tenfootpole.org

By Darren Brockes
Agony Song Games
Labyringth Lord Games/5e/Mork Borg/Trophy Gold
No Level. Recommend a fucking level Darren!

The mausoleum — called the Saints’ House — sits far out from a fort in low hills. Generally people avoid it; it is not a place of worship and no one mourns the saints who have passed, given death is necessary for the status of sainthood. However, that does not stop the rumors swirling in the fort: those men and women who do pilgrimage to the mausoleum return with healed wounds and hearts; blessed bones are found just inside, sold for a fortune; a priest wandering the halls who casts out the ruin from a weary traveler’s soul. All adventurers have pasts in need of atonement, whether for something small or large. As all who follow the saints know, the blood of a martyr is the only true forgiveness in this world. And you have decided to set foot in that mausoleum to seek it. Here is all you know: a true confession of what you seek atonement for, aloud, is the only way in. You will know when and where.

It’s four fucking pages, only two of which are real, for $4, with no preview and uses fancy fucking hard to read fonts. What the fuck doYOU think my summary of it should be?

Welcome to Train Wreck Tuesdays, written on a Sunday and published who the fucks knows when. Wednesday, maybe? Who knows, time no longer has meaning. In this occasional allerative series we find out just how fucking much of a hypocrite I am by examining works we would not otherwise. Besides, pickings are slim and I’m REALLY not in reviewing 100 page adventures right now, it would cut in to my Staring at the Sea Staring at the Sand time. 

Bam! Here come ol flat top, cruising up slowly. Nice weirdo ruined cover, lets buy it! And then we look down to see $3! Great! And then we see it’s only four pages! Ought oh! Utopian hypocrisy time! Small things can be good. Well, I want to believe that small things can be good. And money? Bah! We’re in a post-consumerist society. It’s $3. If $4 is meaningful to you then you’ve got troubles. 

The real reason, of course, is that we’re afraid. Because the price isn’t actually $3. The price is $100. And how can this be? I want to believe, and have said, that quality is worth paying for. Let’s say someone publishes a REALLY good 20 page adventure and prices it at, I don’t know, $50. “Woah!” We’d all look at that weird. But why? I mean, the price isn’t THAT unreasonable, is it? I mean, compared to going out to a first-run movie? And if you knew you’d get 3-4 sessions out of it and that it was good? But, of course, that’s not the case. A) It won’t be good. B) It won’t be 3-4 sessions. If I knew it was high quality and I could get multiple sessions out of it I would absolutely pay $50 for something. But, I mean, it’s not going to be good. Probably. But a boy can dream can’t he? Quality should be the determining factor for price, with a little bit of how many sessions thrown in. But designers all think they write like the demiurge and they all write like cold stinking shit. Well, not all, but it’s close enough to the truth to say its true. No one knows what they are doing.

And thus no, we are in a situation where you just EXPECT that whatever you buy is going to be crap. Isn’t that a great feeling? Knowing that you are burning your cash? And thus, if you buy, say, ten adventures at ten dollars each you might get one good one; spending $100 and becoming substantially more jaded in the process. What a world! What a world!

And thus we arrive, finally, at this adventure. It has no preview, so you can’t tell what you are buying before you are suckered out of your cash, once again. FOUR PAGES! That’s about how long Craigs adventures are, so it’s possible. But then you find out two of the pages are monster summary sheets. Exact copies of each other, one in white on black and one in black on white. Wow. What style. What grace. Avant Garde TO THE MAX. So, now we’re down to two pages. I nte that Agony Song has another adventure that is $3 .. and is only two pages, so this seems to be their schtick. Whatever.

Ah, but then, the summary sheets are hard to read. Because they’ve used some bullshit artsy fucking font. I don’t know, that planescape font, maybe? Wth the “plus” circles and so on? It’s hard to fucking read. You know what you should not be doing as a designer? MAKING THE FUCKING DM’S LIFE HARDER! It’s supposed to be a play aid. All of the bullshit Plancescape font? All of the fancy cursive fonts on the two pages? AITS FUCKING CRAP! I’m not going to struggle to ead your fucking cursive text. And I REALLY don’t like struggling to read plancescape/whatever fonts. Jesus Christ, when did “legability” become a hurdle? I get it. Oooo, I’m artsy!” Fine. There are better fucking ways to accomplish this that don’t make my life as a DM trying to read the fucking text harder.  Hang on, I’m going to link in a section of text. That section makes up about one sixth of the actual adventure, with another sxth being artwork. We’re now down to 1 and ? pages of text for the adventure, 

The adventure, proper, is five rooms. Hmmm, not bad. I’ve seen fewer rooms in twenty page adventures. I’m … intrigued. Hmmm, monster descriptions are … ok? “The Unwashed: They are most noticeable when they pass in front of a beam of light from the entryway; rags moving as if underwater; covered faces; barely perceptible moaning.” Ok, I get it. Not the best imagery, but the designers heart is in the right place and trying to do the right thing. And then there’s a section on their habits: “HABITS: 1. watching just out of sight 2. amassing far above 3. clinging to loose pieces of equipment 4. trying to whisper secrets 5. fleeing to shadows 6. keeping a distance from the font.” I’ll buy that for a dollar! This is done with each of the three monster types; an appearance, stats on one line, habits, and then a little defenses and weaknesses section. In particular, the Unwashed have a weakness to light (the sun, torches) ; AND the ink, tagine shadow. That’s interesting. As implemented the weaknesses are a little mechanistic, but, especially that light and inky shadow, starts to deviate from that in to something much more interest. Something that supports free form play. How do you bless a corrupted shrine in a game? Do you cast bless? Clean it? Pour on holy water? Pray at it? Something else? Games that leave this open, or encourage open-endedness always seem more With It then games that say “If you cast bless you get a +1 For the next day.” The morons may demand mechanics, but for the rest of us it’s the inspiration portion that the designer needs to concentrate on.

The room descriptions are laid out nicely, in theory. There’s an overview, which handles the general description, and a section called “moments” which tends to go in to about one more sentence of detail for everything mentioned in the overview. “Props” seems to do the exact the same thing. Then there are sections on Traps, Treasures, Dangers, and Trinkets. This all happens in about half a column of text, so, fairly tight and covering enough evocative detail in a terse manner to make me generally happy. Here’s an example (fucked up line spacing is my own WordPress ignorance)

The Narthex

GOAL: Confess past regrets to enter the mausoleum. 

OVERVIEW: The entryway of the mausoleum is entirely plundered and weather-worn. There are faded friezes, tall columns, and an inky web blocking passage behind a large font. MOMENTS: + doors, twice the height of the tallest adventurer, cracked open enough for a single person to pass through. + friezes depicting processionals, gift-giving and graphic violence; no faces survived weathering and scratching. + a sudden, sharp smell of burnt paper; a cloth billowing behind a column, not there.

PROPS: + the sacrificial font — a large, black, stone basin, wider than a human and rising to the navel, sits in front of a shadow strung up like a web. + tracts of miracles — delicately carved down the length of each column, every saint’s miracles are recorded.

TRAPS: the unwashed flit and glide through the entryway, unable to enter the mausoleum.

Treasures: none.

DANGERS: none.

TRINKETS: chipped off pieces of friezes; bits of paint ground up into pigment

What you can see here, negatively, is the sad devotion to form. The GOAL is meaningless in most rooms. The Treasures and Dangers in this first room don’t exist and yet we have to have a section heading telling us that anyway. The idea here is a good one but by including the negative. “There is no treasure here” you are, in most cases, just padding out the text. Just don’t say anything and use the space you’ve saved, in toto, to put in another room, more interactivity, opr something more interesting. 

Slapping the monsters in to the “trap” section is interesting, and no really something I’m super happy to see. It’s a new convention, and I’m not gonna slap it for trying something new, but it is atypical. More worrisome is not telling us how many there are. The designer presumably knows their creation better than we do and should be giving us guidance on how to balance it/what they intended. 1 unwashed? 200 unwashed? 3? 6? What do they intend in their design? Otherwise it’s some bullshit “keep throwing them at the party until they feel challenged!” kind of nonsense.  In general, though, the room layout format is decent and specific enough to add color and bring it to life in the DM’s head while still keeping it terse enough to scan quickly. A good job. Interactivity, though, is relatively poor. It’s mostly looking at shit and getting attacked, the usual. The curse of the short five room adventure: there’s just no room to DO things. 

So, interesting ideas here. Interesting format used. Relatively decent evocative writing. But it’s too short. There’s no room here for an adventure to expand its lungs and breathe. Less devotion to the “I’m a clever boy!” aesthetic and more to usability, expanded to a length that makes sense, would really put this in another category for me. As is, now, if I were looking for a little roadside chapel, or something abandoned in the woods/cliffs/etc I might throw this in. It’s certainly atmospheric, but the size means its hollow inside, of actual play adventure. A little longer, a little more usable and less “look at me!” and/or more interactivity and this would easily be a No Regerts. Easily, if not higher.

This is $3 at DriveThru. There is no preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/319300/The-Beatified–Damned?src=newest&filters=45582_2110_0_0_0?1892600

By WR Betty
Rosethorn Publishing
S&W
Levels 3-5

[…] Every spring, two or three children go missing from the village, every summer a few animals disappear, every fall the harvest is plundered. The locals have begrudgingly accepted the fact that Hope Cross is cursed and wait in terror every spring for what they call “The Culling” to begin another year of horror. It is only through the short winter days and long winter nights that the people find any peace as they pray for the house to disappear as suddenly as it appeared.

This sixteen page adventure describes a two-ish level dungeon with 28 rooms in a classic folklore house of evil fey. Maezels in this case. They fatten them babies up and then eat them. There are some annoying discrepancies/things left out of the text and the writing could be more evocative, but organization is generally quite good. It has all the elements you need for a good adventure, but feels like it could use just a little more work to bring it up to Really Good levels.

The setting here is very folklore/fey, which I am fond of. You’ve got the bezels taking the role of the classic “goblin” type creature from folklore with real goblins serving as their slaves. They kidnap babies to raise and then eat, steal things from villages, experiment with stuff, much more Fairy Goblin Market type of fey than bestial stabby stabby humanoid in a cave type fey.

It’s got most of the support information correct. Good, in voice rumors. Wanderers are doing something and have some simple motivations. There’s non-standard magic items and treasure, and the magic that IS standard goes just one step more. So, a blue viscous potion of healing, for example. There’s a monster summary sheet. There’s a simple order of battle for the monsters to follow when responding to a party incursion. There’s a small table of Meazel & Kidnapped Child personalities. So, all of the minor stuff is pretty much taken care of.

The organization of the encounters is fairly good. General information up front. Bolding. White space. Things are laid out in the encounters in such a way that you can scan it quickly. There are also details thrown in, like a groove worn in the floor from a creature pacing for centuries. Specificity can create an evocative environment WITHOUT indulging in an overly verbose text. That’s good.

But it also has some REALLY dumb mistakes, mostly around what looks to be a Dyson map and how that matches up to the text. There are two room 27’s in the text, for example, and no room 28, as there is on the map. That’s pretty minor. But in other places there are trapdoors and grates and exterior doors … and it’s REALLY unclear where any of it goes! It’s not noted on the map and text doesn’t tell us the room number. It’s these pretty basic mistakes in, I don’t know, proofreading an adventure? That makes me say things like you should always have an editor. I think most editors are crap, but ta least you’ll have a second set of eyes on the adventure to prevent these kind of mistakes of oversight and mistakes of being too familiar with your own work. 

It also fails, in places, to mention important room details high up in the text, throwing them later on. Again, I think this is oversight and sloppy editing by the designer (who is also the editor.)  And, similar to this, it doesn’t do a really consistent job in providing an evocative environment. In one place there’s a cloth draped over a mirror, for example. This would have been an excellent opportunity for a great adjective or adverb to describe that cloth, one more word, or replace cloth with “burlap” or something. It’s something the adventure does in other places, but not in this example. Likewise, demonic visaged statues and so on. It just fails to CONSISTENTLY deliver that organization and evocative writing that I demand. 

And you know what? It’s still not shit. I’t still better than 90% of the crap I review. It’s got a decent, if classic, idea. It follows through with the theming. It gets the support information correct. It just needed to be more consistent in its organization and evocative writing, and have someone proof it for bonehead logic errors. 

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages and show syou the wanderers, the rumors, the first 23 rooms … that’s a good preview! I wish every product did it like that!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/318693/Goblin-House?1892600

By Madeleiine Ember
Ash Game Design
Troika!
Introductory Levels?

After a long fall, you’ve landed on something soft. A bit squishy and squelchy, really. And moving. Is it… a worm?

This “sixty page” adventure describes an adventure where the party is thrown down a well in to a weird underworld and have to regain the surface./escape. It is uber-weird, as Troika! Tends to be, and mostly linear, as modern adventures tend to be. That aside, a pretty book, it is not very usable, with massive walls of text and formatting transitions that are not amenable to usability. It needs a hard, hard edit and some layout effort … which is saying something because the layout clearly was quite involved … to no good end other than “pretty.”

First, of the 60 pages, about seventeen are devoted to backgrounds, with a decent sized appendix, so you’re actually getting something around ten or so pages of actual adventure, with that involving seven to nine encounter areas. This is a mostly linear adventure, which, in the modern vein, is just something you need to expect. Getting rid of Gold=Xp and exploration elements, modern adventures create small environments for the party to interact with. That’s what modern RPG’s are, and that’s ok, if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s a different genre, I don’t have a problem with that genre when that’s what I’m expecting to get when I buy.

The layout here is PURTY. Landscape design layout, with four column, black and orange backgrounds are striking with an art style reminiscent of ancient vase figures, in the negative space-ish, all in black. It’s drool worthy.

Drool worth and detracting from the usability, though. The white text, in negative, on the black and orange backgrounds make it hard to read. COmbined with the four-column (landscape mode) small text, making it hard to read. There’s a dearth of effective whitespace and section headings, bolding, etc, to help bring to the eye to important details and to help with scanning. There’s an attempt at this, through the use of italics to note another section heading, but the italics, in negative, doesn’t stick out very well. This all leads to a wall of text syndrome. The “Rememberroom” room, on page seven, have two solid columns of text, with only paragraph breaks. This is very ineffectual.

Is it the layout, the writer, the editor, or combination of the above that is responsible for this? A mix of all three? The writing certainly doesn’t help. A lot of if/then statements, some background mixed in, mechanics mixed in … it all combines to make the eyes glaze over. Recall that the most common complaint of adventures is that they are hard to prep and use. The usability. This is the chief barrier that an adventure needs to overcome. It must first succeed in its core mission: being used at the table. The most common complaint about adventure is that they are hard to use at the table. Look, it’s not impossible that the most dazzling adventure ever could be in wall of text/hard to use, but in a world in which people commonly complain about usability, the chief complaint in fact, the primary goal should be to make the damn thing usable at the table. Scalability. Readability. The ability to quickly and easily grok the room and reference the parts of it. It’s not an absolute, a disaster in readability may be worth investing your time in running anyway if its good enough. How many adventures are there like that? Thracia? Maybe one or two others? What’s the excuse, in 2020, to having a wall of text? You don’t know what you don’t know, I guess.

There’s some nice scenery scattered through.  Maze has a little table with the following sentences in it, as example places for the party to visit: “Cavern with stalactites carved as greek statuary.” “a rainbow-lit (by fluorescent mushrooms) waterfall.” , “A gentle brooks that flows with glittering golden water.” There’s no interactivity there, just little single sentences. It’s nice imagery, but it should also serve so purpose. The Ed Greenwood “museum tour” adventures make a similar mistake, but instead of being evocative, as these are, they are pointless interactive 

It’s got interactivity. Things to talks to, a rope bridge to traverse, NPC’s and situations to interact with. But they are a FUCKING PAIN to figure out because of the text issues. If I’m struggling, reading casual with all the time in the world, how can I expect to run the encounter at the table? After two times through the text I’m still struggling to understand the overall situation down below and how the adventure should flow. And in a modern adventure this is NOT a good thing.

A hard edit of the text. Focus the rooms. Work on the usability. Republish.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. $10 adventures without previews make me sad. How can one expect to know what they are buying without a preview? Are we to throw ourselves to the wind and hope for the best? Well, we’ve seen where that gets us …

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/313219/So-Youve-Been-Thrown-Down-A-Well?1892600

By Lazy Litch
Lazy Litches Loot
S&W

Deep in a vast wood, a town called Willow sits beside the Lake of Tears. The lake is framed by weeping willow trees, their vines pouring into the lake’s dark green shores. Willow is not what one would call an upbeat town. The rains here are relentless and the grey skies loom low like a giant cage. Travelers do not linger here long; one night in the Blue Brew Inn is enough to make most jump on the ferry and move on. But recently the ferries have stopped running as something terrible has taken up residence on the river. Meanwhile, the town folk will not talk about the noises echoing up from the staircase that descends below the lake, nor the broken stone circle on the hill at the edge of town. The town’s leader, a witch named Morose Morgan, is a recluse and refuses to leave her island.

This 32 page digest adventure describes a small region and the situation going down in it. IE: it’s a sandbox with people and factions who want things, a timeline, and a part full of gasoline. Its heart is in the right place but it comes off both a little bland and it is trying too hard, all at the same time. I’m not mad at it, but I’m not really chomping to run it either.

The way in and out of the region/village is through the river and people ain’t coming back from that ferry journey. Or, worse, they are coming back floating down the river dead. Thus the party and the villagers are stuck, with food slowly running out. There are six of seven factions running around the region, from wizards, to rat people to crow people ton evil treant to various town characters of local color. They all have a decent little description and some goals clearly laid out, as well as some hints as to what they are likely to do and what they think about the other groups. It’s the essence of a good sandbox: terse groups with things they want and FEELINGS about other groups. 

But the whole things feels “meh.”  Maybe because I just reviewed a similar product, Lorn Song of the Bachelor, and it was REALLY good. But it’s not exactly like this is bad. Ug. This is why I stopped reviewing the same publishers stuff in a raw; product needs its own space.

Ok, so, food is running out. And its disappearing from the storehouse. Where you find a tunnel. That leads to the rat people. Who want something. Which interacts with another faction. Which brings you in contact with another faction. While yet another faction is running around doing their own thing. Actually, they are all kinds of doing thing own things in parallel, with their being a nice sample timeline in the back of the adventure to help guide a DM toward a course of events and inspire without it being a railroad. I really like it when these sample timelines show up. They help bring the factions goals down to earth and ground the adventure for the DM in a way that is not a railroad but rather inspires the DM. Most sandboxy adventures could benefit from this sort of thing.

But that’s an issue also; I’m a fan of just about everything this adventure does, at least in principal. The NPC summaries are pretty good, short, with wants and goals and what they are doing now. The local wise woman of this fishing village solves all disputes by gutting a fish and reading its entrails. She cannot be fooled, and only comes ashore to perform rituals. This is all pretty solid stuff to hang your hat on as a DM. The same can be said for the locations. And the various encounters. 

But it all feels a little flat. My notes say “trying too hard?” but I’m don’t think that’s it. The genre here is a little off center, with rat people and crow-people, a little “odd world”-ey, but I don’t think that’s it either. It’s hard to say it’s generic, or abstracted content because it does engage in being specific. It just feels like it’s missing something. Like there something missing that ties everything together … even though there is. Or something is missing that will bring the villages, regions and NPC’s to life … even though I could normally point to the descriptions, etc and say “this is what you should generally be doing.” 

You could take this and run it, fairly well. I just have absolutely no interest in doing so at all. Maybe because, at heart, it’s a “you’re trapped and fetch quest for food” sort of thing? I don’t know. I seriously have no idea. 

Can you do everything right and still not do good? Sure, of course. But I’m not even sure this adventure does that. Not succeed. Maybe I just don’t like it? Is that possible? It’s got lots of stuff I like. 

No, it’s missing something. Maybe some organization? A summary? Something to tie everything together and make it feel alive? Maybe that’s it, it doesn’t feel alive. Not in some gaxian verisimilitude kind of way. In some other way. It feels so … unmotivated?

Look, I’m gonna Regert this. No, I’m not gonna regret this. Fuck I don’t want to run this. I have no desire. Is that a Regert? Or do i want to run Regerts I just don’t want to put the effort in with Regerts? 

Who fucking knows. Why does an adventure cause such an existential crisis in me? It’s not the adventure it’s what is symbolizes, something new under the sun, a way of not being good that you seldom, if ever encounter. Reall? It’s not good? Or it’s truly just something that doesn’t meet your tastes? What tastes? It’s got stuff I like! Yeah, but you don’t like it ergo it must have something you don’t like, something large enough to be substantial enough for you to not like the whole. Well My Smrty, if that were the case then I could point to it, if it were that substantial, right? And I can’t, right? Ergo FUCK YOU I’m right and you’re wrong. I forget, which side of us is talking and what is this sides opinion supposed to be? I don’t know. Nothing has meaning anymore. The adventure, right? No dumbass, its the Corona, as always, you know that, you’re just saying the adventure to make a funny and it’s not, not even in the meta. Lighten up dude, its just afucking adventure and a joke. Well I don’t like this. I like knowing. But this felt like a chore. Like, maybe, going through the motions. Maybe going through the motions and hiding behind the Art Punk aesthetic. You like that aesthetic. Do I? Really? Or have I just like a bunch of products that HAD that aesthetic? When are going to go correct those aesthetic misspellings. Now. They seemed to have thought about shit and grokked the knowing of it. Because they didn’t suck donkey balls. Like this one? It doesn’t suck donkey balls. It’s good then? I don’t know if its good. Isn’t that the entire point of the fucking blog? To fucking know? It’s a process dipshit. And this is just one more element of that process. And now throw in the truth shit. Quaint. Resting your head on the desk won’t help. No, nor will another cup of thai iced coffee, sin ice. Ok, we’re gonna finish this thing up.  You can come back every day for the next three days, or even ten, to figure it out. Cause this aint working.

No Regerts. Maybe?

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. It don’t show you shit except some art, maps, and a “How to play D&D” page. Bullshit preview. Show us some real pages, some encounters, locales, people. Give us an idea of the writing to expect inside.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/316522/Willow?1892600