Isle of the Angry Apes

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ken Spencer
Frog God Games
S&W
Levels 5-8

Wow, those apes are angry! […] Yet, as the months have passed the Sleeping Fire has corrupted the grey apes. No longer content to simply tend weedy gardens, they have taken to raiding shipping far and wide, taking loot for their own use, prisoners to work as slaves, and sacrifices for the Sleeping Fire. No longer castaway soldiers, they are becoming fiendish warriors and loyal servants of an evil flame that longs to awaken. Its heat burns in their veins and clouds their minds, and these piratical apes are so very angry.

This 28 page adventure describes an island with some ape pirates and a “dead” fire god. It clearly had ideas about what it wanted to be when it grew up, but they don’t mesh together, its not a good site-based location, the organization is poor, and it suffers from the Frog’s usual lack of anything resembling “care” when it comes to mistakes. 

So, island with a volcano on it. Barren landscape, scrub, rando lava/steam eruptions from all over the island. And a jungle. And it’s got intelligent apes on it. And they are pirates. And they use viking longships. And the volcano has a “dead” fire god in the temple in it and there’s a group of fire plane people hanging out there. Nice ideas. I can see where they are going.

But then comes the execution. Everything is just so … meh. “Ape City” has about five buildings, barracks and slave pens and the Home Of the Pirate King, essentially a six room hut that is described as “each room decorated with the best items taken from ships the apes have captured.” Well, colour me impressed! I can see now where all my advice on specificity and mapping has been in vain! There’s just nothing there, in spite of the description being a column long. Just stick in trivia, and explanations and call it a day! There’s no soul to this, or to any other area in the adventure. Just these abstractions of description.

And anything actually interesting id buried in what amounts to a wall of text. Paragraph after paragraph with backstory and explanations of the history of the island and the thing and why things are they way they are. The best example is probably The Beach. It has six or so longships all piled up on it. And each one get a decently long description if its backstory and who it belonged to and other trivia associated with it. But there’s no purpose to it. There’s also a slave hut and a guard hut, which at least provides some interactivity, and one ship has a couple of wraiths, but that’s it. It takes a page and a half to describe all of this nonsense … to no point. It’s just writing for the sake of writing. You know, writing in order to be read instead of writing in order to be used: Sin #1.

There’s this time travel thing that’s supposed to go on, with three different time periods. It’s mentioned twice in the DM notes in the beginning and then that’s it. No other details of guidance or inspiration at any point during the adventure. Why? Was it cut in editing? 

Speaking of … the Frogs do it again! Location after location is not shown on the DM’s map. Merman cave. Jungle. About a half dozen other locations. None of this shows on the map. The fucking island is only 3 miles across … maybe show it and/or provide an overview of what the island looks like/major locations and the like? No. Just slog through paragraph after paragraph. 

You’re level 5-8? Enjoy tha 5k treasure in the evil temple. And maybe another 5k from the pirate king. I don’t know, I guess that’s enough. It seems super low to me though, for level 8’s.

I guess, once upon a time, the Frogs put out good stuff? Now it just feels like someone is going through the motion. Be it the house style, or layout, or editing, or just bad wiring, the mistakes, the adventures just feel unusable. That’s the reputation that ALL adventures have: unusable. And they have that for a good reason. Example 1: this adventure. I’m not going to slog through the fucking walls of text in order dig for the info I want/need. I’m not going to try and make sense of what is supposed to be going on. I’m going to instead toss this in the junk heap and run something else that IS written well.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, which is a travesty for a $10 adventure. It shows you nothing of the writing. Your best bet is to dig in to the backstory on page two and let that be your guide as to what to expect in the adventure. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316395/Isle-of-the-Angry-Apes-SW?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 5 Comments

(5e/OSR) The Obsidian Keep

Posted on June 20, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Joseph Robert Lewis
Dungeon Age Adventures
OSR/5e
Levels 1-3

Last month, a fleet of holy warships sailed out to destroy the evil sorcerers of the Obsidian Keep. The fleet never returned. Today there is a call for righteous heroes (or brave treasure hunters) to find the fleet, rescue the sailors, recover lost treasures, and discover the fate of the cruel masters of the Obsidian Keep!

This 35 page adventure is good.

What, you want fucking more? Ug. Ok.

This 35 page adventure is REALLY good. 

Still not good enough? FINE!

Tremble! Tremble in the presence of Joseph Robert Lewis. You are not worthy! None of us are worthy. Fuck you Joseph Rober Lewis! Fuck you for writing this! Now, for the rest of our days we will all live in this shadow of this work. Now, every fucking adventure I review, every fucking adventure I ever pull out to run at a con has to be measured against this one. What kind of life is that? What terrible future lies ahead for us all, knowing that this exists? This fucking thing is CLEAN. Clean, and sharper than the sharpest scalpel. It’s as close to pick and run as you can get, I think. 

Good enough now?

Obsidian Keep, Evil Duke 7 Duchess live their and raid the sea lanes. Empire sends ships to destroy it. They don’t come back. Terrible storm. Now word from anyone. Now, it’s two weeks later. 

This has four separate sections: the harbor, the beach area, the grounds of the keep, and the keep proper. Let’s say that each one has about fifteen encounter locations. Each section has a little overview to start, easy to scan. Each section has i’s own full page map, easy to read. The layout is three-column, with good use of bolding, underlining, bullets, indents and whitespace. You can tell IMMEDIATELY that this is easy to use. I mean that. Glancing at it you’re like “well, this is obvious.”  The formatting here is SO good that it it appears simple. Trivial even. And yet … A general read-aloud overview, with sections underlined. The underlined wors lead you to bullets, with bolding. It’s all super easy to find the information you need and the writing is terse, easy to scan and easy to hold in your head. There are boxed offsets and … ?vertical lines? That serve to further organize text. It’s crazy how usable this is. Monster stats for that section are at the end of that section. Magic items appear in offset boxes and again at the end for ease of reference. Maps are clean, easy to read and reference (and generally non-linear, since only the keep is constrained by walls.)

The first three parts serve as a gateway to each other and to the keep proper. You see things. You hear things. You are slowly getting closer and closer to the thing in the distance: the Obsidian keep. Entrance to the Mythic Fucking Underworld indeed! Maybe it needs just a little mist (well, in the three outdoor areas) with things barely visible in it and sounds … but I’ll give that a pass. Cause its obvious you should do that.

You find survivors in the harbor, of the shipwrecks. They want rescued. You gonna do that? How bigs the rowboat *the designer tells you) You gonna take them back to your main ship, anchored in the distance? Gonna risk more wandering encounters for that? And the people on the beach, gonna do that also? Fucking wanderers are great. A sailor on flotsam, paddling toward you, calling for help, a shark fin circling him… desperate sailors. Creatures seen but disappearing again in the water. These are SUPER brief. One sentence. Sometimes two. But evocative as all fuck and each DOING SOMETHING. Building dread. Actionable situations. Lots and lots of things to talk to. Clues to other areas. Interesting situations. 

NPC’s are brief, just a few words, but memorable. 

The writing is clean, terse, and evocative. “A mass of tiny legs and tails wriggles on the surface, but makes no progress in any direction.” or A“n overturned hull rests above the waves on a rocky point. From a square hole in one side, a woman sits fishing.” or “Five harbor sharks thrash just below the surface. A few logs and a yellow jacket bob away. The frothing waves are red.” Terse. Packed up. Pretty good writing and descriptions. 

Magic items are well described in just a sentence or two and generally unique. “MARINER’S LANTERN The dim red glow from this magic lantern offers little light, but it clears away fog for 100 feet in all directions.” Yes, please!

My complaint, here, is that after all of the lead in the keep proper is short, with only about seven rooms, in a row. Very good rooms, but a bit anticlimactic after the journey to get there. This thing could support a sequel, concentrating and expanding on just the keep. 

Like all of The Best, I do a shitty job describing it and why it is The Best. Yeah, the keep could be better. Yeah, I can quibble with word choices and suggest even more in the way of evocative writing. But, come on man, it’s immediately obvious, from every aspect, that this is a good adventure. Not just Acceptable (9/10) but Good.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is sixteen pages and shows you some of everything. Perfect preview. And this thing is only $3? Jesus Christ, how much fucking money have I wasted in my life on adventures that were NOT this?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316699/The-Obsidian-Keep-A-Dungeon-Age-Adventure-5e-and-OSR-versions?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 11 Comments

Gatehouse on Cormac’s Crag

Posted on June 17, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Dave Bezio
Dave Bezio's Grey Area Games
S&W
Levels 1-3

The dilapidated keep on a windswept cliff has long been shunned by the local…so of course, that’s where you are headed!  Uncover secrets and explore the unknown as you attempt to rescue 3 helpless maidens.

This forty page adventure details a dungeon with seven levels and 135 rooms. A good attention to the basics keeps this from running away with itself. It does tend to the “plain” side of the house, though, in terms of writing.

First, do no harm. Is that were the mantra of adventure writers then we’d all be in much better shape as a hobbyist looking at products for our use. This adventure gets that right. It’s not stellar, but, it also doesn’t fuck up. And “Not A Fuck Up” is a pretty good place to be.

This adventure is doing everything at an … acceptable? Level. It has a small village with terse little descriptions that are littered with potentially interesting things and brief little snippets of NPC’s that a DM can take and run with. It’s got a rumor table and henchmen table, as well as some small wilderness wandering monster tables that embed a bit of detail. None of this is bad. None of this is overwritten. It not exactly forthcoming in providing detail that excites the DM, but its doing a great job of batting average, over and over and over again. In practice this looks like “The smith Bjorg is a crotchety loner who has noticed that the McDugals have been acting a bit funny since marrying the 3 old crones from outside the village.” We get a smith. He’s crotchety and a loner. His name is Bjorg. All of those are things the DM can work with. And then get a little bit of intrigue with the 3 old crones comment. This isn’t fuckign rocket science. Bezio knows that less is better than more and he uses the less to great effect, empowering these short little descriptions with what both the DM needs to run the NPC and to empower some action further on … and note it’s done by having the villagers have relationships with each other. One mentions the other.

The rooms are much the same. They tend to be very basic and just a little bit above minimalism. This isn’t the minimalism of the Vampire Queen or that of expanded minimalism but rather that of some of the beter adventures that use minimalism. Just like with the smith description, the rooms provide JUST a little more than minimal, and not in the “expanded minimalism” manner. It’s not droning on about some backstory. What there is is embedded in the room description much in the same way Gygax did in his better writing. The story builds as the adventure unfolds through the room descriptions.

And getting to that, there’s an interconnected nature to the rooms. While the levels have themes (kobolds, goblins, wizard, temple, etc) they also have a interconnected nature. Clues for one area in another. The map has a cross-section and several levels have multiple entrances/exits. You can bypass levels and there are hidden levels with good map detail. Some levels open up and others tend to only have ten or so rooms. You can get yourself in to trouble by going deeper and skipping levels. This is a part of what I mean by “design” when I use that term specifically as the seldom-mentioned fourth-pillar, alongside interactivity, evocative writing, and ease of use.

Speaking of evocative writing … well, this don’t do that. “A chipped statue of a maiden stands in one corner of this room (worthless.) Ok, so, it’s short and easy to scan. That’s good. But it’s not exactly making me excited about running the room. Ratlings play a game involving human teeth and a sharp stick. This gets to the better part of the description in the B2 Keep on the Borderlands, where orcs shoot dice. But the adventure is almost never rising beyond that. A storeroom with empty barrels and smashed crates. Book treasure. 3 tapestries (100gp each.)  These are all very basic details. 

Art is charming as are names for folk like Pepsy Tallfeller the halfling and Erikk the Crass the dwarf. There are good level overviews.

I can quibble with other details in this adventure. Creature reactions for a level are in their room rather than the (summary) overviews of the levels. Not ideal. A room or two has some background information first, prior to the meat of the room, increasing scanning time.

There is design here. That is good. But I don’t see myself excited to run this the way I am other adventures. The rooms don’t fill me with glee. This isn’t about rooms being exciting set pieces but rather the writing being such that I WANT to run the room, tha the description springs to mind and my brain takes over and runs with it, filling in the details. Others will no doubt disagree, but, in spire of the design present, I’m going to regret this. Stronger descriptions, without many more words, would easily bump this for me in to something of the Best. It’s 2020; we can do better than the best of the stuff stuff. (Although this blog seems to prove, day in and day out, that, no, most people can’t get even close to the best of the old quality.)

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. You get to see the village description, rumors, level overviews and wilderness wanderer tables. That’s a decent selection. It would have been better, though, to also include a page or so of dungeon descriptions. The title page/intro pages do little to add to the value of the preview but a few pages of dungeon rooms would. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/315159/Gatehouse-on-Cormacs-Crag?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, No Regerts, Reviews | 17 Comments

City of Solstice: Evil Streets Home Invasion

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Charles Rice
Apocalyptic Games
OSRIC Level 1

You patrol the streets of the Gentry Quarter, a once-prosperous neighborhood, now a ramshackle mess of tenements, crime, and homelessness. Last night a tenement housing the working poor was the site of a massacre. Was this some dark sacrifice by the Star Society, or the work of a deranged lunatic acting on deadly desires no sane man can comprehend? From your base on the Wary Cog you have been dispatched to investigate this brutal mass murder and bring the perpetrators to justice. You are members of the Vigilant, a thoroughly corrupted effigy of a once proud guild, charged with keeping order in a chaotic city of 100,000 souls. You are not adventurers. But you have a duty.

This fifteen page city adventure details fourteen-ish linear events where the party take the role of the city guard in a corrupt locale. Great concept, some good local color, but the linearity and railroad nature, along with game design issues, make me question the way delivery on the premise is attempted. Setting? Yes. Adventure? No. Warning: I LUV me some city adventures.

The setting is one in which the party represents the city watch, or a small part of it anyway. Everyone in power has been killed recently, the city is controlled by the underworld criminals, there’s an old inept figurehead in progress, and the guard is corrupt and relies on press gangs to enforce and bulk up numbers when they need them. Great fucking environment for a game. You’ve got a boss, to give you assignments, and who takes bribes and lets people you catch go. You’re assigned gear at the beginning, blood-stained leather armor with arrow foles in it, falling apart, etc. Perfect setting of the tone. Your fat,overweight, corrupt guard sergeant wades in the the crowd, at one point, swinging his sap to crack a few skulls. There’s police and then there’s little people, as the movie says. The adventure does a great job, over and over again, in re enforcing this kind of environment. Corruption. Moral decay? Or maybe endemic crime just under the barest of pretexts of control? I don’t know. The irony of this being released, right now, is not lost on me. It’s also interesting, I think, in that the party is put out there, with no enforced morality, and just have to engage. They could be corrupt or they could change the system, I guess. Or try anyway. That’s a good job. Hmmm, I said “setting” earlier. I’m not sure that’s the right word. There might be a seperate setting book, I don’t know. There’s not much setting in this so I can’t really say the setting is good. Maybe I mean “the tone is interesting.” You get just enough background and flavour to get you in to the tone of the adventure and setting, but there’s really not much background data at all on the city. Which is fine, I guess, even if there is a separate setting book … or even if there isn’t. The tone makes the entire thing easy to understand where to take things, even if there are not supporting resources for the DM.

NPC descriptions are good. Short. A burst of memorable description, one sentence of background and one or two of attitude/motivations. Easy to scan, sticky. Easy to run NPC’s. Exactly what is called for in an adventure. The IDEA for an adventure, a bronx slumlord killing his tenants and burning down buildings so he can rebuild and remodel and flip for profits, is a pretty classic one, as anyone aware of Bronx documentaries can attest. 

But the entire execution of this adventure is FUCKED.

It’s a scene based railroad with the party going from scene to scene and interacting with it before the next scene happens. There no investigation as much as their is being told where to go. For the first “clue” I’m fine with that. The boss/sergeant tells you, with his experience, who may be involved based on the MO. But when that happens repeatedly, it makes one question why the party is even involved at all. Why play the adventure if the choices are thus limited? A sandbox environment in a fleshed out neighborhood this is not. One sergeant clue? Good kick off. Multiple? Nope. 

And then there are scene transitions that make no sense. You’re in “dingy central park” one moment and in another you’re walking down a busy city street, with no idea of how the transition happened. It doesn’t make sense. There wasn’t a clue leading you to the next scene. Its just you’re in the street now. In the street scene some dudes release a monster to attack you, in the crowded city streets. And they run away. And there are chase rules. But, presumably, they get a ten minute head start as the party fights a 3HD giant lizard? The chase rules make no sense to me. I mean, the actual advice on running the chase are good, but it doesn’t seem like it would get there given the headstart the dudes get? I don’t know, maybe they hang around until the party kill their monster and THEN the chase starts? Scene transitions don’t make sense in this adventure.

I’m also not sure of the actual game mechanics. Low trease in a gold=xp game is rough. You do get double XP for capturing people, and are paid off for killing people and monsters. Both of these are nice ideas, in concept, but the overall issue of handling the GOLD=XP issue isn’t really address. Low money, low magic, I’m good with. But you then need to balance it, XP wise. There is one story reward, 200XP, maybe, but I’m not sure the balance is there.

So, good setting idea. Good adventure concept. Good NPC descriptions. Poorly executed with some raised eyebrows about the mechanics of the game system decisions. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Or level indication on the cover or in the description. Basic basic flaws, those are. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/314802/City-of-Solstice-Evil-Streets-Home-Invasion?1892600

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 9 Comments

(5e) 1-6 Skeletons in a Stable

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Steve Wright
Deus Ex Minima
5e
level 1

Why are there so many skeletons in this stable? What secret does the town chandler hide? Who is asking all these questions?

This eight page adventure uses four pages to describe a stable with some skeletons in it. What was I expecting? I was expecting more of what’s actually hinted in the marketing and the content … short & punchy. There’s not enough here. I know, Surprising, isn’t it?

How much of this site is performance art? Surprisingly little. What you get here are the expressions of my inner child. That’s someone who’s not generally let out in public unless I’m sleeping with you and it’s time for the seasonal 11pm Sunday night ennui. But, these feelings are honest. The hopeful,  high expectations. The crushing disappointment. Expectations are a terrible thing. You can’t have the highest highs without also feeling the lowest lows, can you? Generally it’s the case that I expect the best of what I’m reviewing, with very few exceptions. And because of that you get what you experience on this site: crushing despair when it’s nothing nearly matching those expectations. High standards? Nah, good sir, simply standards in a sea of product that has none! They only seem high when compared to the quantity of what doesn’t make the cut.

Which leads me to marketing. I’m a sucker for marketing. I’ll go for the weird thing on the menu, every time. With the extra tentacles. You’ve got a speciality cocktail menu? Yes, bring me one of each. Not every experience can be good, but every one can be magnificent. Like Mulder, I want to believe. “The booklet has everything you need to meet …” “Skellies included!” Great for a one shot, Setup, NPC’s, story hooks, maps, loot, all included! Help with NPC names! Ideas for future encounters!  Well, you know what Obi Wan says about a certain point of view? I guess they cut the scene where Luke screams profanity at Obi Wan for the deception. Do we accept a certain amount of puffery in marketing? Do we accept that we’re going to be lied to? How much is ok? Where’s the line? If it’s ok for the publishers to puff their marketing, then is it really any surprise when the non-jaded are upset by it? Life is a game baby. You get to puff, but you have to expect pushback. And then as a publisher you get to be mock outraged. You should probably check first, to ensure your neighbor is growing vegetables and not roses. Cause you don’t fuck trivially with the neighboring lord who grows roses.

Hook! That’s what it says! Hooks! “You heard something in town.” “You were sent by a patron to deal with it.” “You stumble out of the woods and need a rest.” Hmmm. I think we have misaligned expectations here. That is pretty much word for word what the “hooks” are. Three very generic idea, used a million zillion time before. The most basic and simple of things. 

“Hmmm, I can’t say the product contains complete sentences … let me see … Leverages the full power of the Unabridged dictionary to present exciting and dynamic hooks! … that’s it! That’s the ticket!” 

Ultimately, it’s a stable with some skeletons in it. The tactics, puffed up in the marketing, are that they relentlessly attack anyone who enters the stable. “They have no particular tactics”, we’re told. Well, I feel cheated. There’s a house, next to the stable, expensive looking, Unbroken windows. You can’t break in to it though, you’re prevented from doing so by magic. 

And this is all too bad, because other parts of the adventure are quite intriguing, at least in as much as revealing what might have been. The wanderer table is a good one, terse, with giant snakes dropping on the last person, bugbears holding people up, and bandits lost in the woods. The two chandlers in town hate each other, one paying to cover up things his dad did, another paying to find out what the other guys dad did, and the innkeep buying info to keep those two from each others throats. And it takes about as many words to describe it as I used here. Terse.

So, there’s nothing here, but there are hints of what could have been, Instead of four pages of content the adventure could have had eight pages. The stable, tactics imagination and and encounter depth could have been greater. The hooks could have involved the town. The town could have been given six paragraphs instead of three, to expand the rivalry/triangle a bit more. 

But that’s not what we got. Insead we got puffery and a note that this adventure requires the addition of a DM to bring it to life. 

That’s not an excuse.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. There is no preview, but, as PWYW, I guess it’s free.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/310491/16-Skeletons-in-a-Stable?term=skeletons+in+a+?1892600

Posted in 5e, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 19 Comments

B2.1: Game of Kobolds

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Gagmen RPG Podcast
B/X, etc
Levels 1-3

Sometimes you run across something interesting. Note that I didn’t say “good.” 

This 42 page adventure supplement describes a stronger faction play element for adventure B2: Keep on the Borderlands. Concentrating mostly on the factions, their NPC’s, goals and motivations, you really do get a Game of Thrones type of sentiment coming out of it. It’s also pretty one-sided, being mostly NPC’s and goals, and lacks the guidance or DM aides needed to actually use this effectively without a substantial amount of work. It’s not bad. It’s just a first draft quality.

Some podcast I don’t listen to asked some other podcast I don’t listen to how they could make their D&D game more like Game of Thrones.The podcast said they didn’t know, but that the podcast should go off and do it themselves. And, in a surprise move, they did! And they used B2: Keep on the Borderlands, with it’s many factions, as the foundation. I thought this “adventure”, or “supplement” was interesting enough, at least in concept, to cover it even though it’s not a traditional adventure. Which means I’m on dangerous territory. But, being adjacent to adventures, as supplement material, I’m hoping  I’ll be ok. 

The meat of the product is roughly thirty of its 42 pages describing NPC’s and their goals and motivations. Roughly, each of the Cave lairs gets about three NPC’s, the wilderness sites get an NPC or two each, and the town gets six or so. These NPC descriptions can take up a column to most of a page, each. You get a some little background on the NPC, their goals, and then a “Hamartia”, what their motivational aspect is. Hatred, Love, Pride, etc, and how it relates to them. Which you can pretty much tell from the backstory/recent history anyway. Essentially, as that NPC interacts with the party they will do so with a bend towards their Hamartia. Frank loves Mary, as he interacts with the party there will be some twinge of Frank trying to achieve his goal of loving Mary. It’s generally not that simple, and has a bit more nuance, but doesn’t drone on either. It’s nice. And NPC’s motivations and goals are almost always related to other people, even in other tribes. Thus you get this tangled web of NPC interactions in the Caves and Keep, with each site having at least three NPC’s (with Minotaur, Ogre, and Owlbear exceptions, of course) and those NPC’s all having things things they want to accomplish, and they each having some relationship to someone else either in their tribe or in another faction. It’s a pretty deep amount of faction play.

The Kobold king, on The Briar Throne, leads all the tribes. They are opposed by the lizardmen in the swamps, led secretly by an undead Kobold “god” … daughter of the old king the new king killed. That’s already pretty good. They have traded, in the past, with the Keep, providing Spider Silk Steel, a unique and special steel. But the lizardmen raids have stopped the flow of the spice … err, spider steel. Various humanoids in the caves support the new king, don’t support him, have their own shit going on. And the same for the keep, and the wilderness bandits and lizardmen. Fucking thing is complex as all fuck! And brilliant! Really really nice job on the faction play and the motivations. It’s all extremely interesting, and I’m not being hyperbolic. From the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern gate guards to just about every other NPC, they make sense and, most of all, are PLAY ORIENTED.

There’s some decent advice on techniques on how to get the party to not just go in hacking (like: consider everyone in the caves speaks common)  and a short “sample timeline/plot” to give the DM some guidance on how things might go. The party arrives with a writ from THE KING to investigate the lack of spider steel shipments. Gonna pull rank on the keep lord? Got an army to back you up? He does. So maybe you don’t go in all obvious pulling rank …  really really nice initial setup, provoking the paranoia of these situations from the very start and supporting it well. Who CAN you trust no to just outright kill you … in the fucking keep?

It’s also got some pretty big gaps. The NPC’s really need more cross-references. Instead of “Ack-Ack” it needs to be “Ack-Ack(o43)” to show he’s an orc and on page 43. Those NPC descriptions also, as great as they are, need to be tightened or formatted quite a bit to make motivations, goals, and backstory information for readily apart from each other to ease the running during play. A nice summary sheet, with the same, and maybe even a mind fucking map would be a good help also. The factions and their relationships are key to being successful with this, and it really needs help in this area. Right now it’s just a text dump and that’s just not manageable. Having said that … a few more NPC’s in the keep would be nice also, or, rather, in the style of this adventure, expanding on the NPC’s already there. 

Finally, I think the thing has a flaw. It’ needs a timeline for goals and some way to manage combat effectively. Right now the timeline is not really present, for the caves people, and it’s not clear how to handle combat, when it breaks out, alongside the political side. Single killings, etc, how are they reacted to and handled … WITHOUT LOOSING THE POLITICAL GAME?  This is presenting a different sort of a game and it needs more guidance on how to handle the situations that come up in the situations likely to happen in that style … especially when mixed with traditional D&D. 

Still, all in all, a great draft of the faction play elements and rich NPC’s pretty tightly focused on actual play. It just needs more to be able to shine through the difficulties of running it. It needs to be more than just the NPC’s and some lite advice.

This is free. I think. The fucking download link is a major pain to find. And the podcast link is currently broken. Joy. Here’s a scribd link or google “game of kobolds”. Scribd can sometimes be a little sketchy. If I find out its infringing I’ll yank the link.

https://www.scribd.com/document/317183033/Game-of-Kobolds
Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 7 Comments

The Tombs of the Whispering Worms

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Bryce Lynch

By Mark Chance

Self Published

S&W

Level 1

This seven page adventure describes a fifteen room dungeon with zones connected by chokepoint passages. Evocative read-aloud and generally short DM text is augmented by some decent interactivity. This deserves to be larger than it is.

There’s no backstory or anything for this, it’s just a hole in the ground, a cave mouth for the DM to use. Which is fine, and better than including some shitty toss off of a caravan guard/asked to look in to it by your patron hook. If you’re going to include a hook and/or backstory then it needs to contribute, meaningfully. I mean, I guess, no harm no foul if I can just scribble over it with a big black magic marker and it has no impact on the adventure. Other than pointing out to everyone that you’ve made no effort. Hmmm, is it somewhat telling that, even in an adventure that does things right, I still find a way to complain about something that the adventure DOES right? I mean, there’s no low-effort hook! That’s great! Now, let me bitch about low-effort hooks …

The map here, but Matthew Lowes, is relatively interesting. More so than the usual dungeon maps. It’s a combination of caves and dungeons. There are maybe three or four zones, or little room complexes, with each one connected to the last by some kind of chokepoint. Not exactly amazing, but for fifteen rooms, taking up about a quarter of one page, I’d say it’s a pretty decent map effort. The map also has a decent number of terrain features. Flowstone stairs, sinkholes, terraces/shelves, corridors running under others, same level stairs. It’s like someone was paying attention in “interesting map school.” It’s refreshing to see. The details ALMOST get lost to me, being a quarter page map, but are still easy enough to see. So, I guess, right size? I could do with it just a little bit larger though, for super ease of use. It looks like Matthew drew the map and then Mark found it, didn’t tell Luke & John, Mary, or Ignatius, and created an adventure for it. 

And a pretty good adventure it is, especially for an existing map. The content matches the map pretty well. The adventure “fits” the map in way that few adventures do, even those that have custom maps for them.

The writing here is decent. The descriptions are evocative. It does that thing, that I think is the easiest barrier to entry, in using short punchy statements and not fucking around with full sentences. The entrance cave is “Rough walls of rock. Evidence of past fires seen in the black smudges of soot on the ceiling and the shallow depressions full of burnt sticks and ash. Rubbish, small bones, a musty scent.” It’s in italics, but isn’t TOO long. Still, some shading or some other offset method would have been better, for legibility purposes. It’s formatted (italics) like it’s read-aloud but it’s one of the few examples of read-aloud that I think the COULD actually be scanned by the DM and paraphrased. This sort of “less is more” theory of evocative room descriptions allows the imagination to wander. It doesn’t fuck around with filler words. It’s just a needle to the neocortex. Again, I think this is probably the easiest way for a new designer to write a good description. Is it THE BEST way? Who knows, but it’s not a BAD way, at least when you are actually trying. ROUGH walls, SMUDGES of SOOT SHALLOW depressions. It’s not digging in to the High Gygaxian Unabridged Dictionary territory, but it is trying to use actually descriptive adjectives and adverbs instead of the boring same old same old shit that does nothing to inspire.

DM text is also short. Usually. Room two has a sinkhole. The DM text tells us “The sinkhole is about five feet deep, about half of that being full of water. The water is cool and relatively fresh.

Nothing valuable or dangerous is found in this area.” Now, i could do without the “nothing if value” line; there’s is very seldom a need to tell the DM that something does NOT exist. There is NOT a bag olf gold outside of window. I don’t need to tell you that though, since you wouldn’t expect that to be the case. Still, through, the good DM text covers what the DM needs to know and it does it in a short manner. 

Interactivity is pretty decent for a fifteen room dungeon. Things happen when blood is spilled in some rooms. Cool things. There are stone sarcophagi to break in to. Braziers to fuck with, and get fucked with by. The elevation things in the various rooms also help with interactivity, providing obstacles for the characters to navigate. It’s not just combat. It’s a bit short for NPC/talky-talky stuff, but there is at least one person inside that MIGHT talk to you, before the Drow fucks you up. I’ll take it, in a fifteen room dungeon.

Treasure seems a bit light for a GOLD=XP. The magic items loots are book items, but it does include miscellaneous magic items quite a bit, which is decent option to mix things up as opposed to the usually floor od +1 swords and shields. These sorts of non-mechanical items, which tend to dominate the Misc category, allow for so much more free-form play and possibilities than the simple mechanical buffs. If you gotta go book then lean heavy on the Misc table, which is a thought I had not had before. I’m gonna add this to my notes and hopefully bitch about it in many reviews in the future … and we have this adventure to thank for that.

It is in single column format and I wish it were not. It’s using little offset boxes for dungeon notes, which is a good thing, but I tend to find long single-colum text harder to follow. The eye has to travel farther. I know, it sounds like bullshit, but, just like with the italics stuff there is research to support this two column, and three, is much easier to read. 

A few of the rooms do get a bit heavy with the DM text. A few sub-headings, in bold would have helped in these rooms, to better organize the thoughts and help the DM know where to scan/look. There’s also a weird-ass table. There’s a room with a monster in it but you roll on a little offset table to see what the monster is. I mean, it’s not BAD, I guess, but nothing like this can ever reach its full potential. For an adventure like this, that has no meaningful procedural element, to include one is weird. Just pick one, Mr Designer, and do the best job you can with it.

Overall, though, I was left with a strange feeling. A feeling of … wanting to see more of both the mapmaker and the designer. The small size/low room count here means there’s only so much that can be done with the design. It’s not BAD, in fact I think it does a good job with it, but a larger space, with more room to breathe, would be interesting to see these two tackle.

Fuck. I had something else to say but forgot it. And … I’m back to writing a two page review. Nice. On a seven page dungeon. That’s free. And decent. Oh, I remember now! The last room! It;s a BIG spiral stair down the outside of a huge well-like pit. Fuck. Yeah. That turns this entire adventure in to a “front door” for the Mythic Underworld of your choice. Nice. That’s right. I’m giving this The Best. Fuuuuuuuucccckkkkkkkkk You, gentle re

This is free at Matthews blog:

The Tombs of the Whispering Worms

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 14 Comments

A Single, Small Cut

Posted on June 6, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael Curtis
LotFP
LotFP
Level 3

“Human greed meeting weird horror with a quite messy outcome.”

This is one encounter padded out to eleven pages. You can’t write something good when it’s padded out like that. 

Some dudes have cloudkilled everyone in a small church and stuffed their bodies in the crypt below. Fake priest is upstairs while some dudes loot the crypts. Party wanders in. Priest ambushes them with four extra dudes in the choir loft. Then a monster bursts out of the crypt stairs, having killed the dudes below. 

That’s your eleven pages. 

It’s like one of those Dungeon Magazine Side Trek adventures. Except this one is eleven pages long.

Yess, Killface, we can never go back to Arizona. 

Why even try anymore?

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is two pages, the title page and the FIRST page of background. You get to see nothing of the adventure. It’s got 23 reviews and four stars. Whatever.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/129613/A-Single-Small-Cut?1892600

Hey, you like seeing this shit? Neither do I. There’s a Patreon link to support me. I wouldn’t use it, but, hey, whatever you want.

https://www.patreon.com/join/tenfootpole?

Posted in Do Not Buy Ever, Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews | 16 Comments

The Lair of the Lamb

Posted on June 3, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Arnold Kemp
Goblin Punch
GLOG
Level 0

This 54 page adventure is both an introduction to the GLOG rules as well as a zero level funnel with two levels and about fifty-ish rooms. It’s quite interactive and does a good job with creature and item descriptions, less so with evocative room descriptions. They are easy to use and scan, after a fashion. I’d pick this to run over a lot of other adventures.

The intro pages to this, the first fifteen or so pages, are used to describe the basic GLOG rules. It’s clearly B/X derived, with lower stats and a few other things borrowed from other systems. More important;y to it’s B/X heritage is the philosophy of adventure. There’s a nice little section, one for the DM and one for the players, which serves as a pretty good overview of the B/X mindset. Rulings, not rules, run away, use cunning, don’t fight fair, etc. Good enough that you could use both the DM and the player sections as handouts to give a great overview of how the game is played, philosophically. So, basic understanding of D&D? Check!

The maps have a couple of loops in them, good since there are enemies to avoid, including the titular “Lamb.” The lamb resembles a gigantic hairless obese cow. It’s head resembles a bloody horse skull with sunken eyes and a black tongue. It drags its belly as it walks. When wounded or scared it calls out “Father! Father!” in increasingly loud tones. That’s a mother fucking monster description right there! It is going to SCARE THE LIVING SHIT out of the players, which is what monsters should do. Further, the description inspires the DM. It places a nugget of flavour directly in to the central cortex. How can you NOT be excited about running something like that? My mind LEAPS to the possibilities of how to use it … which is exactly what a good description should do. Oh, and if not utterly destroyed then three little lambs wait until it’s quiet and then chew their way out of otis belly. Bad. Ass. Father Bastoval shows up in the dungeon a couple of hours after the Lamb is killed, looking for the killers. If he kills a PC he gains a level and then the DM is instructed to forever more introduce him further as “Bastoval, Slayer of X”. Goovy!

There are a handful of ghouls in the dungeon, which may talk, cooperate, or actually help the party, if the party help them. Japer – Theater & politics. Lutz – Cooking, butchery, & lewd jokes. And so they go. Just a short personality each. This is SPOT ON. No paragraphs and paragraphs of backstory. Just what you need to run the adventure. Short. Sweet. Evocative. Something y ou can work with. As 0’s, you’re trapped in the dungeon, escaped sacrifices to the lamb, and you can free your other three PC’s. There’s a hole in the walls that leads to the city, fist-sized, and a dude on the other side who will extort you and buy things to you, to pass in to you. Again, short & sweet personality and directly to the point of enabling adventure. The adventure does this over and over and over again. Direct, short, quick hits that provide meaningful play opportunities.

Interactivity is HIGH. Just about every room has something to play with, use, reuse or something. Things to collect. Classic statue puzzles. Pools of water. Creatures and NPC’s to talk to and bargain with. There are some giant rolly polly bugs at one point. You can use them to bowl a specific obstacle over that will fuck you up otherwise. Rooms are linked with info in one room related to another room, and you can return to rooms a few times. Cross-references to this are almost always present, allowing the DM to quickly reference what they need. The room text says things like “You can smell vinegar coming from the west” and “you can see faint light from the east”, handling the dungeon environment well. Characters motivations are present. Beyond getting out, you need to find supplies, including water … water which is most notable present in a pool .. that the Lamb hangs out in. You start with a -4, due to dehydration, so you’re motivated to Wacky Scheme the Lamb to get that water … it’s good. 

Room descriptions are easy to use. Good use of Bolding, highlighting, boxed offset, bullet points and whitespace to separate and draw attention to various subject headings. The longest/most complex rooms may be about 3/4 of a column but they are quite easy to scan thanks to the format.

What I am not overly enamored with are the actual evocative nature of the room descriptions. Unlike the creatures the rooms are more than a little fact based. “A stone trough half-full of vinegar. Investigating the reeking liquid reveals an empty wine bottle. Another stone trough that stinks of stale milk. It is empty.” From a usability standpoint this is great. From an ITEM description it is pretty good. From a holistic room standpoint, not so much. It is describing the objects rather than the room. This gives me the impression that only the objects matter (and, to be fair, they do from an interactivity standpoint) but it gives the impression that the immersion, the room proper, is not so important.One sentence, at the beginning of each room, describing the room proper, would have sufficed and I think developed the entire thing much better.

Still, great adventure. Loads of magnificent individual elements. I’d run it. 

This is free at the Goblin Punch blog. 

http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/04/lair-of-lamb-final.html

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 9 Comments

Caverns of Slime

Posted on June 1, 2020 by Bryce Lynch 
By Alex Schroeder
Self Published
OSR
High Levels

Level 13 of the Fight On! Megadungeon.

This 35 page single-column “adventure” describes a cavern. Full of slime. Kind of? It has fourteen of so large areas, each with a situation going on. 

Lomax: Can you describe its form?

Lena: No

Lomax: Was it carbon based?

Lena: I don’t know.

Lomax: Did it communicate with you?

Lena: It reacted to me.

Lomax: You really have no idea what it was?

You and me both lady. You and me both.

The orc tribe in this rides around on flying sharks. No, it’s not gonzo. Stay with me.

The caverns of slime is really one BIG cavern, with the River Styx flowing around it in a circle. There are some sub-areas hanging off of it. There are no maps, per se, except for the one large area map showing the various major locations and their relation to each other. Weirdly, that kind of works. 

It’s also not as slime heavy as you might think, given the title. Or maybe it is? Anyway, there are slimes down here. The orcs throw bottles of it. There’s an ooze lord. But there’s also more of a toilet/sewage theme, so you get both the literal slime and the figurative slime. Nicely done! 

But those are just rando facts. The major thing to be aware of with this adventure is that it’s really a list of ideas that the DM needs to work in to a whole, more so than other adventures. This is, I think, somewhat related to Alex’s philosophy of how to make high level adventures work. It IS an adventure, I think. Maybe it is ACTUALLY a high level adventure? I mean, one that actually works? And this is what you have to do to do that? 

Anyway, you get a list of locations. Each location gets a short little description, a few sentences, and then some themes for that location to emphasize while the DM is making up places and describing things. Then there’s a list of things that can happen. Encounters. Maybe six to  location, with some locations having more like “pre-revolution” and “post-revolution.” A description of who lives there and their goals. Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to be used by you. There might be some supporting information, like, “Here’s a list of demon names to get you started if you need some for rando demons in this location.” And then it’s on the next place.

What you do NOT get is a keyed encounter map. Or descriptions of travel times. Or anything like that. This is all for the DM to make up, riffing off of the information in the adventure and what the party does. Situations.

And situations there are! You need to navigate down some falls, stuffed full of fungus, and an exiled fungus lord. There’s a city full of spiders. Civilized. But Hungry. They have “barbarian” spiders outside of the city. It’s likely that the city will attacked by an army of ghouls. Who you gonna help? Anyone? It’s good to have friends …

There’s the orcs riding flying sharks. I swear to you it fits. It’s not just stuffed full of gonzo shit. If you can accept a city of intelligent spiders then can you accept a ghoul army? And orcs on flying sharks? There are ships plying the River Styx. There’s a trapped ooze lord. A dam, that you need to destroy, probably, to get out of the level. Refugees that fell down toilets and ended up here. A beholder wizard. A mind flayer on a spaceship. Things, obviously, related to other levels. Drugs to do, rituals to learn. A prison of DIs, full of demons and people in cages, and LOTS of them are willing to trade things with you … for a price. 

The areas are evocative. The scenes and encounters imaginative. You can, possibly, take and/or trade with a LOT of the people down here. This is an adventure of making allies and getting what you want. 

It’s also riding the line as to what an adventure IS. I’m going to give it a bit of a pass here, in that regard, but also mention two things. First, logically, there’s probably a tonal shift in this area. That can’t be helped, I think, in a collaborative project like The Darkness Beath. I’m thinking specifically of the fungus lord and spider city, and maybe other areas, before the party learn they are trapped and/or REALLY need to make allies. Maybe that’s ok, though, since they are high level. I might have made a note in the first or second area, though, to hint out what was going on to get them going in that direction. Second, The format, being non-traditional, I think could deserve a few words on philosophy/how to run it. This may be how Alex runs things, and I’m sure there are others that can wing it, but a few words on that would help, I think, train a new generation on how to run it this way. Which, hopefully, leads to more adventures of this type. IE: high level that don’t immediately SUCK ASS because they are just emulating level 1 dungeons except with more HD for the monsters. 

This is free at Alex’s website. I would encourage you, therefore, to go download it and take a look at it. The first few areas, anyway. Then maybe ready the design notes I’m going to link to. As an example of how to write a high level adventure I think it has some interesting things to say, with examples presented in the Caverns of Slime. You could, salso, mine the fuck out of this and create about a hundred adventures from whats withing it, if you expanded on them in a “traditional” manner, stealing ideas and riffing off of them. 

https://alexschroeder.ch/pdfs/Caverns%20of%20Slime.pdf

And, a philosophy/design notes post:

https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2012-02-09_How_To_Write_A_Module

Posted in Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Review, Reviews, The Best | 6 Comments