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By Fiona Geist, David McGrogan, Zedeck Siew, Adam Koebel
Free League Publishing
Forbidden Lands

This eighty page booklet has four adventures from four well known designers. I’m going to review this one differently, doing one review post per adventure, in an attempt to give their fair due, something that I think is missing in my previous anthology reviews. This is this third installment, and the general comments from the first, regarding publisher style, still apply.

Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord (Siew)

This seventeen page non-adventure is a general description of a situation, with some ideas about a village of monkey invaders. None of which my taxonomy allows to be defined as “an adventure.” 

It’s Monday morning! The shine is shining, the birds are singing, I had a super fun weekend planned, I’m not hung over and I’m only ten pounds from goal weight and fifteen from that mess jacket I’ve always wanted. I even forgot it was time to write a review, which makes it a very good day indeed! And then I remembered …

What if, like, some monkey tunneled in to our world, man? And what if they were like, invaders man? What about that? And what if they had, like, this giant monkey statue that they and their soldiers used to kill people and convert them to their monkey man religion? And, what if, like, there was also this monkey dude who was an outcast and the rightful high priest? Ok, you get the idea. It’s not an adventure. It bills itself as a “village”, in Forbidden Lands type of adventuring site vernacular, but it’s not even really that. It’s too abstract for that. It’s just an idea expanded to seventeen pages.

We start with … a mess. It’s meant to be an overview of what’s going on. An introduction. An orientation. It is not. It is almost incoherent. It’s almost like there’s a longer work, somewhere, and bits of paragraphs are plucked out of it and pasted in to a couple of pages to make an introduction/background section. There’s a role to be played by leaving things mysterious. The imagination needs room, after all, and given the room it will fill things in by itself. But There’s a difference between leaving room and seemingly random facts plopped down on the page as a background that you’re trying to make sense of.

It then offers some advice on how to frame the monkey invasion for your campaign. It suggests taking the wandering table, provided, and sprinkling it in to your own game. Each session replace one of the entries on your wandering table with one the entries from this which are, of course, monkey invasion themed. Hmmm, good advice. I like the stuff the tries to integrate itself in to your world, especially over time, instead of the typical one and done episodic stuff. More immersion=Good thing.

And then the real shit show begins.

The monkey soldier compound. Six towers with a central platform in the center. That makes for seven locations in this “village.” And what does one of these descriptions look like? How about “The barracks rings with shouted roll calls and the clanking of scale mail. Clerks waddle the corridors, tails picking up scrolls fallen from their full arms. The palace is abuzz. Troops make ready; their sergeants tasked with exe- cuting Ngajaputri’s newest stratagem. Roll a D6 on the table below.” Yup, that’s it. A description that only room after empty room in the barrier peaks could love. It’s a fucking abstracted concept. That is ALMOST the entire description of a major war tower of the enemy. Just a fucking concept. And by almost I mean that there’s a second paragraph: “Inside, Ngajaputri paces her throne room. She leans over her war table. Its mahogany cracks and warps and stains – a diorama of the world, updated in real time, as scouts in the field annotate their maps.” Well now, that added a lot, didn’t it! This is, essentially, about as much description, or less, than the great houses of the drow from D3. “Like, hey, man, you could have this tower, and, like, there could be monkey soldiers in it! Yeah! That’s it man!” There’s nothing to this. At best, its inspiration for the DM to create their own game, or run some kind of Fiasco like story game.

And then there are the table. The random tables. Proving once again that a fuck ton of people making RPG’s don’t the fuck know how to use a table and the what the fuck they are for. Basically, each tower gets its own random table, because, OSR< right? OSR has random tables! Look everybody! It’s Darth Vader! You recognize Darth Vader right?! Dance monkey! Dance! Table 1: where could the monkey compound be located, six entries. Bottom of a lake. On an important road. In the middle of a river. Just more ideas. Hey, one of the towers seems to have a jail cell in it! A ten entry table to help the DM pick a prisoner for the jail cell. *sigh* They are all like this. Hey, you know what works better than a table when you are creating major parts of your adventure? Actually creating that part of your adventure and then riffing the rest of the adventure off of it, as the designer, and focusing the editing around it to integrate it in to a complete whole. Or, I mean, you could just slap down a bunch of tables, creating ideas to inspire the DM to create their own adventure, and then slap “adventure” label on it. 

You know, whatever. For an asshole that claims language has no meaning anymore I sure get pissy when it actually happens. 

Anyway, the weakest entry so far. Next review: the last entry. Please baby jesus, let it be better. Please.

This is $10 at DriveThru. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310243/Forbidden-Lands-Crypt-of-the-Mellified-Mage?1892600

By Fiona Geist, David McGrogan, Zedeck Siew, Adam Koebel
Free League Publishing
Forbidden Lands

This eighty page booklet has four adventures from four well known designers. I’m going to review this one differently, doing one review post per adventure, in an attempt to give their fair due, something that I think is missing in my previous anthology reviews. This is this second installment, and the general comments from the first, regarding publisher style, still apply.

The Firing Pit of Llao-Yuyuy (McGrogan)

This dungeon uses thirteen pages to describe a 21 room cave complex that’s used by an (evil) dude to make magical pottery stuff. It’s lacking in much interactivity, beyond combat, and is fairly straight-forward, reminding me more of a lair dungeon in tone, if not in size.

Okey dokey, so, same italics in the read-aloud, same iso-metric map bringing a more evocative vibe to the mapping sphere. And, well, more of the same of everything.

The complex is mostly a just an adventuring site, with a couple of off-hand remarks up front about integrating it like “the party is just passing by” or “several villagers have gone missing.” Nothing wrong with just an adventuring site, but, I think the adventure would be stronger to leave them out rather than just have a throw-away sentence. Or, perhaps, use the space of the throw-away’s to expand the “missing villagers” thing by just a few more sentences to add some depth to it. 

The map is is in the same great iso-metric format as the first entry, adding life to what would otherwise be a pretty plain “a couple of chambers with connecting twisty passages” map. There’s a water feature or two and good little vertical piece, complete with pulley and bucket to get to the top/bottom … always a fun time! It’s more simplistic than the first entry in the volume, which is one of the reasons why I compare this to the simple lair dungeons so common these days. Larger in number of rooms, but still as straight-forward as they tend to be … and I don’t necessarily mean linear. And … one room is missing a key on the map; a dreadful oversight of our erstwhile editor. 

Read-aloud is … well, I’m not actually sure it’s meant to be read-aloud. It’s in italics (and long. Boo!). It’s formatted like read-aloud. It reads like read-aloud. Well, mostly. Until you reach the entry that says, in the read-aloud, that there are d3 treasures in the room. Editing error? Or, is this meant to be some text for the DM to give them a brief overview of the room? That would explain the over-detail of the read-aloud, destroying the back and forth between the players and the DM … because then it wouldn’t be over-detail. But, counterpoint, the creatures are never mentioned, which would be be something you should put in the DM focused text. So, I stick by my initial assertion: it’s read-aloud. In italics. Too long. With DM text mixed in. And using boring words like large and small instead of more evocative ones. And, of course, the over-detail. “It is guarded by a golem called the Child” says the read-aloud. Which both over explaines (The Child) and tells instead of shows (golem.)

DM text is added to fuck and back. “These were painted eons past by the primitive peoples who lived in the region.” Which has fuck all to do with the adventure. “They leave this room unguarded.” You mean, like, the description says? Or the fact that there are no monsters in the room? No shit sherlock. Look, ok, that’s an over-reaction on my part. A child could squeeze in to a crack. Or, the text tells us, a dwarf, halfing, goblin or other small humanoid. SO … something child-sized, you’re saying? This is just the typical padding that I would expect in an adventure … expect in a not very focused and/or well edited and written one, I mean. 

Which is not to say its all bad. “A large black hole in the side of the mound, below which is a steep slope of scree. Strewn all over the slope and in a huge pile at the bottom are shattered fragments of pottery and clay dust.” There are little bits like that are not too bad. Large and huge are pretty boring, at least large is, but not bad. 

Oh! Oh! Another padding tirade! We do get a over abundance of DM text, a lot of it coming from padding and repetition. For example, a watchpost has the usual “dozing watchmen” in it, but we’re told this in three separate places:  lazy servant is posted here at all time, the details of the lazy servant mechanics to see the party/be dozing, and then “Since nobody ever approaches the mound duties are treated laxly.” … an explanation and/or justification of the encounter. This goes a long way to padding out what should otherwise be a shorter amount of DM text. But, hey, it reaches the required page count. This room, in particular, also exemplifies the house style … never really mentioning the servant, beyond those oblique references, until the end, noting “Creatures: one servant” at the end of the room description. 

Over and over again this shit happens. When we do get something good, like potters who can’t walk and shuffle about on their fists, it’s done in a way that they DONT shuffle about on their fists. And, ultimately, it’s just going in to a room and seeing a human servant or some humanoid golem. One or two of the golems are mechanically ot descriptivly interesting, but theres little enough to the variety or interactivity to make it interesting beyond this. 

I’d rate this far weaker than the Geist entry in the anthology.

This is $10 at DriveThru. Preview doesn’t work.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310243/Forbidden-Lands-Crypt-of-the-Mellified-Mage?1892600

By Fiona Geist
Free League Publishing
Forbidden Lands

This eighty page booklet has four adventures from four well known designers. I’m going to review this one differently, doing one review post per adventure, in an attempt to give their fair due, something that I think is missing in my previous anthology reviews.

It’s hard to review anthology adventures because you’re dealing with different authors with different strengths. On top of that, you have the publisher, who inevitably has their own house style guide. It’s hard, therefore, to attribute any aspect of an adventure. Was it the designer making the choice, or the publisher, or an editor, or a layout person? And thus we have this thing. A series of adventures that share some similarities that we’ll attribute not to the designers but to SOMEONE ELSE. For example, the house style guide says “Read aloud is in italics” so all of the read-aloud is in italics. Multiple sentences in italics in this one, making them hard to read. And a weird font on top of that, exacerbating the problem of quickly and easily absorbing the information. This, alone, makes me groan as I struggle with the read-aloud. Maps for the adventures are buried in some random location in the adventure, making referencing them during play difficult. I generally print them out for my screen, so not a huge deal, but it goes to show that shortcuts were made on the usability of the adventures at the table. An afterthought. We do get, however, a nice isometric view of each map that adds quite a bit to their nature, making them evocative and easy to read and bringing life to an aspect of an adventure that is generally just a simple drawing. Very nice

Crypt of the Mellified Mage (Geist)

Our first adventure is a 35 room dungeon, a tomb like thing themed to the “honey wizard” that is buried there. Bees and honey and wax, Oh My! It runs roughly eighteen pages, with two of them being a fine isometric map and a small amount of artwork. 

“The Honied Catacomb gestates beneath the earth like a pustule waiting to burst.” Is the first actual non-italic line of the adventure, and serves as a good summary of what’s to come: some decent ideas with perhaps a bit too much Try Hard with the verbiage. The alternative being what it is, I’ll take the Try Hard every time, but Geist walks a fine line here, getting things right a decent amount and dancing over the line in to inflated prose enough that I worry about my already poor eyesight. That balance, however, comes with time and practice and things are moving in the right direction with Geist.

The first age or two is background and summary and, frankly, one of the poorest sections of the adventure. A summary is a good thing for an adventure, telling us how things will go and how things work together. But in this instance is a worded mess. There’s a rough paragraph that is trying to describe a village on top of the dungeon that is a complete disaster, not being clear and something I missed entirely in the first reading. Abstracted to “insular and weird”, it provides no real benefit to the adventure. Nors does anything else in these two pages, except for a note that there are three entrances and the air inside thick with loamy and faintly spiced sweetness. This then is the gameable results of two pages of hard fought words, the rest being not coherent enough, in organization or sentence structure (and I thought I was paren happy!) to hack through.

The map is a great one through. Spread over two pages we get a kind of 3d view of the system. It really comes alive in this format. I can’t say it’s to the benefit of anything, mechanically, the way it is say in DL1, but It brings the place to life in a way that few maps do. Streams, same-level stairs, columns and alters, you get a great sense of the place. It’s a delight to see and has more variety than the usual old boring  tomb or temple map. 

Geist is a good designer and decent writer, and that shows up, in both ways, in the adventure. There is a general level of over-reveal in thread-aloud that works against the player-DM interactivity of slow discovery that should be a hallmark of adventures. A sample (italics) of a longer read-aloud says “A small idol of a bee made of expertly worked topaz and onyx sits atop a massive, papery bee- hive.”

This one line, pulled from a longer section, is indicative of the small issues that combine to less than stellar effect. We get the generic word “small”, with over reveals of detail in the read-aloud telling us it’s a bee, it’s expertly worked, what it’s made of , and the papery nature of the beehive. Ideally this would be a more general, but still evocative description of a gleaming point of something or some such on a beehive, leaving the details for the party to discover as they interact with the room. In other places we also get a kind of abstracted text in places, described conclusions and telling instead of showing, such as rooms “echoing dramatically.”

But, Geist knows their stuff. We get great bursts of imagery like a visiting “yokel armed with a handaxe and a disproportionate amount of self esteem.” That’s great imagery and you know immediately how to run the encounter. That sort of description is worth its weight in gold. I would hold that sentence up against any other ever written in adventures design as an example of writing looks like when its at its best. Short and punches WAY above its weight class. There is also a decent amount of interactivity that goes beyond the usual staid traps and tricks, like a throne that tilts backpack when you sit in it spilling the person in to deeper part of the dungeon God, I love the classics when they are well done!

If I was not full of ennui right now (My bottle of Chartreuse was $70. $70! Can you believe it?! Why, when I was a wee lad of 19 it was only $20.)I would pick the FUCK apart the text of this adventure. Like “6. Embalming Room. A room for the preparation and mummification of corpses.” Well no fucking shit, you told us twice. Plus, you don’t tell the fucking players its an embalmbing room, you DESCRIBE an embalmbing room. This thing needed a fucking editor. I see from the credit that the CEO of Free League edited it. Well, I see your problem right there. 

This thing is hard. The rooms are good. The writing has points where its REALLY good. I mean, fuck, a room stuffed FULL of beehives with the droning an bees? Fuck yeah man! But the house style, and shitty editing detract a great deal from it. Yeah, ok, so, I’d pick this over 90% of the adventures published. But I also wouldn’t look forward to running it, because of the layout/style issues. 

I can see parallels here to North Wind. 

This is $10 at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310243/Forbidden-Lands-Crypt-of-the-Mellified-Mage?1892600

By Scott Malthouse
Open Ended Games
Against The Darkmaster
Level 1

Silence has fallen over the town of Dawnfell. The enchanted ringing of Frostchime, the sacred bell that wards away the clan of wild trolls in the Biting Woods, has vanished. Now Dawnfell is open to vicious attacks – how long can it last?

This 32 page adventure details a quest in a forest to recover a magic bell … before the town is attacked. It has some interesting writing and formatting in places, although it’s missing a kind of continuity to bring the various parts of the adventure together. It doesn’t feel cohesive in any way shape or form. The eternal question: muddle through it or find something better? You know how I’m inclined to vote.

Open ended? Sandboxy? Toolkit to run a plot based adventure? I’m not sure how to label this. Perhaps it is closest to something like “How to run a plot in an OSR environment.” There’s a situation: a town, beset by failing crops, with a troll band nearby that likes to attack the village. Except they are kept at bay by the magic bell the town has. Also, some elves in the forest, who used to be allies of the town but the local Dude In Charge is on the outs with them because his kid died. Also, there’s a woman in town who killed the head troll the last time they attacked. ANd his son now leads the troll band and wants her dead to avenge dad. And there’s some human tubal people in the forest, allied with the elves. And there’s some bandits in the forest, the leader of which kind of feels sympathy for the Dude in Charge because he also lost a kid young. And then the bell goes missing. Oops! Looks like them trolls might a coming!

This is an example of the adventure doing things right. As a kind of open-ended thing, with an inciting event, it knows that you need a lot going on, and it certainly has a lot going on. It knows it needs to do this and it does it, and that’s a common theme for the designer. They manage a pretty competent job at most aspects of the adventure. NPC’s are all grouped together, usually a page for each with stat block and maybe some art, with some nicely bulleted items to help the DM find what they are looking for. It could have used a bit of bolding here and there to focus the attention, but it’s the right idea. Likewise the various locations are terse, but well, described. The starting village focuses on the the places important to the adventure/adventurers, and leaves the rest of the village to a few words like “People generally look malnourished and they whis- per of another bad winter on its way. Upon seeing the PCs, people’s spirits will lift and they will waste no time trying to befriend them, hoping they are here to save the day.” or “They will give them every last morsel on their plate to bring the bell back.” These are strong, strong images to help the DM run the village, communicating the vibe clearly. 

The encounters are fairly imaginative at times, or, at least, evocative. A  crystal blue italian spring … with a severed bring at the bottom … wearing a ring. With the giant spider Geldor in the trees above it. Sweet! Spiders with names are something from Tolkein that I CAN get behind. A nice abandoned woodcutters hut, well described and evocative without droning on. A riddle on a tomb wall noting that the dead elf queen lays in repose until the day death is removed … with a close examination of the sword she wears on her hip revealing that it’s pommel says ‘Death.’ Good stuff. The kind of stuff where the party only has themselves to blame, with classic situations and imagery. 

But. 

There’s not enough of that. And, it suffers GREATLY from a lack of cohesion.

There’s a farmer, the guy who took the bell and sold it to the trolls. But there’s no way to actually track things to him. The woods are just a big map with some numbers on it, with no paths, or tracks or anything. Like you took a blank sheet of paper and scattered the numbers one through six on it, with a scale. How are you supposed to know where to go, or even HOW to go? References are made to “prtrols” by various groups, off hand references, with no more words of advice given. The location in the forest, a few of them, have more detailed maps. But these are physically AND themely disconnected from each other, appearing in different parts of the book (this thing could use some cross references in a lot of places.) The wilderness description, the general overview, is more dynamic and situational while the location description is like “three elves sitting on a log.” COmpletely disconnected from each other. 

Finally, there’s a timer here. The trolls attack the town in two days. The party doesn’t know this. The party has no way of finding this out. The INTENT is for the party to travel in the forest and  make friends with the various groups, to bring them to the defense of the town. But, again, there’s no way for the party to know that they need to do this. The quest is just “go get the bell” not that the town is under imminent threat of attack. You’re on a secret timer, and you have a secret quest objective. Without any way of knowing the context of the citation, the party can’t make informed choices for their characters. Not Cool Man.

So, relatively good formatting, a decent is somewhat basic situation and decent formatting, with some GAPING holes that makes this one I would skip … as per the usual.

This is $9 at DriveThru. Taint no preview man! Not Groovy!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/357874/The-Silence-of-Dawnfell?1892600

By Francisco Duarte
The Keep Studios
DCC
Level 0

South of the famed city of Caster’s Crossing lies a jungle rife with dreadful perils and savage predators, known by the locals as Erset La Tari. Adventurers crave the bounty of treasure and powerful artifacts said to be lost in the depths of this treacherous place; many have lost their lives trying to uncover them. Now a band of conscripted prisoners are forced to best the horrors lurking in this dark place. Will they be able survive and perhaps unearth the prodigious power said to be hidden in the depths of the jungle deep?

This sixteen page adventure details twelve encounters in a jungle. Without much of a jungle vibe. Linear is what you get with a DCC adventure, with fighting and traps and an obstacle or two thrown in. The read-aloud and DM is terrible. Surprise. Not Interesting.

You’re the Last Hope, condemned prisoners sent on a mission and if you succeed you gain your freedom. That’s the last bit of interesting this adventure will have. You walk down a jungle path to the end, having you’re linear encounters, with the exception of a small clearing where you could also go right or left to have a single encounter each. I don’t know what I’m complaining about this; it’s what DCC is. It does get a bit tiresome though. Especially when it’s vanilla.

And vanilla is mostly is. Stray off the path and get eaten by a dog/tiger thing. Fight some snakes. How can giant cobra snakes be boring? Read on! Fight some things. Fight some more things. Jump over a sludge stream. Maybe go down to the bottom of a sinkhole. Can you tell my heart is not in this? It’s just … boring. De rigueur. 

The read-aloud is LONG. Long paragraph long. And in the hated italics. If I accomplish one thing before I die (I just did a few life expectancy calculators, I have 40-43 more years; I clearly need to drink more) it will be to drive the hated italics from read-aloud in adventures. I know, it’s my own windmill to battle. Ok, so, Long read-aloud to bore the players to death. It’s in italics so it’s hard to read. And it uses second person. I fucking hate second person read-aloud. It’s just garbage. “As you walk along the path it gets narrower …” Is it really that hard to say that “The path gets narrower?” is that really that fucking difficult? Do people not realize the issue with second person in read-aloud? Is it not the obvious fucking sin that I think it is? “As you gaze in to the muck of the stream.” No. NO! I do not gaze, at anything, EVAR! I want to fucking make it through the adventure and “Don’t gaze at things” is like rule number three for adventurers.” It does NOT create an immersive environment. It does the exact opposite and breaks immersion. 

The DM text is long. REALLY long. Like, at least a column if not three quarters of a page in most cases. And it’s just simple paragraphs, with no bolding or underlining r highlights or anything to help parse whats going. Oh, there is a “TLDR” section, which is a nice touch, but it’s not really meaningful to running the adventure. “The stream blocks the way and kills anyone who touches it.” Great! Where are the stream details? Buried somewhere in the following page of text.. *sigh*

How does it get this way? I think the first encounter has an entire long paragraph of text that tells of the ecology of the place, how the canyon was formed by the running stream. That has no impact on the adventure. It’s the Ecology of the Piercer, embedded in an adventure. It’s fucking padded out in the most annoying ways. “Although most local fauna will try to avoid the party, the Shardian Grass Cobras that flourish here are another matter entirely.” That sentence says nothing. “Should the characters decide to inspect the surround- ings they will notice two interesting elements, previously …” That entire clause has nothing to do. It’s just padding, obfuscating the meat of what’s to come. 

Ok, I lied, there is a bright point. When the party emerges from the jungle in to the clearing the read-aloud DOES tell them what they see in clearing, ahead, and off to the right and left. This is a good example of what I like to call The Vista Overlook. When you can see a decent distance that encounter should tell you something of what you can see, to lure the party off track and provide assistance to the DM for the inevitable party question of “What do we see?” 

There’s just nothing here. It should be a steaming jungle vibe, but that isn’t communicated at all, either in the read-aloud or the DM text. I now, evocative writing is hard. I know. I empathize. But a jungle adventure should FEEL like a jungle adventure, and not just walking down a long hallway killing a snake.  In the end, I’m using this as a textbook to pull examples from for my book on how to NOT write something. Not, let’s go see if I can lower my expectancy a bit more …

This is $7 at DriveThru.The preview is seven pages, the first seven. Fortunately, the last page of the preview shows two encounters. Note the padded out text. The first real encounter, with the snakes, is one of the more evocative in the text. I think the read-aloud ruins it, as does the second person, but hip-deep brown grass under a blazing sun has something going for it. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/204502/Sword-in-the-Jungle-Deep?1892600

Because it was on my Wishlist, that’s why. Yes, I’m still working through my Wishlist. Because STUPID, that’s why.

By Greg Saunders
Fire Ruby Designs
Warlock!
Beginners

The Vale is a wilderness on the fringes of the Kingdom where a number of factions,

from pilgrims to goblin clans, exist in an uneasy state of truce. Now someone has

shown up to claim a piece of its past, they’ll need adventurers to do it, and what they

will find risks upsetting the delicate balance.

This 76 digest page setting and adventure details a small valley, popular amongst pilgrims, with a lot of generalized hints of what could be going on and a brief ten page “heres something that could happen” adventure. It’s got a nice vibe, and the ideas of things that could be going on are good, but its far far too high level to be called an adventure and way too limited by the digest format to be a good setting.

It’s a valley. There’s a little town/village in it. There is a holy site nearby where pilgrims make their way to, and the people around here make some money off of them. There are goblin bands scattered about, really more like bands of humans bandits in the way they are handled. Protection rackets and opportunists. The town and locales around it have little quirks that make it feel alive and like a real place, and they all tend to be supplemented by a little tables of things that could be going on. Some Red Priests show up and want to go to the holy site for a pilgrimage. The locals are aghast at these heretics. Local priestess is looking for some compromise to keep the locals mollified and not hurt the pilgrim industry. That’s it. Or, “was that a man with the head of a fish that just disappeared into the water?” They are ideas, left open ended. And that’s ok, for something like this. I think they all could have been expanded upon just a bit more with some supporting information for each, to integrate better in to the valley, but, as a high level idea thing it’s fine. And there’s a sly little humor present throughout. One of the first tables is about weather. “Mud. Everywhere.” and “Snow, still snow. WIll it never end?” It does a good job of communicating a a great vibe with a few words. It reminds me a lot of the Dungeon Dozen in its ability to do that, and I don’t think there’s a higher compliment. 

Still, the digest format limits this greatly. As a supplement to run the valley it’s going to be very hard to find the information you’re looking for to add local color. This is going to have to be an almost memorization job for the potential DM. You’re going to need to keep almost everything in your head because there’s both enough local color, and its hard enough to reference in a seventy page digest, that’s its going to be hard to work in well otherwise. Digest, for these longer settings, just doesn’t work. You need more page space and better formatting than “a normal paragraph page style” … which this uses. I’m sure there are exceptions, but those are not the rule.

The adventure included is quite high level also. Frank wants you to go find some artifacts/ of his legendary dad (of the aforementioned holy site) for a ceremony. He sends you to some ruins. In the ruins are a goblin outlaw band, who will talk to you. They’ll let you in the crypt if you go kill the leader of another band, the main one in the area. That guy, if talked to, will send some of his dudes to drive off the first band … but only if you go poison the holy sites water with some laxatives, for the lols. The crypt you gain access to, one way or another, has one room. And the entire adventure is really not handled in a much more complex ay than I just put here. It’s VERY high level notes and not much more than that. As an introduction to the politics of the bands and the valley, supported by the rest of the book, it might be fine, but in terms of supporting the DM running the adventure … well, no. And, it’s full of padding like “With the threat of Izmirelda neutralized (by force, spider-handling, or Ardak’s own goblins), the player characters can get to the back chamber of the crypt, clearly meant for someone important.” That is both a long sentence and a completely empty one for adventure content, saying nothing useful.

I’m disappointed in this. While the various little tables and “hook/rumors” give the impression of a lot going on, there’s not really any support for the DM beyond this. It does a good job of setting up a potential situation, at a very high level, and I can truly see that this could be a great place to adventure and home base in. But the formatting just makes it unusable as a reference book for play and there’s just not enough TO those hooks to support the DM. The entire thing feels like specificity at the level of a hex crawl … which is good for a hex crawl and less good for a regional setting or actual adventure.

This is $14 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages and can give you an overview of the writing style, even if it the generalize background stuff. A few more mixed pages would have been better.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/331841/Warlock-Griffs-Vale?1892600

Still reviewing everything on my Wishlist. I should be done about the end of the next Long Count, where I will op all of my great scientists. In fact, I think have a couple of more of these Warlock! things on it … if I can find one by a different author I might try it.

By Christopher Letzelter
Anachronistes Press
OSRIC
Levels 4-7

PC’s get more than they bargained for when they undertake a quest to destroy a recently-captured tome of black magic. Standing in their way are an unforgiving desert, a cursed and ruined city, an ancient tomb, and a dried-up spring. Oh, and lots of unexpected foes and tricky situations, of course.

This 52 page adventure is a Real Deal lost city adventure, with over 350 rooms, primarily in two large multi-level dungeons. It is also, I think, nigh-unrunnable without devoting a couple of weeks, or months, of your life to it, illustrating just about every surface-level bad design decision possible. A major, major overhaul of this would turn it in to a classic of the genre.

The parties intro to this is much in the same format as G1; the armies of light have been going at it against the Evil Dudes and a group have returned with an evil artifact, a book that is indestructible. While everyone else is off waging war against the moat house and temple, the party is given the task of destroying the book, which the seers say can be done in a lost city out in the desert. 

A lost city with the tomb of an evil king (multi level dungeon) guarding by some good pilgrims, fending off incursions of an evil cult who are lairing in the palace of the evil wizard (multi-level dungeon) with some outbuildings to explore, an underground passage out StoneSky, and a couple of independent entities in the ruins, like a dragon and lamia … as well as the usual hangers on of vermin, undead, deserters and so on. The two major dungeons have over 150 rooms each, meaning we get about eight rooms per page … in an adventure that is pretty much, front to back, nothing but encounter keys with only a little front and back padding. It’s got some light Sumerian theming, which drew me to it in the first place. (Fun fact: in a con game, revealing you have a brand of Gilgamesh means you always get to play Gilgamesh!) 

In a world of mini-adventure and four-hour complete games, this is a complex adventure. This is more of an expedition, and a hard one at that, more akin to Gaxmoor or other products. You’re gonna need to bring everything with you and plan to stay for a few weeks, I suspect. Cause this place is FUCKING HARD. While the majority of the human factions are 1HD fighters (yeah! Great to see that!) there are a wide variety of 4 and 5hd monsters, numerous, along with hard traps and the like that are going to make multiple forays in to plays a necessity. And then, of course, the factions may hit you back while you camp. Or that dragon may come by for a snack. (Ok, dragonne, close enough.) Wanderers, while tending to be generic desert encounters, are checked twice a day and twice at night … which may give enough time for some recovery.  While I usually prefer my wanderers with a little more life in them, somehow the generic desert stuff like pit vipers, dust storms and nomads, seems to work well in this environment. I think it’s the slower/longer playstyle with established party camps that can lead to better emergent play opportunities. I understand shorter self-contained adventures are the norm these days, but this shows one of the strengths of a longer game … and, in contrast, what you need to do in a shorter game in order to help recreate that emergent vibe the longer ones help foster naturally.

This thing is a mess, from a layout and writing viewpoint.

Read-aloud can be a quarter of page long, and in italics, leading to both usability issues for the DM and “another droning room description” for the players. It can be sprinkled with overly dramatic language like “you feel tiny, helpless, and uneasy, as if someone or something is watching you.” … which commits the sin of telling instead of showing. Ideally you want to write a description that makes the players think they are tiny, helpless and uneasy, instead of telling them they are … and “you” is almost never appropriate in read-aloud because of this. It further dips in to simulationist territory with a lot of exact dimension and detail in the read-aloud, instead of leaving that for the party themselves to discover and thereby contributing to tearing down that key game element: the interactivity between players and DM as they explore and discover. “Two open portals beckon in the north edifice.” *eyeroll*

It engages in that favorite device of the hard adventure: gimping the players. No divination spells, creatures turn as two levels higher, and so on. The party has earned their abilities and they should be able to use them as such. Figure out another way or accept that for every divination spell cast to gain an edge there is a fireball not being cast. It also engages in something more natural. The heat causes issues for fighters in full armor. “This module will be that much more enjoyable for the players if you enforce these armor penalties.” Well … not in my experience. I get it. It’s trying for a naturalistic nerf and there’s a little simulationst thing going on here also. But, simulationism is only good in as much as it helps with the suspension of disbelief. And while I’m generally supportive of these more natural ways to nerf a party (the wizards tower is on top of a 1000’ high tree, fly if you can …) I don’t think I have ever seen heat or cold handled in an adventure in a way that is both not cumbersome and fun. It has always come across as punishment for playing the adventure. And in a level 4-7 adventure that is already quite hard? It just seems grueling, the party are no demi-god levels of powerful yet. Fuck, they might not even have fireball.

It does also engage in some other questionable design decisions, like a sepia snake sigil. Well done, there’s a cobra drawing on the wall so its not a throw away, I still raise my eyebrows at anything that seems like it’s trying to use the rules to create a in-game effect, rube goldberg style. (That’s a normal noun now, right? I mean, you don’t have to use it like a proper name? xerox VS Xerox?) And, of course, the required “you can’t open the door until you defeat the monster nonsense. I can think of one random monster encounter in the desert, with vultures, in which if you kill a vulture you are cursed. Just out of the blue. Step on a crack and break your mothers back. If you’re going to do this sort of thing then you need some hints or some way to telegraph it, or make it a conscious choice. LOTS of vultures around, you’re starving, and you know that they are sacred to Old Asshole the Very Active God of Punishing People Who Fuck With His Sacred Animals. Otherwise, this is just an arbitrary negative consequence … again, punished for playing the game.

DM text is long and confused as well. There’s a mix of in-line stats and stat blocks. While I’m not religious about either, I do find that the inline stats in this adventure just make things all the harder to scan. It could be the formatting selected and/or fonts and bolding, parens, etc. It seems to break over multiple lines, three or so, which causes you to lose what’s going on in the room. Then there’s the embedded history and backstory of the room. One room with gnolls, states “Their previous employers were more interested in building a temple stronghold and magical gain; this group is seeking a greater financial reward, and will fight heartily to keep the little bit they’ve plundered and stolen . One of the gnolls has just recently been grabbed and eaten by the inhab- itant of 12.” Well, ok, that adds nothing to the encounter at all. But that sort of thing does make digging through a simple gnoll encounter in to a pain in the ass to scan. And while treasure gets a good treatment, it tends to be ALL treasure that gets this. Even coins. Like CP and SP. “each gnoll has pouches or folds holding …” and “that is valued at …” and tons of other padding that does nothing for the comprehension of the adventure. Nothing positive that is. Ug, and we get LONG empty room descriptions. Simulationist again, above playability. “If anyone ventures past the entrance with a light they will see …” Uh huh. Just describe the fucking room man. This turns a nice and interesting little jaunt through the desert around the walls of the city, filled with sinkholes, in to a painful affair you have to fight through in order to run it. 

A disturbing number of encounters, the vast majority I’d say, do something like “they will have just spotted the characters” or they surprise the characters. Or they are waiting for the characters or something like that. And this leads to the bigger picture.

This place is too complex with no help for the DM to figure it out. There are NO summaries of what’s going oin in these place. Order of battle is mixed in to room descriptions tens of encounters away. “Frank will gather his friends in #21 if he hears sounds of battle in room 2 and will respond by …” ARRGGG!! This goes in room 2, or up front as a general reference! You can’t fucking run someonething like this. In these hundreds of rooms bases/lairs/dungeons, you need a summary of what’s going on, where things are, how things might go and so on. Given the amount of padding, figuring it out for yourself is going to take a hard core week with a highlight and a fresh notebook. 

And, frankly, I’m not going to fucking do that. I’m not going to buy an adventure and then burn an absurd amount of prep time in order to run it. Sure, big adventures DO need some prep time. But not this much man. I like the maps, clean and interesting. The adventuring environment is at least as interesting as most adventures and more so generally. But the usability and evocative writing here is just terrible. Yes, evocative writing is hard, I will give you that. 

Still, I’m so close to giving this No Regerts. A real deal lost city adventure, an expedition that feels titanic and varied. But fuck, it needs a COMPLETE overhaul in its writings and presentation. 

This is $9 at DriveThru. It’s sold in a weird way, with the encounters in one PDF and you have to buy a separate product to get the maps and wanderer tables, appendices, etc. SO you HAVE to have both of them to run this. And yet they are sold as two separate products. LAME! And, the preview doesn’t work. *sigh*

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/253075/The-Book-and-The-Spring–Encounters–Sourcebook?1892600

Blah blah blah blah reviewing everything on my wishlist as a pretext to not actually write the main book blah blah blah balh