybe because of using room/key for this. But, again, serving no master it could be of use to all three.

So, it has decent ideas. It does an ok job of communicating them. It needed another couple of hours of hard editing. And it needs more focus on what it wants to be. Because, in spite of what the designer says, it’s not a joke adventure or ignoring good design principals. So, Fuck You, to get a No Regerts.

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages. It shows you the wandering table and several rooms. Including some NPC’s. It does a GREAT job of showing you the type of content to expect. From the snarky writing, to the ease of use bolding, to the stronger ideas for each room. Note rooms A1 and B, for example of the loosy goosy style that could be better.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/336672/Thieves-Guild-Built-in-the-Subterranean-Ruin-of-Insert-Generic-Anthropomorphic-Urban-Rodent-God-Your-Choices-Temple?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 9 Comments

The Lost Halls of Scarnascis, DCC adventure review

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Christophor Rick, Michael Spredemann
2 Old Guys Games
DCC
Level 2

A magical map, a solemn pact, and the halls of a lost civiliation. Could these be the fabled lands of Scarnascis? The legendary civilization that incurred the wrath of The Lords of Order? Legends say that as punishment, the ground opened and swallowed its major cities, including its capital, thus ending a  protracted civil war and restoring order from the chaos. What wondrous treasures could be had within? Can you stay on the path of Order and reach the precious treasures that surely await?

This 22 page adventure has a five room dungeon described in five pages. 

“Hey, that’s not much of a summary Bryce.” Yes. Yes it is. Anyone with any knowledge at all is going to read that sentence and see two problems. First, 22 pages for a five room dungeon. Second, five rooms in five pages. These two items state mountains about the adventure and it’s completely obvious to everyone that knows ANYTHING about adventure and an absolutely meaningless statement if you don’t know anything. And, like all good trueisms, is not actually true. Sure, The Paris Review COULD publish an uplifting story, but we all know that’s not the case. And, a five room/five page/22 page dungeon COULD be good. But we all know it’s not. The page count ration, 22 to five, indicates that the emphasis is on things other than the adventure at the table. Effort was spent fucking with the other shit instead of the shit tha tthe adventureres would be directly interacting with. Yeah, sure, state blocks, new monsters, new treasure. Doesn’t matter. The effort is misplaced and misplaced effort almost always means that the actual product, the adventure the players will be in, was given short shrift. Now, add on the One room per page page count. This indicates that the dungeon is over-explained. Too much emphasis is being given to detail and not enough to leveraging the DM as a tool. Can you do a room per page and have a good adventure? Sure.; I’ve seen more than a few. But it’s usually not the case. And it’s not the case here. 

The map does have some little annotations on it for traps. That’s great! You can see at a glance where things are from just looking at the map and consult the reference guide, the adventure text proper. Good job. 

But the room read-aloud is in italics, and therefore hard to read, as all long chunks of italics are. Further, the read-aloud is both confusing and incomplete. “The room appears empty” is followed by a list of things in the room, like a blue crystal throne and corpse on the floor. Or, you’re told that your at the top of a long cliff … with a cave going in to it. Huh? 

And the DM text is LONG, as the room count implies. It’s trap/door porn, with the (extensive) traps being poured over in detail, taking up large sections of the page to explain the mechanics of them. Clarity is missing in the text, one room describing a pole in the center of the room and two holes … suddenly telling the DM that the staff puzzle is … wait, what? There’s a staff puzzle?

And there are hallway and door traps. Without warning. These generally suck. The designer notes that one, on stairs, made playtesters angry. No shit. You arbitrarily told them they died. The RA, or the DM text, should be hinting at traps, to give the players queues to search, poke, etc. Just putting a fucking trap in the middle of the hallyway/door, etc does nothing but slow the game down. “We always search everything” is what invariably comes out of the parties mouths next. Resulting in a lot of rolls. And an arbitrary trap spring anyway when the party fails one. Just roll some fucking dice at the start and tell people they are dead before they play the adventure; it will save time and result in a more enjoyable experience for everyone. 

There’s nothing here. Some DCC fights in otherwise empty rooms. (This is the DCC equivalent of not putting in enough gold to get XP from in a Gold=XP game. The Fighter needs some shit in the room to do Mighty Deeds with.) Walk in a room. Maybe get in a fight. Get a couple of hidden traps sprung on you. Go in to the next room and face other arbitrary things. 

WHich is too bad. The blue crystal throne, a flooding room, a room full of wind coming up from a giant pit to fly over … these are good concepts. They are just poorly implemented, not described in a very interesting way … and, ultimately, a bad value.

This is $6 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. There should be a preview of a few dungeon rooms so we, the purchasers, can get an idea if it is something we’d like to buy before throwing our money away. There IS a layout JPG inline to the adventure description page, which shows some section breaks, but you can’t really see what is going on with the text or tell how bad the writing is. (Or, good, but that’s  not the case here.) 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/336832/The-Lost-Halls-of-Scarnascis?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 3 Comments

First Level Dungeons, D&D adventure review

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Dan Smith, Steven Kenson, Dave Woodrum, Dante Parti-Smith, Adam Steele, Anthony Constantino
Smif Ink Games
OSR
Level 1?

A compendium of OTR compatable adventures that can be used as a connected campaign or dropped into your existing campaign as one off adventures.

This 41 digest page compilation contains twelve dungeons by a mix of designers. They are roughly interconnected through some pretexts but are different enough, in theme and style, that they can also easily be standalone entries. With a mixed group of designers and, it seems, no storing editor, it is no surprise that the quality ranges from “bad” to “Shows some promise …”

I suspect these compilation products sell well but get played minimally. They seem to offer value but my own experiences with them is that their quality is all over the place, based on the designer for the particular section you’re on. Even with a very strong guiding hand (Fullteron on Hyquatious Vaults comes to mind… ) it can be jarring to see writing styles and/or quality change. And the editing hand on this one is not very strong, exacerbating the problem.

First a few general comments. The stronger entries here are from Dan Smith and Dave Woodrum, both of whom I gather from the intro are more established designers. It shows. Their entries, while flawed, show some clear indication of understanding certain design principles. I’m going to cover some of their entries in this volume, and make some generalized comments about the rest. 

The font, layout and such reminds me of a GURPS supplement and, I think, Dan Smith may be the one responsible, as the project guide. His name sounds familiar and it may be that he did a portrait of me for one of the GURPS books back in the 90’s. The fontis a chunky one with, essentially, BOLD always on. This is not the best for legibility purposes. I find it tiring on the eyes and not a quick read. It’s not exactly unreadable, but its getting awfully close to the line of “too much effort to bother.” There seems to be this desire to apply a house style to products when, in fact, just picking a very legible font is almost always the right way to go; house style can be implemented in other ways. 

The levels are VERY loosely interconnected. Essentially you get a in and an out for each other and maybe a note that this level level can be connected to the one above it. Thematically they tend to be worlds apart. We get a tavern and some jail cells, a cult HQ, a pill bug/harpy cave level, a mushroom forest, a strange cult city/lair, and so on. Even then, the first six or so dungeons are more closely connected than the last few, which explicitly say things like “a set of caves off of a trade route” or some such. The product has no table of contents or summary to orient a DM to the dungeons within; you just get to wade in and see if the theming matches what you want. They tend to all have a full page map and then between one to three pages to describe fifteen-ish rooms in the dungeon, plus or minus a few rooms, depending on the level. For a product claiming to be OSR, treasure, meaning Gold=XP, is EXTREMELY light. Enough so that they might as well have put none in. Each dungeon gets a little summary paragraph, describing whats going on, right after its map, and maybe some environment notes about light, smells, etc. These are great, and do exactly what they should: provide some overall atmosphere and give the DM a summary as to what is going on. I still think atmosphere should be on an “always on” page, like the map, but, whatever. They tried.

Dans first entry, The High Priestess Tavern, is one of the stronger examples. It doesn’t really start strong though, with a minimal pretext. Basically someones son has gone missing and you’re sent to the tavern to find them. In there you get in a bar fight and are captured, or find your way, to the basement jail cells. That’s about as much pretext as you get, a sentence or two, and then it’s GO TIME! Things improve in usability and style after this. We get a note that the tavern environment is “heavy mead/body odor, dusty floor, 60% light” which is enough to start placing an image in the DMs mind that can be expanded upon Other rooms gives us notes, at the very beginning of “(lit)”, letting us know an important environment condition. There are a good detail or two being present, like certain people in the bar having a right hand that is stained red. Descriptions are short, with the fifteen or so rooms all being described on two pages. Loud and boisterous guards, a drunk dwarf, a barkeep who wont leave the bar. A few personalities for the prisoners would have been nice, and kicking up the descriptive text another notch to be more evocative would also be in order (with adding substantially more words, of course.)

Woodrums first entry, as an example of his work, differs quite a bit. We get about another sentence of description per room and the evocative nature of the text is quite a bit weaker. But the interactivity does get quite a bit more. There are frescoes to look at and get clues from, magic pools, and the monsters tend to be engaged in something, like alchemical researchers shoving a boulder aside. The “scene” setups are quite good, even if the descriptions could use some work.

The other designers are far weaker. The dungeons tend to be just hacks, with things to kill (and the trap quivelant) and little else except, maybe, an environment thing like a river or something. “As you enter this room, it appears to be nothing more than an empty dirt filled room.” The “as you enter” implies a kind of hybrid read-aloud format, but the “As you enter” shows the weakness in writing, as does the “appears” stuff. Another designer has room after room of descriptions like “This area contains fungus nutritious to the monsters.” … a dazzling example of how abstracted descriptions ruin a dungeon. Still another likes to tell us what a room USED to be used for, or using meandering writing styles to get to the point. 

Of special note here is Adam Steele. This appears to be his first and only entry in to designing something. He’s written a trog-cavern level which could appear as a short dungeon In Fight On! And not be too out of place. “A cascade of ledgers, papers and scrolls is strewn about, along with body parts and blood.” Nice! And he’s got the style of the little scene/vignette thing that WOodburn does in place also, with a trog impaled on a spear in the wall, or another having a tasty snack with some slaves. Still a little loose on the writing, especially the longer and more complex rooms (which I suspect suffer also from the Dan Smith bold/font style which obfuscates monsters stats and makes everything run together instead of the stats being a kind of aside.)

These are all, essentially two to three page dungeons, with one page being the map. They suffer from that. One pagers don’t have enough room to breathe. It would have been better to include fewer dungeons but give the ones that are included more room. I’m no stranger to stunt writing a dungeon, and little good comes from the final product, except, perhaps, in the mind of the designer, as a tool to learn focus. 

I’m not a big fan of compilations. As I said, the quality tends to be all over the place. And, I never feel like I do the review justice. Should I write fifteen separate reviews for what are, essentially, fifteen one page dungeons? (Ok, one page of description and one page of map.) QUality tends to be all over the place, as it is in this one. This needed some more conceptual work, a better layout, an summary/table of contents, and stronger editor control over the content. “No! Do it again!”

This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and shows you the first dungeon, the Tavern and jail cells underneath. It is one of the better ones in the compilation … so judge the book accordingly.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/332605/First-Level-Dungeons?1892600

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

First Season in the Marchlands, D&D adventure review

Posted on November 30, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Tyler A Thompson, Joshua Mahn
Sad Fische Games
OSE
Mid-Levels?

An adventure compilation set in the Marchlands- a clannic, pastoral region beset by monstrosities, corruption, and banditry. 

This 123 digest page adventure describes a region and includes four adventures with extensive page counts. The adventures, while seemingly short, are verbose and use a meandering text style that must be fought through to run. More ideas than adventure, in spite of the keyed locations.

25 pages to describe the region and then, roughly 25 pages each for the four adventures. Ignoring the region, I focus on the adventures. There is a great ide used in one of the adventures. The party is exploring/raiding/clearing an old ruined fort. Inside are a very small number of bandits. There are some short snippets of conversation, in voice, tha the party can overhear as the bandits talk amongst themselves. This is wonderful. It gives hints to other things going on, like a minotaur in the area and the snippet being something about “it just picked him up and snapped his neck!” In voice adds character and gives the DM something to work with when roleplaying out the scene and this sort of “in the moment” element can add great depth to adventures.

Otherwise … oof! This one is rough!

The adventures are relatively short. A small four or five room ruined fort with six or bandits in it, for example. And yet it takes almost 25 digest pages to describe it. There are a few reasons for this. First, on the positive side, there are some ongoing situations. Thus, should the party clear the fort and perhaps take it over then there are some adventure seeds, such as the minotaur r thieving ratmen, that can be used to expand and provide events on an ongoing basis, generally ending with some climatic event, like the storming of a lair … or the party being stormed. This is a good thing. I always enjoy those little paragraphs at the end of an adventure that describe future implications of the parties actions … something to make it seem like the adventure is integrated in to the longer campaign, or, rather, giving the DM some hints as to how to do it, rather than it being a one and done situation. 

But the larger problem is how things are described and laid out. Just about everything in the adventure is described in trems of its history. This used to be a strong wall but now it is crumbling, for example. But, lengthen the history quite a bit more. This is seen in nearly every location and with every person, which is great if you’re reading a history book or doing an ethnographic discussion, but less important in the moment of the adventure. Thus, a significant portion of the text, at least a third? Is devoted to things that don’t really matter in actual play. This has the effect of clogging things up and making it harder to find the information you DO need to run the adventure; what’s happening now? Further, they do tend to arrive at the beginning of the description, meaning you get to skip down several sentences in order to find what you need. If this sort of stuff is the kind you like to put in an adventure then it needs to be out of the way, an  appendix, sidebar, or something, so it can skipped over while running.

And then, the organization, is quite wonky. For the fort, there’s an extensive write up on the bandits and their situation. Then there’s an extensive keyed location write up of the various locations. And then there’s ANOTHER extensive write up of the keyed locations, that includes information from the first write up as well as information about the bandits. All extensive. Thus you’re digging through three different places for information to run a room. I suspect it was meant to be a kind of overview, or summary, but it comes off as something different, something you need to consult during play. The effect is a kind of bizarre hunt for information as you try to figure out what the current situation is in a room.

This happens time and time again in the adventure, so much so that it’s the normal state of affairs. And, I think, makes the adventure unrunnable, at least for someone who doesn’t want to print it out, read it completely several times, take extensive notes and highlight it in order to make sense of it. And that ain’t me. It’s not worth it for a simple fort/bandit thing, even if it does recall that Dungeon adventure where you get to own a fort after you take it over. (That one was good. What was it?)

And then there are other weird choices. Most maps are keyed … except for the one adventure in which the map is not keyed. This is, of course, on a Dyson map. I have no idea what makes people not key his maps, but they resort to things like “The big room beyond has …” instead of just keying the damn thing. It’s weird. And then in another adventure, with a dragon, there is an extensive plot-like thing full of setting up a trap for the dragon with livestock. A LOT of pages. I guess that’s what the party is doing then? It’s out of place when compared to the more free-form of the other adventures.

It claims to be in the Old School Style, because of its looseness. I don’t equate the old school style with that. This feels more like some loose ideas, ala the MERP supplements. I liked the MERP supplements, but they weren’t really adventures. Just descriptions of regions and rough location ideas. And that’s what this feels like. Some ideas over a bar with a buddy about how things might go down in certain situations in a game they are running. Except it also has keys. 

I’m not really sure I can make out the intent on what was trying to be achieved. Verbose, and lacking clarity, or confused because of the verbosity? Or the intended formatting so obfuscated you can’t really figure out how it was meant to be used? As a result, it’s just a bit old book full of ideas and places and things that could happen, more than it is an adventure, even though it is clearly intended to be an adventure.

This is $7 at DriveThru. You get to preview the entire thing. Yeah! Rock on dude! That’s the way it should be. I might try pages 35 through 40 of the book to get a good idea of the writing style in this. Or, maybe, 29 through 32 to see the hook (i think it’s the hook?) and see if you can ferret out the supposed adventure from there. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/336113/First-Season-in-the-Marchlands–Adventure-Compilation-Compatible-with-Old-School-Essentials?1892600

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

The Beloved Underbelly, D&D adventure review

Posted on November 28, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Philippe Ricard
Self Published
OSR
"Low Levels"

[…] this zine details the tunnels and sewers beneath a dystopian fantasy city, full of beekeepers and taxidermists and pigs and sorcerers.

This 24 page “Adventure” details an underworld/under the city environment with a five factions and eleven locations. It is both trying too hard and not producing enough, although it goes through the motions quite well. It is probably not an adventure. Or even a city supplement. More of an idea, communicated over drinks at a bar.

A repressive city (described in two sentences) houses a seedy underbelly in the underverse underneath. Not really sewers, but interconnected locales frequented by seedy types and their factions to get things done and advance their nefarious plans. In to this we throw the PCs and watch the ensuing hilarity. 

Alas, all is not well though. For while this has the elements of decent supplement, they are not tied together or, I think, useful in a way that the supplement can be meaningful. 

Our underworld of the city has five factions. Taxidermists. Beekeepers. Wild Hogs. Bees. Wizards in to platonic shapes. Just from this you can see where this supplement is going. PoMo, or, as Mo would say: Weird for the sake of being weird.  On top of this you get a kind of vibe coming off of the Matrix#2, with this confluence of weird individuals (like The Architect and Merovingian) represented by The Tax Collector or The Sorcerer Supreme,  and then mash that up with Victorian Noblemen and maybe the seedy underbelly stuff from that recent Sean Bean Frankenstein series. And, I must admit, I find that kind of seedy theming quite interesting and playable. Well, if we warp Taxidermists in to “Body Snatchers” and manage the leap in believability that Bee Keepers are a credible faction.

In spite of having factions, and monster reference sheet, and mind maps for faction relations, and terse and evocative setting locales … the place doesn’t work.

There’s no real adventure, or treasure, for a short game and it’s not big enough/oriented correctly to be a support system for a larger multi-month support location for your parties locale town. You only get eleven locations, plus a few more rando places to stumble upon. And these locations tend to be iconic, like The Courts, The Bridge, The Black Market, and so on. These are roughly described, outlined I might say, to give impressions of a much larger world and their place in it. Not a place you hack, loot, and move on. Iconic locations would then imply, I think, that this is meant to be a supplement to your normal city. A place the party can visit time and again for info, supplies, rumors, etc. And yet, this seems too small to support that. The map is an abstracted pointcrawl, which it kind of a definitive guide to travel. If you want to go to B then leave in the east hallway from location A. It seems too small and cramped to serve as a major support for five factions the base of an entire city.

And, getting past the beekeepers again, I don’t see the purpose this fills. Too small and iconic to be an adventure, but too cramped and … knowable? To be the support for a major campaign in the city above. The factions have very basic goals but nothing to really fire the imagination. Dont get eaten. Get more pigs, and so on. They are more long term instead of the short to medium term specificity that could fire off as hooks for party shenanigans.

It tells us early on that: “The PCs are the flame to the fuse, and it remains to be seen whether they survive the explosion which will invariably ensue. Whenever possible, ask yourself what consequences arise from the PCs’ actions—“who will this piss off?” This is great advice, and a great attitude. But it just doesn’t follow through with enough specificity on the ground. More like general guidelines than an adventure, but too cramped and not enough intrigue to support longer play. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. You get to see the intro, Tax Collector dude, and four of the factions. From this you need to intuit that, while flavourful, it is more of an idea that you could ten create content around using these elements, then it is a support for adventure.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333930/The-Beloved-Underbelly?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 5 Comments

The Bloody Engines of the Dinosaur-Men, D&D adventure review

Posted on November 25, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Brian C. Rideout
Deathtrap Games
Labyrinth Lord
Levels 3-5

What makes the screams echoing down from Eira Peak? After the recent avalanche that forced the people of Eirata to file their homes, many went missing. If they were killed by the falling ice, where are the bodies? Who are the veiled merchants selling exotic meats and fruit on the northern roads? And what are the strange many-horned “dragons” devouring trees and melons at terrific rates in the Salka Marsh?

This 28 page single column adventure features a thirteen room dungeon with dinosaur men and some steampunk technology. It’s heart is in the right place, but it’s emphasis on mechanics and excessive read-aloud, along with some production issues, makes “not as bad as most” a compliment only on the tenfootpole.

Not much lead in here. There’s a short history lesson and then a rumor table, with each entry on the table being expanded upon by a paragraph or so. One rumor has a body washed up from the river, taken to a local sage. There’s about a paragraph for the sage explaining what he knows. Likewise for the other rumors; about a paragraph each to handle it, as the DM, which is a fine way to transition from “hook thing” to “and here’s the dungeon!”

The dungeon is a steampunk slaughterhouse run by the dino-men, for turning people and herd dinos in to meat. They are armed with muskets and tentacle grenades and a mortar, and the steampunk devices serve as the main puzzles in the adventure. Turning vales to increase or decrease the pressure from boilers, lava tubes, the front door, and so on. These things are generally handled with a “make an int check” roll. This is NOT my favorite way to handle puzzles. I think it emphasizes the character sheet instead of the players and their interactions with the DM. The adventure would be strong with far fewer of them and more or a “figure out the puzzle” thing. As is, it’s essentially just an abstracted roll. If you want to lower the pressure then make a roll, and so on. 

The map, though, is isometric, with some catwalks and garbage chutes. The varied elevation is always a good sign in an adventure, and there is even a note or two about high heat on the map. Nothing about light or noise, which would have also been helpful, but at least there’s high heat. There’s a back door in to the dungeon, but no notes about it at all, so … who knows.

There are other weird little things missing from the adventure. Room one should have a Location A and B noted, according to the text, but it’s not present on the map. There’s also Some read-aloud in places that doesn’t match the style of the other read-aloud. One NPC gets extensive notes about what they want/don’t want (which is great!) but all of the other prisoners are just “prisoner”, without names, races, wants, or anything else. (Ok, there’s one other one, an old woman, without the explicit wants/dont wants), but it’s weird to see the various ways this was implemented. One fleshed out. An old woman whos not. And then just “prisoners.” for the rest. There are also notes in the adventure about a “flood” in the complex, or creating one, anyway, but it’s never really clear how this happens. Multiple rooms makes reference to it, but I guess, maybe, it has to do with an exploding boiler in one room? As a central element of the adventure, the flooding is not really handled well, or comprehensibly, at all.

Read aloud is longish, in italics, and contains too much detail, telling the players things they should not know unless they examine the room in depth. The DM text is longish as well, with more of a focus on mechanics, clogging up the text and making it longer than it needs to be … and thus harder to run, not easier. Treasure is abstracted in places in to “4 rarified fossils” and the like. Better to be explicit in the treasure, noting what they are of, or how big they are, or they are azure, or something, to give them meaning other than an abstracted “2ooogp.”

But, the multi-level environment is interesting. There’s potential in the puzzle-like steampunk environment. The prisoners could have added additional depth, as could the timer of the flooding/exploding boiler. It’s going in the right direction and, I think, at least a better exploratory/assault environment than most adventures like this. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.50. The preview is six pages. You get to see the iso map, and room one. A better preview would have shown another room, I think, although you do get to see the minimalist hook investigation text. Not exactly great, but, again, going in the right direction.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333531/The-Bloody-Engines-of-the-DinosaurMen?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 1 Comment

The Thief King’s Vault, D&D adventure review

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Tim Hitchcock
Frog God Games
S&W
Level 5

It has long been said there no thieves in the city of Caltoshar. At night, one can safely walk the streets, and a few worry about locking their doors. Yet one would be foolish to believe Caltoshar is without a criminal element, for there are thieves aplenty if one knows where to look. The best advice would be for you to assuage you curiosity with such matters, and enjoy Caltoshar for what it appears to be. You’re probably not one to take wise counsel, though.

This twenty page adventure uses eleven pages to describe a couple of lead in scenes and an eighteen page dungeon. A thief/trap/tomb dungeon. The signature Frog style is prevalent, delivering the usual mediocre product. 

The Frogs are famous for not giving a damn about their editing. In this adventure we get: “[…] attempts to open them. must saving throw 18points of also anc (see below) hidden […]” I don’t know what the fuck it means either. But, whatever; they will keep throwing these scraps to the crowds and the crowds will keep lapping it up like mothers milk. It’s 2020 and there is no right, no wrong, no up or down, yes or no. Just a whole bunch of rap, flowing freely. As usual.

Scene 1: You get invited t a winery and asked to go steal a little idol from a merchant. Scene 2 you obtain said idlo. Scene 3: Returning to hi, dude you hired is killed by thugs. Scene 4: Walk five days through the wilderness. Scene 5: an eighteen room trap dungeon. These can serve us by framing some discussions about design.

Scene two has the party trying to obtain a small idol from a merchant. He lives above his shp on the second floor, keeps his windows locked, and has two small dogs. This is handled fairly well in two (longish) paragraphs. It doesn’t drone on and on. You can sneak in, feed the dogs, charge in and kill the dude, whatever. It’s ALMOST an afterthought. By which I mean “not overwritten at all.” You need some details, about the locked windows, second floor, neighbors, the dogs, but the rest is just left to the DM to run. They way it should be. I can quibble on word choice and criticize on flavour, but it is, essentially, done correctly.

Scene three has the party returning to the dude that hired them, presumably with the idol from scene two. They find his tied up in the middle of the room, a pool of blood under him. Surprise! There are six thieves in the room, staging a coup against the dude, the current guildmaster.It’s fairly easy to see what was being tried for here. A coup, the underlings grabbing power for themselves, etc. But, it comes off as just another generic D&D fight. “Thugs”, not names, showing up for the first time in the adventure. No hint of dissension prior. The imagery here is not quite hitting the mark. We get hints, with the dude croaking “its a trap!” if ungagged before the ambush is sprung, but it’s just that, hints of what could have been, missing the details and design that could have turned “six thugs attacking” in to something with more resonance. It is at the end of this scene that we’re told what’s inside the idol … which should have been mentioned in scene two, when the party first picked it up. 

Scene four is a joke. A short little multi-day wilderness journey, with two wandering monster tables. The read-aloud covers all five days. And then there are wandering monster tables for The Plains and The Hills, with no guidance on when to use which, or what frequency, or anything. I guess it’s the day three foothills the read-aloud mentions? It’s just an afterthought, and not in a good way. In a “no one cared enough to actually proofread this adventure” way.

Scene five. An eighteen room dungeon. This is, essentially, negotiating one trap after another. The read-aloud reveals too much detail about the rooms, killing the back and forth between the party and the DM. It also contains no hint of the traps to come other than “there are doors.” It just uses the “throw everything in one paragraph” Frog style which, I think, is fairly typical for the industry. Or, what I think of typical anyway. It sucks for running it. When you get to the end you are met by some people who offer you 200gp for all of the treasure you’ve found. There are no stats for them in case you don’t want to hand it over, though it’s implied they are powerful. 

Who really cares? These are not, I suspect, meant to be run. They are just churned out for the 5e crowd to make a buck and then converted to the OSR for a little more cash to grab. Who the fuck cares about quality? It’s not like any of this was surprise. “Vault of the Thief King” by Frog God Games tells you everything you need to know.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, the first three pages, so you get to the see the title page and the adventure hook. Nothing at all to help you make a purchasing decision. Shitty shitty low-effort preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/335350/Thief-Kings-Vault-SW?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 16 Comments

(5e) Ravenloft: Prey of the Black Wolf, D&D adventure review

Posted on November 21, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Christopher Moneymaker
Self Published
5e
Level 3

A killer stalks the night and must be caught before he kills again!

This 176(!) page adventure is rough. I mean REALLY rough. It’s nigh incomprehensible rough. Like “You can’t actually read it in order to run it’ rough. I THINK it’s just a simple linear plot thing. I think.

Of the 176 pages about a hundred of them belong to an appendix, character sheets, and so on. There might be ten or so pages of intro/table of contents also, leaving about sixty or so pages of actual content. Incomprehensible content.

I harp on legibility issues from time to time. If I had to point to one adventure to illustrate my point then it would be this one. It’s a nightmare to try to understand. First, it’s in single-column format. Single column is generally bad. Your eyes have a long way to travel across the page, causing you to lose track of where you are. It makes the physical act of reading text quite fatiguing. In formats like digest sized adventures then this isn’t such an issue, your eyes don’t have as far to travel. In a full letter size, though, it’s bad. It’s true! There are scientific studies! 

On top of this, and perhaps more importantly for this adventure, it’s using a funky font. Basically, it’s a kind of gothic font with cap letter oversized, lots of little flourishes and stroke marks on lowercase letters, and it’s all in a heavy bold. This is NOT legible. Not even close. You have to work, work very hard indeed, to just engage in the act of reading the text. Scanning would be impossible for mortal man. It’s seriously almost impossible to read. On top of all of this are the maps, which looks like they came from an EGA/VGA computer game. Dense with color and thick with (more) weird font choices, they are, almost all of them, not going to be possible to figure out without a lot of work.

This is all a problem. A BIG problem. Like, the biggest problem I’ve ever seen in all of my D&D reviews. You’re fighting the actual legibility of the text the entire way. So much so that I feel guilty with this review, because I don’t think I’ve given it a fair shake with the content. I’ve tried to wade through it twice and while I think I’ve done a decent job, I can’t help but think I’m not getting the full picture. Did I mention the large block of red front on a beige background? THis thing is ROUGH to wade through.

Combined with this are LONG sections of traditional paragraph text. LONG sections. It’s all laid out in a if you ask about this then they say that format, with an emphasis on minute, light how far someones’s tunic comes down to the ground. It’s just impossible to find ANYTHING in this text.

But, at its core, it’s just walking around a village talking to some NPC”s and a few wilderness encounters and a small lair map. For 176 pages. 

This is CRAZY. I mean, you could not point to a better example of the issues of legibility in adventures. Yeah, I’ve said almost nothing about the adventure. While some investigation and NPC talking to is a great idea, you first have to make the adventure legible, and this ain’t that.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages and shows you nothing of the adventure, which a preview should actually do. Open it up and scroll to the last page of it. That big text blob at the bottom? That’s an example of what the ENTIRE adventure is like. And is one of the more comprehensible sections of text.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/314883/Ravenloft-Prey-of-the-Black-Wolf?1892600

Posted in 5e, Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Worst EVAR? | 17 Comments

In the Shadow of the City-God, D&D adventure review

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Istvan Boldog-Bernad
First Hungarian d20 Society
OSRIC
Levels 3-4

Mur’s fortunes have been built on tear salt, and merchants from distant lands travel to the city for this healing elixir. There are two tear salt springs in town, owned by two rival patrician families: the Falconi and the Capullo. Mur’s laws forbid open conflict, and like most crimes against citizens, the punishment for breaking the peace is severe: live entombment within the living city’s ever-growing walls! Nevertheless, cloak-and-dagger intrigue always claims new victims, and discord between the two families has now escalated into almost open warfare after the elderly Ercol Falconi’s young wife has disappeared. Time is ticking away, and only a bold company of outsiders can resolve the feuds and discover the masterminds behind it all… under the watchful eyes of the City-God!

This 32 page adventure details intrigue, Fair Verona style, in a small city. Two great houses avoid open warfare, with the party mixing things up, perhaps going all Yojimbo. There’s too much to keep straight, though, without a scorecard, and it could use a little more intrigue to mix things up. It’s a pretty cool little setting, even if I do think it’s a lot of work to run.

 You’ve got a setting and you’ve got shit going on in that setting. And then you’ve got three dungeons related to the adventure. (And, also, a separate wilderness adventure that I’m ignoring for this review.) The setting here, the city, is flavourful, with enough detail to make it spring to life in the DM’s mind, easing their ability to run it and make up new stuff. The Shit Going On in the setting is … plentiful, to say the least. You’ve got a fuck ton of people running around with differeing motivations, generally acting in opposition to another group. IE: a fuck tun of faction play.

The city, proper, is pretty interesting. Worshipped as a god, they bury people in the walls of their houses. Alive, if they are criminals. They export some magic vials of water (actually tears of a crying titan …) and, like the cities of old, foreigners have essentially no rights in the city. 

To this lets add two factions, the Gold and Blue, based around two old families that have a stranglehold on the potion business, being the only two (legit) providers. (See that throwaway word? Legit? There’s one throwaway line in the city description that mentions imposters and crooks and fake potions … and like all good one-liners it provides ample inspiration for a DM to expand the adventure. It’s not just some shitty window dressing, its a line that directly contributes to further adventures and complications … the way these things should!)

Ok, then You’ve got their own personal guards, the Blue and the Gold. Then you’ve got the commoner filled Greys, the city guard, who take advantage of foreigners. The lesser criminal elements, always willing to place the blame on foreigners (IE: the party.) Oh, and the two great houses in Verona like to use outsiders since they can’t openly go to war and they are essentially disposable. Let’s see, you’ve got an independent wizard upset that the local library has burned down and is interested in bringing people to justice over it. You’ve got a beggar king with a secret to hide. You’ve got a ½ orc with plans to score ig at the expense of a family. And then you’ve got the main plot, with the child bride of one of the families gone missing and rumors abound, with Fake News, on who did it. And then you’ve got the beggar king, with his own secrets, and desiring to Bring The Noise and destroy the city. And then a couple of other independent places, like The Hotel out of John Wick, this time a small neutral ground inn for merchants. There, I think I got about ?’rds of the shit going on. This is my kind of place! A fuck ton going on and two seperate timers, unknown to the party, driving the action, before two different people end up dead … one with normal consequences and one with apocalyptic consequences. FUCK! I forgot the cult. And the thieves guild. Anyway, a shit ton going on. This is totally my bag baby and I luv it! This is the fucking way you create a setting!

The dungeons, three of them, do a pretty good job also. Hands reaching out from walls, ghouls bursting through them, weird lifelike mouths, statues that are guresomly real, cannibals, and a shit ton more, all described and brought to life with a minimum of text. I could, mayhem use just another sentence, since a lot tend to be one sentence long, but the core concepts are good ones and the brief descriptions do a job job lodging them in your brain, which is what they should do. Nice writing, but could be better.

But, alas, all is not well. There are four things that spring to mind, in this adventure, that do not sit well with me. 

The first is, I think, a subset of a larger problem. The city wanderer table is about half boring. Meaning about the encounters are just “merchants” or “Bandits” or some such, with nothing more. The other half might have a sentence of something like “Rakes who like to humiliate foreigners, especially in front of a crowd.” Devoting a page, or even doing an inline table, to spicing these up would have gone a long way to giving the DM a springboard to launch an encounter from.

And this “springboard”, or lack thereof, is the larger issue I find in this adventure. The city setting is interesting. The factions and all the shit going on is great. There are good hooks that abound. One of the first is from a relative of the missing girl, “find her … or avenge her!” (As an aside, this Realpolitik/Men Of Power thing is a theme in this adventure and I LUV it!) Fuck yeah man, Permission to Stab received and understood! But, there is some level between the down and gritty detail and the high level faction plans. SOme way to ge the party involved more, after the mission brief, some way to get them in to the thick of things. This is, I think, sorely missing from the adventure. The middle is missing. It didn’t have to be much, maybe a sentence here and there, but active party involvement seems to be missing.

On top of this, or, perhaps, as a symptom, the thing feels more like an overview or guidelines than an adventure. I understand that, when writing a Tv Show, there is some document produced that has all of the backstory of each character and the places. This FEELS like that. Not in the amount of extraneous detail (that is thankfully not present) but rather as a kind of “high level briefing document.” That can be ok, for a setting, but as a part of a city, to run an adventure in? It leaves more than little to be desired. The various locales are both thick with information (dense, maybe?) and high level guidelines. I LIKE guidelines, but, somehow, here, it feels off?

Finally, and most importantly, this thing needs a fucking scorecard. There are SO many people, and SO much going on, with their funny fucking names, that its hard to keep things straight. I’m not sure, after two read throughs, whos up to what and why, if you mentioned a name to me. A summary sheet of this shit would have been VERY helpful to run the adventure/city from. A necessity, infact. 

I’m ending this review early to go pass out. It’s the day after election, I’ve been ignoring all of the news channels and instead drinking. 

This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. The writing style, used in the preview, is the one used throughout. A better preview would have a page of dungeon encounters and perhaps a page of the city locations as well. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/331707/In-the-Shadow-of-the-CityGod?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 8 Comments

The Headless Haunting of Berengar Manor

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Timothy Lanz
Adventure On
DCC Levels 1-2

Dark rumors have been whispered in the village for years of the vile deeds of Berengar the Brutal and his wife Ra’za’zsu the Cruel. Their manor, now long abandoned, still haunts the nightmares of those who worked there in their youth. When two of Berengar’s fromer servants go missing and their grandson seeks help in finding them, will your adventurers be ready?

This sixteen page adventure details a haunted house, With serious Wall of Text issues. So much so that it is nigh unreadable, let alone playable. Oh, Wall of Text, how I have missed thee!

I had been not reviewing DCC adventures of late. There tends to be more linearity in them, not in terms of plot, like a 5e adventure, but in terms of dungeon design. This one seemed to be different, with a haunted house to explore, and who doesn’t love Tegal/Saltmarsh? To its credit it does present a short section outside of the house, with the grounds and a few outbuildings to explore, as well as a house that, while small, is not linear. Small sections of text also give an overview of the house and grounds, as seen by the party, which is good to see.

That is all.

While there are small vignettes that are fun to explore (the old “skeleton laying under a broken rafter with an overturned chair nearby” gag) the thing is plagued by A LOT of text issues that add up to a horrible horrible wall of text.

There’s A LOT of read-aloud for rooms. Multiple multiple sentences that kind of cause the eyes to glaze over; I can’t think that I’d be patient as a player, listening to it or recalling what been said. The read-aloud is also in italics, which causes my eyes, as the DM, to glaze over and lose track of where I am. Then the read-aloud gives too much information. Small details, like the hasp of a chest being broken, destroying that back and forth interactivity that should exist between a DM and their players. So, too much read-aloud for the players, badly formatted for them DM, and the read-aloud gives away too much information … with it sometimes slipping in to first-person also  “you clean away the …”

And then there’s the DM text. There’s A LOT of it. Again, your eyes get lost because it has very little formatting to help you run it. And mixed in is TONS of backstory about what rooms used to be used for, what happened in them, why something is there, and so on. A LOT of it. SO  much so that the DM text ALSO turns in to a Wall of Text. 

It’s a pretty simple “kill the monsters” adventure, with a few things to figure out, as the players, but it is COMPLETELY unusable, as a throwback to the late 80’s or 90’s style. And EVERYTHING is exacerbated by the smaller font used. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The pview is only four page, and only shows you a little of one encounter. You do get to see the font size, some read-aloud, and IMMEDIATELY see the wall of text issues in the intro. But, a few more encounters would have been better in the preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/328725/The-Headless-Haunting-of-Berengar-Manor?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 2 Comments