So, there I am, in Ohio, researching my families murderous past in the Appalachia region of the southeast, near Athens. Low and behold, it turns out Prince is there! I quickly drop my shovel and crowbar, kick over the headstone and head to Athens … to a motel that charges by the hour and you can pay in cash. Hmmmm.
Much liquor was consumed, in to the night and blackberry mead starting at 8am, lasting throughout several days. We discussed all of you, talking about each of you behind your backs.
But Lo! Who did we run in to but Melan! It’s true! We were out hiking a part of a conservation trail and we saw him upahead, coming out of some kind of tall grass patch. WTF?A?A That can’t be Melan?!?! But it was!
He was in that part of Ohio also, for work, consulting on traffic circle design! We had no idea, but there he was! Fortune favors the reviewers!
We quickly found a latrine with all thee of us wallowing in our kingdoms of filth, in to the wee hours!
The next morning we got some someone to take our picture together at a local diner! We stayed, discussing the finer points of Encounter Critical, until they kicked us out.
The Misty Halls of Kalavorka
By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
1e
Levels 5-7
A lost vale located in a high mountain range is home to a clan of mysterious giants. Sages believe the giants have strange powers that no other of their kind possesses. Yet, no one has heard anything from these giants in decades. Do they still dwell in their misty fastness? Do they really possess these reputed powers, and if they do, what are they? Crafty giants, evil gnomes, and a weird guardian await any adventurers who go seeking the lost halls.
This 44 page adventure features an overland journey through the mountains ending with a four level dungeon with about thirty rooms that used to be a cloud giants home. Social notes abound and one or two interesting rooms are highlights, while a dense DENSE text, hack-a-thon, and the text density subtracting from usability make this a miss. If you lied Gygax’s later TSR adventures then you’ll like this.
Ok, cloud giant dude lives in the mountains and you’re going to see him for pretext reasons. This is more of a location to drop in, so reasons exist in your game and you dropped this in, which is fine. You journey through fog covered mountains for a week or two, arrive at dudes house, and meet his fog giant servants. Who eventually attack you if you don’t attack them. Turns out dude is dead.
R. Nelson has created something that trends close to the simulationist side of AD&D without going over the line. Multiple encounters have a social aspect to them, folk react the way you would expect and are doing things you would expect. It feels like a realistic environment … if that environment had giants and such in it. And then it has a room or two of weirdness in the end is one of the better, if not best, representations of the ethereal plane and other dimensions that I’ve seen. So mundane adventure. And then the end is weird, much like Tharizdun.
Wilderness encounters, both random and set, as well as rooms in the manor are relatively lengthy, taking up a column or a quarter column is not uncommon. This generally involves some sort of reaction roll and social encounter notes and then maybe some monster tactics porn. The concepts behind both these are good but their execution is lacking. This is how the Berserker tribes reacts to you, and if you do this then they react that way. These short notes are great. Likewise, combats starting with the baying of the yeth hounds from a distance … great evocative notes. And in fact the adventures writing is at its best when it is dealing with those more evocative areas. It then, though, devolves in to overly prescriptive text, with the tactics porn being a good example of this. First the monster casts this spell then they do this. Then they cast that spell then they do that. These overly prescriptive parts of the adventure are not the best. Skippable, yes, but …
The writing and layout choices in this thing makes my head hurt. The font, spacing, kerning, font size, and layout all seem to contribute to an extreme feeling of DENSITY of text. This is then combined with those prescriptive paragraphs. This is then further exacerbated by a more conversational tone in places and brief sentences or phrases about history and purpose of rooms, areas, etc. Brief adds up. It all combines with a lack of good bolding and whitespace use to create long sections that feel like wall of text. When my eyes can’t focus on the text that’s not good.
“Thorogang’s ancestors designed this octagonal room to thwart uninvited visitors to the complex. This area holds a large pool, and four false doors.” This is the main description for the Chamber of the Pool, room two in dudes house. Note how it tells us nothing. We already know its octagonal, and has four false doors, from the map. We know it has a pool, from the map. The history of the room doesn’t contribute to the running of the adventure for the players in any way. This is a bad description in every way. There are seven more paragraphs to this room to dig through. The only thing uncommon about this room is that the initial description is a bit short and not wholly representative of the writing.
The text is padded out. “Furthermore …” or “Simultantionaly two things happen …” This all leads to the extreme length of the text which further contributes to the wall of text issues. Other rooms repeat text. Bobs sitting room is the title of the room and the first sentence tells us that the room is Bobs sitting room. This shit matters; it contributes to the eyes glazed over thing going on in this, and that’s not good. In the end we’re left with writing that is quite long, for a variety of reasons, but not that evocative.
But there are some good things going on in this which makes the rest of the issues a shame. There’s a decent order of battle presented for the giants, and the briefer tactics notes (maybe “guidelines”) are appreciated. But the general text length and formatting makes it hard to take advantage. Likewise the emphasis on social elements is great. Encounters are likely to start with some kind of social element and then perhaps devolve in to combat. This FEELS right. The design here is pretty strong, if not the execution. The baying of the Yeth Hounds and brief little occasional sentences describing fallen and ruined gates, the entrance to the mountain steps of the cloud giant manor, these are section that are short, a sentence or two, and quite evocative. Maybe a little on the drier side, as the entire adventure is (probably due to the length of the text) but you can see these flashes of good text in it that INSPIRE You to run a great encounter. It just doesn’t fucking happen far enough.
A special shout out to the last couple of encounters in this. There’s a brief otherworldly/ crystalline entity room, with some ethereal shit going on in the room right before it. This combines with excellent use of a Thought Eater and some imagery ideas that are quite good. Again, execution could be better, but the ideas are sounds and the imagery that IS present is pretty good, you can recognize it without squinting too hard. Silvery puddles of liquid on the floor … hmmm, I sure that’s ok …
In thinking about this I am reminded both of the wilderness section of Tharizdun (or was is Lost Caverns?) and the steading in G1. There’s an overland travel journey in this and then a giant home that is mostly a tactical hack with the giants using hit and run tactics and making a last stand in a certain room, etc. And like Tharizdun, Lost caverns, and the Steading, most encounters are combat, with a little social roleplaying thrown in, generally based on reaction rolls. Exploration and Interactivity are on the low because of this and, I would suggest, essentially non-existent, comparing it to the interactivity, or perhaps type of interactivity, found in G1.
One of the better Dungeoneers Guild products, if you thought Tharizdun was the pinnacle of adventure design then you’ll probably like this.For me, it comes off too day and too wordy/hard to use.
This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. It’s just the first five pages though and doesn’t show you any of the encounters, so it’s hard to really tell about the writing style and encounter style. I think, though, that if you read that fourth and fifth page of the preview you can get an kind of idea as to the general writing style and formatting issues. If you can handle that and the review seems appealing then you’ll no doubt like this.
Also, Dungeoneers Guild adventures seem to be getting better. Which is GREAT!
Jesra Vorak, a renowned Fighter from Greymoor, hires the characters for a perilous adventure into Ravenholm. On a mission to find her family sword, Salvation, and destroy the enemy that inhabits her ancestral home, Jesra seeks only the most heroic allies. Many dangers await the characters in Ravenholm, most of them unknown; Jesra is determined to fulfil her destiny and cleanse her bloodline of its darkness or die trying. Will the characters become legendary heroes, or be doomed by the Jesra’s obsession?
Well jackass, you’re the one that tosses yourself in to these situations.
One encounter has a merchant on the road in a wagon. His wagon has 30 feral cats in it. They are all polymorphed lesser devils. Do you NEED to read the rest of the review now to get a sense of the adventure?
This fifty page adventure uses twenty pages to describe the lands around a small castle and the castle proper, containing a vampire. It’s an escort mission for a DM Pet NPC and it’s heavy on facts, mechanics, and long paragraphs on the beach that go nowhere and hide the sunset. Yeah it’s fucking Ravenloft, but I’m not going to review it like that.
Are RPG’s about the story the DM is telling? Are RPG’s about an antagonistic DM? Are RPG’s about the DM at all? Are RPG’s about the pedantic way some people roleplay their characters, forgetting they are a part of the group? No, RPG’s are about the players and their characters, together. The story is emergent but it IS about them.
This adventure is not about the party. It is about an NPC. For this adventure and everything in it is centered around a DM Pet NPC. You get to escort her to her ancestral homelands, find her ancestral sword, travel her ancestral lands, and visit her ancestral castle and kill her ancestor, the vampire dude. Along the way you will be subject to a long masturbatory description about her ancestral sword, that only she can use. Along the way you will face numerous challenges … that only she can overcome. And then of course you will face ol grandpappy vampire dude, who only she can kill with her sword. This is fucked up. We’re not talking Giovanni Chronicles here, but it’s still pretty fucked.
The actual design of the adventure fights play. In the initial village you have to make skill checks to convince the guards to let you in. You are sworn to note tell your real mission, but everyone is a very skilled lie detector and hates you if you lie. And if you tell the truth they probably kick you out. In the village you have to find out that there’s a well with a secret door in it. But it’s a random rumor on the rumor table. So you probably won’t hear it. And if you do then there are guards near the well who don’t want you messing with it (ok, that’s ok, it’s a roleplay/crazy scheme opportunity) and then inside the well you have to have a character who can see in the dark and THEY have to succeed on a perception check. How many fucking secret doors are going to put the door to the rest of the adventure behind? Jesus H Fucking Christ, do not NOT want the party to play the adventure? You know what’s going to happen, the DM is going to fudge it. So why the fuck is it in the adventure? There are a lot of better ways to handle this shit.
There are long Long LONG sections of italics text that make my eyes bleed they are so hard to read. Save your fancy fucking fonts and make do something to make the text easily readable.
Mechanics and details are embedded in in longform paragraphs, hard to pick out and hard to find during play. Bolding is absent. Does this room have a monster in it? Let me spend ten minutes reading all of the rooms nearby to see who reacts … this is a thing of NIGHTMARES.
On the plus side there is a room that rains holy water. There’s a 40% chance it spoils when exiting the room. So, continual rain of holy water with 40% of it spoiling is still … yes, that’s right, an infinite amount of holy water! Vampire Dude here We Come!
In spite of my assholery, there are some ok sentences in this A typical room entry might contain:” [] room is badly damaged, showing signs of impending collapse.Mouldy parchment lies around a stone bookshelf set against the south wall, and the remains of a writing desk sit to the west. A door carved with the Vorak crest leads north.” That’s not a terrible description. I did cut all of the pedantic dimensional data and this IS one of the shortest room descriptions. But it’s not terrible, if you ignore the following paragraphs with the mechanics that are hard to pick out. And the 30 polymorphed lesser devils.
This is $7 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. It should have a preview. Everything should have a preview. And the preview needs to show meaningful parts of the adventure, not the title page and the masturbatory backstory.
I know, hang in there and keep an open mind. It’s not a good game and is, in many ways, a bad game. And I promise I’m not branching out to other game genres. I just had to get this off of my chest.
I’ve bought a PS4 twice now with the explicit purpose of playing RDR2 and have been unsatisfied with the controller in what is, essentially, a shooter, and have sold it. I’m a PC gamer and thus when that version came out I bought it and have been playing it for several weeks now.
RDR2 has an excellent open world, full of people and an environment and subsystems that can really bring the world alive, from hunting, to cleaning your guns, to brushing your horse, just to name a couple. The sheer number of different activities you can engage in is mind-boggling.
The voice acting for the main character is excellent, as is much of the voice work, character animations, the script, and for the most part the story. The camp you are a part of, the people and how they interact and what they do, is top notch. Really some of the best I’ve ever seen.
And yet I think it’s a bad game. This comes from two core components: the gameplay and the mechanics. Mechanics first.
The game is slow and tedious. Doing anything seems to require substantial travel time between areas. Even after unlocking fast travel it’s slow to return to your fast travel base, because of choices made. Travel by stage and train requires long load times with useless animations. Further, your character and horse feel sluggish. “Real world physics!”, I can hear the shouts ever from here deep inside the volcano lair. Maybe, but tedium in sacrifice of fun is not a good choice on the designers part. It’s their job to solve those problems. Looting bodies takes forever as you watch a slow animation scene. There are parts of the map where you can’t run forcing you to suffer through long slow tedious walks and mini-animation scenes.
Even a month on the game crashes at least twice a day for me, and I don’t play a substantial amount. I’ve got a decent rig, why do I suffer with slowdows, crashes and stutters? I bought the game through Epic and couldn’t get it to work, requiring me to return it and repurchase through Rockstar proper. Even then I need to run a third party CPU app to keep it from pausing because it can’t manage its CPU itself. And I STILL suffer from pauses and stutters, but at least its playable now.
Moving on, all of those mini-games? Pointless. Hunting is tedious and the upgrades it provides are unneeded. Poker, dominoes, mumblepeg, photography, and a seemingly nonstop amount of other activities from collecting flowers to collecting dinosaur bones … all of that is useless. It doesn’t actually get you anything meaningful in the game. They are just tacked on little items, useless.
The core story missions and the side missions suffer from a lack of depth. The side missions, popping up from time to time in the world, are some of the more interesting parts of the game, from a variety standpoint. Dozens of interesting little vignettes. That generally are just “go collect X things” or “give me something” or “go talk to someone.” They feel formulaic and shallow in the extreme. Interest setups that have no depth and whose formulaic approach to them shine though almost immediately, taking the luster off of them. Go watch a youtube video of all of the setups/intros for them and you’ll have a better experience … without the tedious travel they require.
The core story missions, while having some interesting depth behind them, if the pointlessness of mans existence (Dutch) is depth (and I think it is, from an existential standpoint) are problematic. They are rail shooters. Watch a slow cutscene. Engage in slow travel. Engage in slow button-press activities. Then engage in what is a rail shooter. And, in many cases, have your weapons taken away, or be forced to use only your handguns.
For you see you no choice. You WILL engage with just your handgun, in spite of having a shotgun on your horse. Weapons WILL be locked in the stores until you get further along in the story. And, if you dare engage with the mission in any way other than the railroad your forced on to, well, the game will fail you. The best example is when the house you are hold up in is attacked by a rival gang. You are outside shooting the other gang. The game tells you to return to the house. If you stay outside to shoot some more the game fails you, telling you that you didn’t return to the house.
All of that choice, that big open world, everything in it .. .it’s just an illusion. This is a rail shooter. A sluggish rail shooter.
I’m reminded of a Deus Ex game. The big selling point was you could go through the game without killing people. Well, except for one boss. You see, that boss fight was farmed out to a sub in development. It was the typical boss fight stuff, figuring out how to kill them, etc. And that’s what this game feels like. It feels like the big open world was developed and then mini-games were farmed out. And the story action scenes were farmed out. And because of this none of it is integrated well.
The game is not satisfying. It is frustrating for what it COULD have been. Yet another example of a railroad story told by a DM. The emergent story is always better.
Jacob Hurst & Donnie Garcia
Swordfish
5e
Levels 4-5
Deep in the forest plants and animals twist and crack and seem to fill with stars before they vanish, screaming into nothing. A tomb has appeared, and lumberjacks argue about its origin over drinks at the Red Squirrel Inn. Some say it’s new, like a freshly grown cancerous lump; others say the twisting earth revealed an ancient trove of bone and unimaginable treasure. No one can agree, but townsfolk have begun to go missing, riders in black have been seen on the roads, and some say the candles are singing.
This 56 page “slightly larger than digest sized” adventure features about twenty rooms in about twenty pages, with generous art. Detailed, evocative, interactive, and frustrating, it can sometimes be hard to get a handle on the larger and more complex rooms. And it also presents a GLORIOUS vision of a lich lair. Flawed, but worth having.
Frank wants to be a lich and then an arch-lich and fly around the universe collecting power, ascending to higher planes of being, etc. He does some research, finds out that he needs willing sacrifice victims, and sets out. #1 is his true love, who truly does love him and truly sacrifices herself willingly. He then builds a place and starts luring other “willing” villagers. It’s a nice set up and he, a CR21 Lich, is in the dungeon.
The intro mentions, but doesn’t explain, some keywords that will be familiar to the OSR but less well known in the 5e world. Mythic Underworld. Combat As Sport, Answers not on the Character Sheet and, of course, running the fuck away from a CR 21 lich when you’re level four. I might question the ability of the general 5e public to grasp the adventure, but I shan’t be the one to pander to the lowest common denominator in this review. It’s got a solid head on it.
Supporting material is pretty good. The nearby village is well done. Brief quick hits of places and NPC’s, just enough to get things juicing. A good percentage is focused on the adventure at hand with some personal flavor to brighten them further up. Bolded words and good use of section breaks make it easy to follow. Information that add character is specific, not abstracted. It feels like a place that you can run, when you first glance at it. The hooks are great as well. And, uh, maybe in a first, ALL of them. Six of so, one paragraph each. In one the local curate summons you. He’s afraid that if words gets out about the missing villagers and the mysterious tomb that just appeared then his superiors will start up a witchburning inquisition … since they are already suspicious of their worship of a moon goddess aspect … Perfect! Makes PERFECT sense. Ties in well to the moon goddess. Which ties in well to the actual “tomb.” Or, a mining & timber business deal gone bad. WTF? In an adventure full of undead and a mysterious tomb? Fuck. Yes. Life is better when the world IGNORES the zombie army beyond the wall! The local color in both the hooks and village are EXCELLENT. I WANT to run it, and that takes some fucking skill!
The place is interactive as all fuck out. Dig through pits of undead. Candles of different colors that you can light and mess with. Piles of skulls. A trapdoor full of sand. A pool of banshee tears. Yes. it’s ALL the tears of a banshee. Hmmm, maybe that needs to go in my evocative section? Anyway, this place has it all: Trance, stilts, throw-up music, an albino that looks like Susan Powter, Teddy Graham people.
And it brings the fucking noise in evocative. I already mentioned the pool of banshee tears, right? Piles of skulls holding candles on top of them. Pits of bodies. Brief hits of mosaics on doors. Windows that shine the light of elysium in. Black sand, everywhere, subtly moving towards one room. Oh, you got mixed up in it? Skeletal hands reach out of it! How about creepy villagers, in only gossamer garments, draped with that ancient jewelry from Frodo’s barrow? Oh, how about a voice, barely heard, saying “This way. A little further.” O! O! O! That’s creepy!
The map is good, and has some atmospheric effects embedded in it, little keywords for the DM to emphasize, like the sand, cold, or precision of the construction. That’s a good tool to help keep things fresh in the DM’s head during play, so they can relate it to players to enhance the atmosphere. Likewise, it does a good job with cross-references to other locations.
And now for winters discontent.
It feels like something is wrong with the formatting.
It’s using a series of bolded keywords to draw the eyes attention, with some [brackets] to contain some additional info on those items, along with section headings that stand out to give additional information. Something similar is used in the small village/NPC section, to draw the eye via bolding. Here, though, it feels like the longer rooms, and many of the rooms are longer/more details, loose their essence in a forest for the trees type situation. That format, combined with the two column, the digesty size, and the more complex/lengthy rooms seems to be a problem for me. I have problems conceptualizing the rooms and groking them. They becomes a series of individual elements I have to pick out instead of a ROOM with elements. The entrance room, one, for example, is small and the format works well. But as the adventure moves to room two it seems to cloud up. I’m gonna let this review sit for another day and see if anything clicks.
Ok, coming back to this I think I can run it. The bolded words, issued as brief impressions in the initial descriptions, maybe with some [bracket] comments tossed in, and then interactive DM->Player play beyond that, with the section headings providing more details. It works pretty well. What’s missing, I think, is the creatures. They still seem out of place, or somehow not fully integrated in to the rooms/descriptions. It FEELS like you get a good room description but then there’s a “oh, uh, yeah, and there’s this banshee in here also”, or something similar. So, in summary, the two-column digesty bolded keyword format works, but takes a bit to grok … and I think you’re gonna have to make some notes for the more complex creatures to appear on the map.
Speaking of …
There are a couple of aspects to the adventure that are a bit subtle. It’s doing this thing, that I’m supportive of, where the “plot” and/or background data is conveyed through the keys. It’s a part of B2, G1, and other products and is a nice way to integrate things without a huge amount of backstory. In this case, though, one additional paragraph could have helped a lot. Essentially, the interaction of some werewolves and the banshee, along with a couple of other smaller points that are meant to impact play. Likewise, there’s a section of text which covers the rituals being performed inside of the “tomb.” This is generally self-contained on one page but is may be in more of a story mode (in spite of it being well numbered bullets) and less in a “actual play” mode. Step nine states that when a sacrifice gives up completely their body becomes ethereal and runes appear in two locations. What a great effect to happen during play, while the party is in 4 or 6! It’s certainly flavorful, as presented, but there’s another section, on the Lich’s extras, which is essentially trivia. Breaking that out to “actual play” notes, or including those AP notes on the map, would have been a cool thing and better integrate them in to the adventure, errr, help the DM do it. The sacrifice flow states that people wit in the chapel room for a week, but the chapel doesn’t mention this. Nor is much given to the “items of shame” that are a center of a lot of the adventure. I might quibble, also, with a couple of smaller decisions, like explicitly stating that, in the sand dune room, you can’t see the far door from the entrance door. Temptation and curiosity are great player qualities to exploit.
FInally, let’s look at the goal of this adventure. Why are we here? To save villagers? You’ll get a few out. Cash? Ok, but 5e is not a gold=xp game. Helping a couple of brothers save their sister? Maybe. But, solving the issue of The Tomb, proper, isn’t going to happen (not that I can see anyway) without something being done about Mr Lich. Hmmm, maybe I need to reread … maybe dealing with his girlfriend is good enough. As a kind of Thing That Exists, it’s good, but that’s not the general flow of 5e. 5e tends to be more story and plot oriented. The challenge is marrying the more OSR-centric flavour to that end.
This is a complex place. It could be tweaked some, or notes added, to ease actual play. But it’s a worthwhile environment to have for OSR play if not 5e play. Can your players handle a scenario that is not a TOTAL AND COMPLETE SUCCESS?
The PDF is $10 over at DriveThru, with a print version available at Swordfish. The preview is fourteen (!) pages long and does a good job showing you the type of content you’ll get. Check out preview pages 7 (real page 18) for the entrance first hallway. And then preview pages nine through the end for a complex room. Putting the room, the elements, and NPC together is a little rough.
By CS Barnhart
Mad Martian Games
OSRIC
No Level Given
The peaceful villages of Eastern Thanegard are under attack. Fenrir raiders have taken up arms against Einheriar colonists. Or have they? And if they have can they be stopped? These are the tasks Thane Egil has assigned to a small band of adventurers. Travel east, interview the victims, track down the culprits and deliver the Thane’s Justice. But all isn’t what it seems and foul sorcery and blood thirsty revenge may be behind the recent uprisings. Can the brave adventurers uncover the truth and stop further bloodshed, or will war consume them and the Thanelands?
This 26 page adventure is a hunt for wolf barbarian raiders who are a whopping and a whoomping every living thing in town. It’s core ideas are decent, if not good, but the designer has, rather euphemistically, no idea how to write an adventure.
Essentially, you’ve got some bandits who are impersonating the local Wolf Barbarians. They rob and raid, leaving the blame on the barbarians. The thane has you assigned to stop the wolf barbarian raids. You figure out it’s bandits about the same time you’re slaughtering them, and then face down the leaders and an evil wizard allied with them. It’s an oldie of an idea, but still a goody.
The execution in the idea is what is lacking. There’s a regional map provided, for the party to explore. But there’s no scale provided. The adventure mentions hexcrawling the map, but, again, no scale on it. The map, which has incorrect location keying on it (Editor!), lays out a number of locations and and provides for some wanderers, even with a little color to them. But then the locations, proper, are then laid out in “plot” order. First the village that was just burned. Then the village that will be burned the next night. Then the bandit camp. Then the bandit HQ. Then the evil wizards lair. You’re clearly meant to do the adventure in this order. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, except in the mismatched styles used.
It’s initially laid out like a sandbox. It’ mentions hexcrawling. But then it switches styles to linear plot adventure. Then, the five actual locations, are detailed in a very conversational format, like it was a plot adventure. This is the village. These are the people. These are the reaction rolls. Then the baddies show up. Then the baddies do this and this. Then a fight starts. The next encounter on the linear path will detail consequences, like questioning people from the last encounter that leads to this encounter … at least sometimes it does that.
NPC’s and local color are very inconsistent. The first village, burned out, gets a few NPC’s to talk to. The wanderers have at least a little color to them. But then the second village, not burned down yet, gets no local color or NPC’s at all. Then, the integration of the “events” in to the main text, in long paragraph form, just like how all other information is presented, makes following the adventure hard. You need to hunt to pick out information. Or maybe you don’t if you just run it like a linear railroad, running “one paragraph” at a time.
And then information for the DM is inconsistent. At one point you can track baddies. “How many” is a natural question for a player to ask. Nothing provided for the DM to help them. Or, where do the tracks go? At least some page cross-references would have helped. Instead turn to encounter three and do the math, provided you remembered that encounter three, which you have no reached yet, has the formula for calculating how many baddies. And then, the placement of the “questioning of the prisoners” in the NEXT section is weird as fuck. It’s not actually the next location, it’s more “what happens after the last battle” formatting. Weird as all fuck, that.
Information is sometimes spread out over pages that makes it hard to follow. Guy’s Chaotic Henchman blog had that excellent series of articles on basic layout that would have helped with that.
I think perhaps beefing up the wilderness section with scale would have helped. Describing the villages, bulleting out or using whitespace to call attention to differing sections and important information would have helped. Sticking “event” information in a separate section for each location, or at the end, would have helped. Adding more local color to the locations and/or sticking in NPC’s would have helped. Handing this adventure off to other DM’s to run and then really interviewing them to ensure you understand what was confusing and what thir problems were would have helped.
I shall make no mention of the 8th level wizard, by himself, with 42hp. WTF is the CON on that dude?!
But, it does have some interesting design. If the designer can learn how to write, edit, layout, and form coherent sections then this guy could be going somewhere. Those are all skills you can learn, I think, much more easily than coming up with good ideas, which they have already.
Also, THERES NO FUCKING LEVEL PROVIDED FOR THIS ADVENTURE! We the consumers, are generally buying an adventure based on level. It needs to go in the DriveThru description, and maybe put it in your level AND in the adventure title page also, for future reference.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages. So you don’t get to see anything of the actual encounters, but you do get to see the regional map and some of the “page overrun” formatting issues. Show some encounters in your preview. That’s what the preview is for: to give us an idea if your “real” writing style is worth the $5 to us. And the “background” information is generally seldom representative of encounter style.
By Keith Sloan
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 6-8
More than a century ago, the evil Sea Lords ruled this region. They were cruel men, devil-worshippers who practiced vile rites and were the terror of folk across the seas. But, like most tyrants, they were at last thrown down, their strong places sacked and destroyed. Now, they are little more than a name of fear and loathing. Little of them remains, but sometimes an isolated hold or other location is discovered, most filled with plunder from decades of their reign of terror. Your party has acquired a treasure map purporting to show the location of one of the Sea Lords old holds. While most were sacked and plundered long ago, this one seems to have been missed. With luck, perhaps some of their vast treasure remains for the taking!
This nineteen page adventure contains a two level dungeon with about 120 rooms, at a density of about eleven to a page. It is, essentially, a minimally keyed affair with brief expansion of details in areas. “Book Standard”, where that is defined as the usual monsters and +1 shields, expanded with a few new ones in each category. These sorts of adventures always make me dream of what might have been.
This adventure forces a key question in a way that few others do: where is the minimalist line located? Let’s say I create an interesting interactive environment, but use language that only a first grader could understand … is that a good adventure? (And I don’t mean that as an insult, but rather to illustrate clearly what I’m going for here.) Plain language, tersly delivered.
We can see in this some of my key design points. Terse generally means it’s easier for the DM to run. Great! Interactive means there are things for the party to play with. Great! Appealing to the lowest common denominator in language use? Well, there goes the Evocative pillar out the window.
But this isn’t just a list of random die roll monsters thrown on to a map. There’s design here, hence the interactivity. Pits that lead to elsewhere, dangerous traps. Factions in the dungeon. A great map with multiple levels and areas. It works and fits together well.
Keith must be the perfect writer for XRP; their styles seem to marry well. The minimalism in the writing tends to be a “feature” of many (most?) XRP adventures. I clearly don’t get what Keith and Joe are trying to do. Or maybe I do and I just strongly disagree with it. Strongly.
I would, an do, assert that the purpose of the adventure is aid the DM in running it. A key portion of that is jamming an idea in to a DM’s head. Stabbing in an idea. Making the DM grok it at a fundamental level. The DM can then riff on it, expand it, and fill in the edges of it. They then bring it alive to the party as the idea runs wild in their mind. That requires decent writing. “This tomb contains eight rough- carved stone biers, upon each of which rests a sea wight.” That does not bring the room alive for me. It’s not bad, and it’s certainly not being TOO verbose, which is the more common problem. But it doesn’t make me excited about running this room. It feels like a slog to do this, room after room, for a hundred rooms. I want something just a little more colorful. Just a handful, five or six, extra words to bring the place alive. This seems like it is fact based. “There are X things here on Y objects.” I think I want something almost like impressions. Fuzzy descriptions. Some balance where the important parts are preserved (eight sea wights) but there’s some impression delivered that fills my mind with mystery and wonder and it races to fill it in and imagine it. This ain’t that. At all.
There are other touches, though, that are great. You can pick up “hangers on” spirits that follow you around and, of course, too many is a bad thing. The map is great, with multiple entrances and areas and loops. The faction concept is always good, although it could be better implemented here with goals, reactions, and orders of battle. There are a few things, outside of the factions to talk to, and while “betrayal” is too common, at least some will just run away with the loot instead of killing you.
There are some general atmosphere notes up front: “The air throughout is cold, damp, and smells strongly of the sea in the worst sense, with a heavy smell of briny rot throughout.” This would have been great added to a map, to always keep it fresh in the DMs mind to add to rooms and hallways. And a wandering chart noting that a monster appears from a nearby room is good also … but that requires to DM to them go hunting for a nearby room.
Indicative of the language issues are two common things: a large wooden chest and the Room Titles. “The liches Lair”, while factually correct, conveys little of the atmosphere that I think a good description should contain. And using the words large, small, red, black, and so on should, generally, be minimized. There are better words to use than “large wooden chest” that would have conveyed a more evocative environment.
This is $14 at DriveThru. For $14? No. But, let’s say it was ALWAYS on sale for $7? Well, no, not unless you’ve got a hard on for this minimalism. AndI know some of you do. The preview is four pages. The last two show you the first level map (great map!) and the first eleven rooms. Good preview. It’s indicative of the writing you’ll find within.
Blood on the traitors’ hands never dried. Instead, it flowed from Cup until it bathed the temple and valley in a flood of profane holy blood, thick and dark and hateful. Life withered and rocks crumbled under the weight of sin. And when the last of the murderers’ grandchildren died, Cup of Hands stopped bleeding.
This fourteen page adventure features twenty rooms in five pages. It’s a delightful surprise of evocative text, interesting situations, and usability. It can also be maddening at times. This designer, their first effort, is about 80% of the way to Rock Star.
There’s some backstory here and, in fact, I’ve replaced the normal publishers blurb with a paragraph from the backstory, which I find much more interesting. A gods avatar, murdered, three holy relics stolen, one, the Cup of Hands, flowing with blood, as the blurb states. Pretty fucking badass. The entire backstory, in one column that’s a super fast read, is written in this almost mythic style. It sets the place up well, creating a vibe immediately in the DM that gets them oriented. They then view the rest of the adventure through that lens, that feeling that the designer has imbued in to them, and everyone benefits as a result.
Creatures are unique. There are only two stat block present in the adventure, for Blood Bests and Voiceless. Voiceless, with a name that harkens back to the Madlands, are some kind of zombie undead and/or puppet undead. Blood Beasts are composite creatures, hybrids each different. This is represented by two d12 tables that modify the base stat block and give some physical attributes. A centipede with long rubbery arms, for example, giving +AC and Venom from the centipede, -AC and +Range from the arms. A new stat block format is used, with the intent of being clear. And it IS clear and concise, easy to read. The designer saw something they didn’t like, traditional stat blocks, and did something about it. This is a thinking person. I might quibble some with the random hybrid table. It’s inclusion is good but I might have included a one page summary sheet of fifteen or so beasts, rolled on the table, with their stats already adjusted. I like the option of random, for further expanded play, but I also want something I can use NOW.
There are a couple of other appeals to randomness in the adventure. Rooms have a 33% chance for a random “evocative element” to be present, like howling wind, etc. Again, I might have just done this up front; the random element adds nothing. There’s also some random “number of creatures appearing” in various rooms. So instead of 3 Blood Beasts it’s d4 Blood Beasts. Again, functionally no difference and the random element adds little.
But, a major feature of this adventure is both the evocative writing and the formatting used. I’ll reproduce the first room here, in toto:
1. TWISTING ENTRANCE
• Fat and grotesque vines and branches
• Wet soft ground soaking through boots
• Heavy damp smell sticking to the skin
Pretty sweet. Wet soft ground, soaking through boots? Fuck Yeah! Fat grotesque vines? Fuck Yeah! The bullet format makes it easy to pick out these individual elements. The strong language imparts the vibe of locale. This isn’t the only way to get an evocative and easily scannable encounter description; there are many paths to that goal. But this one works for this adventure, generally. When you come in the locale for the first time you can hear Blood Beasts feeding on bodies in a courtyard beyond. Fuck Yeah! HEAR! Setting up anticipation and putting people on edge! Excellent use of both language and design principles to create an impact.
Well. Usually.
The bullet format fails at times because of small things. One room is separated from another by thick vines … but that’s noted in the later room and not the former .. better to note these impediments on BOTH rooms, if you expect people to go both directions, or in the “leaving” room is two rooms are directly connected. There’s also a bullet or two that should be higher up in the list. A black pit in the ground, we’re told, and then later that there’s a Voiceless kneeling in front of it. The pit may be the more detailed feature, but the Voiceless is more noticable and likely what the party will see first. First Things First in encounter description is almost always a good idea. Likewise, monsters could be called out more in the bullets, they sometimes seem to fade in. Mostly, thought, there are points at which things don’t get fully explained. One note tells us that a trap is rearmed, and we’re left to infer from “eyes turned to jewels by electricity”, in a body description, that the trap is electrical. Just another edit pass, perhaps by a third party, would have done the trick, IMO.
The map is another issue entirely. It’s an evocative map, meaning arty. It’s not that’s its bad, or I have no soul, but it’s not as effective as a more traditional map. I’m not saying that a more traditional map should have been used; the more artistic map helps convey the vibe of the adventure and I’m all for overloading and layering a vibe. But there are elements that are not clear. In particular, the connections BETWEEN the various maps. There’s a tunnel in once location, and maybe some stairs in another … but they don’t come across well AT ALL. Further, it’s sometimes hard to tell is things on the map are “artistic” or real features. Again, more clarity is needed, without, hopefully, resorting to a full on traditional map. (Which I like, but clearly the designer is going for something else in this case.)
English is a Second Language here. I didn’t have a problem with the adventure, it’s language use is pretty good. But it can be jarring to some to see preposition drops or some of the weird english plurals mishandled. Again, maybe an editor would help. And, once again, I don’t think it matters enough to be an issue, at all.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $4. It’s worth that. The preview is six pages and gives you a good idea of what you’re buying. Nice overview sections with flavour included, as well as room encounters. This is well worth checking out, especially for good, but non-traditional, 5e.
Also, some jackass gave this 3 stars at DriveThru. Pfffft!
Also, man, I gotta finally learn how to use wordpress, this <p> shit is killing me!
Here’s another sample entry. I feel like the vibe, a pool of coagulated dead people?, isn’t really communicated well. The individual elements are strong, but someone the “main” vibe doesn’t come across.
2. POOL OF DEAD COAGULATION
• Outer wall ruined and submerged
• Smell is overpowering
• CON DC12 or vomit for d6 rounds
• Severed arm floating, holds a scrollcase with a random magic spell
By R. Nelson Bailey
Dungeoneers Guild Games
OSR
Levels 1-3
Nothing much usually happens in the sleepy fishing hamlet of Har’s Point. Recently, however, a ship has crashed on the rocks outside of town. Now rumors concerning treasure it supposedly carried are running rife amongst the fisherfolk. Some of these rumors hint that dead sailors from the ship are now walking the nearby beaches at night. Even more concerning, a mysterious stranger has been spotted around town. A few inquisitive adventurers might be able to discover what exactly is going on in Har’s Point.
This sixteen page adventure details a couple of locations in and near a seaside village and a few events related to a … sahuagin attack. It’s more a “sixteen page overly wordy outline” then it is an adventure. And it’s pretty brutal as well for the level range given. What was U3? Something like 3-5?
Well, the little sahuagin bastards have, once again, lost a religious artifact and need to find it so they go a raiding. You’d think their gods would punish them more, given how much they seem fuck things up. But no, they keep hanging around, showing up in every sea adventure EVAR.
There’s a shipwreck which, ostensibly, occupies the party. While messing about with it and staying in the village to do that, some people go missing That you probably never hear about. And then eventually a weird woman shows up. And then eventually the sahuagin show up and try to kill everyone. I know, right? So, the party is in town. They want to go out to the shipwreck, that has lots of rumors of gold on it, and of dead sailors wandering the beach at night. To get there they have to take a little boat. Which costs 400gp to buy, ten times the going rate. Or, I guess they can steal one. But then, for the last two hundred yards to the shipwreck (its on a reef) there’s a 50% chance each turn it capsizes, likely killing everyone because you take 2hp of damage each turn you’re in the water. AND there’s a 5 HD giant eel that prowls the place and attacks anyone in the water. Don’t worry, if you’re a seaman background then it’s only a 30% chance per turn of capsizing! What the fuck man! 200 yards of this? Once there you find no gold, but trade goods. “Ah ha!” sez me “Even better! Goods from foreign lands!” Alas, there are no details given. Just “trade good” with no value.
The sahuagin are searching the shore/land around the wreck, looking for their lost artifact. They search three hundred yards a night. The text explicitly says they search an area that is six miles from the south of the little village to four miles to the north of the little village. Ten miles. At three hundred yards a night. That’s like, what, two months? But wait! They end up attacking the village on like the third night. So … I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
The idea of events is a good one, for a general outline of an adventure like this, but it seems ass screwy in this. The events take place over three or four days … and yet the party is likely to hit the shipwreck quickly and probably move on. It’s like it wasn’t thought through, with the capsizing thing. I like the sort of a “locale and general outline with events”, almost like a little sandbox, but …
The first event is the disappearance of two beachcombers, at night. Who are killed and eaten in an isolated location. Which means no one knows they are dead. WHich means the event doesn’t really impact the party. It’s the same as listing “Bob & Martha thought about having sex but decided not to.” How the fuck does this impact the adventure? Leaving a bloody mess, near the boats, or on the way to them, or somewhere else … THAT would serve as some sort of inciting event to get the parties ass in gear. As written, though, it’s a non-event. “But Bryce”, the whiners say “you can change it.” You’re damn right I can. And I would, too. You know what else? I’d also write my own adventure instead of using some poor quality thing like this. It’s the designers job to do this shit, to inspire the DM, to give them the ability to run a good game … if not then what the hell are we paying for? SOme stats out of the DMG?
The church is the center of social activity in the town, we’re told. That’s it. That doesn’t play in to the events. That doesn’t play in to the townfolk. It adds no local color. No local color is provided. It’s a good fucking idea, but you have to then anchor that with specifics. When the party come in they are having a wedding, or a town meeting, or something else, going on all the time. WHile the baddies attack there’s a sewing bee at the church. WOrk it the fuck in for vecna’s sake!
There is, essentially, no treasure to speak of. Instead we are provided with milestone/goal XP. Which means that the party has to read the DM’s mind to figure out what they are supposed to do. “Ha! You didn’t figure out that the crown was what the baddies were looking for! No 200xp for you!” or “No, the chick dies, you don’t get your 200xp for that.” There’s multiple problems here. First, the fucking system is gold=xp, so that’s how the party is going to play unless the DM is up front with them that there is no gold here. Second, the party can’t succeed unless they know what they are supposed to do. Are we do read the goals out to the up front? I’ don’t have a problem with that, if we’re goal based, but it also kind of kills the game flow, IMO, given the SPECIFIC milestones mentioned. Compare to more modern systems, like 5e, where the milestone system is used and it’s more “complete chapter 1.” Finally, it implies there’s a right way and a wrong way to play the adventure. I hope you’re goody good who help fishermen for no reason, because anything else and you’re not getting XP from this adventure. It’s bullshit. It’s like saying “Ha! You were supposed to roll low on all of those to hit rolls instead of high! Suckers!”
And since I’m on a tear, let’s talk about rumors. The rumor table is laid out traditionally, with fifteen or so numbered rumors. But not all rumors are known by everyone. Only the fishermen know some of them, for example. But, you have to sig through every rumor to find who knows what, it’s not organized at all. Organizing it by “Everyone” “FIshermen” and so on would have made much more send.
In the end this is just another poorly organized adventure with too many words laid out in a long text paragraph format with little to no though made to usability. IE: the usual.
This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages. The only worthwhile page is the last one, showing you part of the village description. It would have been better to show the actual encounter areas so people would know what they are getting for their sixteen page $6 adventure.
The entrance to Geir Loe Cyn-crul is a towering doorway hidden in the crook of a precipitous ridge. As a manifestation of greed supplanting ancient veneration, the doors have been torn off and cast aside.
This 78 page adventure describes a one level dungeon with 103 rooms in about thirty pages. The fundamental ideas of this are (mostly) quite good but it fall down somewhat in execution being, as the designer notes, a hack & slash job. As a strategic puzzle it’s interesting in that regard. As a more traditional adventure, only the vibe delivers on promises.
This is a different thing. It reminds me, somewhat, of a few of those Frontier Settlement adventures where the party is faced with hundreds of humanoid foes. It’s got a strategic bend to it that it going to fit better as a high level adventure. Every ten rounds, inside, you have an encounter, with about a third just being cave crickets. One area has 12,000 piercers in it. Another has a couple of hundred trolls. The rooms, chambers and halls are cyclopean in size. It gives the feeling of some of those scenes in Moria and could, potentially, support a small army deployed inside of it. Like, maybe, a small PC army in support of their mission …
It’s one level, with those cyclopean halls and chambers, and a couple of “Warrens” attached to the core chambers. You really get the sense of size from the map. There’s also a great ruined thing going on … but also it’s lived in. Imagine this DID house the Throne of the Gods, and over the years it got ruined and support of the location has stopped … but it’s still guarded by some who are doing their duty. That’s what you get here. Cyclopean halls, ruined, but with the loyal guard still repesent … as well as a fuck ton of vermin and interlopers near the edges. Huso delivers on the vibe. The map works well with the text and the concept to deliver on a feeling of sad majesty and the glory of days long past.
And it is a mother fucking hack. Almost every encounter is just pure combat. The 200 trolls, multiple giant guards with dragons, drow with “hydras”, chamber after chamber stuffed with monsters that amount to one or two sentences and then a long stat block and a longer treasure block. Again, seen as a strategic challenge it’s interesting, but as an “adventure’ it feels much less so.
The map is both glorious and frustrating. It’s provided in page-sections at the back of the book, so, like twelve pages to deliver the entire map. High res and a full map are available on the designers blog, though you have to dig a bit (or google straight to it.) It delivers on the promise of the ruined Throne of the Gods, and has height in places as well as multiple routes in/through areas. Solid. Frustrating as you try to piece it together holistically, especially as certain lair maps spill out in to other map pages. An overview would have helped. Creatures are located on the map, squads of smaller humanoids or individuals for the larger ones. This is relatively good: you can figure out if someone can see/hear/react to the parties incursion/noise/light etc. I did find it VERY hard to read though. The floor is grey colored on the map and sometimes that blended with the, rather smallish, monster letters that made it hard on my eyes and non-trivial to locate the nearest monsters. Size/dimensions are also approximate, with the scale given on the map compass and no traditional square grid overlay on the map. Too small and/or busy, I’d guess. It’s a bit disconcerting. It both feels like it supports the cyclopean vibe but also that it has abstracted the map in a pointcrawl type of thing. It IS a traditional map, just without the grid. But it feels pointcrawlish, perhaps because of both the scale of the halls and the lack of a grid. DIsconcerting, and the monster letters don’t work well in execution even though it IS the correct methodology to take.
Uh … I think everything in this is hostile? There may be one wanderer that is not immediately hostile if the party is strong. Otherwise every wanderer is of the “it attacks” type. Likewise IU think that just about every creature encountered is hostile. In a traditional adventure that would be a minus, but this almost feels like a, idk, Battlesystem thing? Approached as such, as a strategic campaign of war, it makes more sense. In that same sense, the exploration element mainly revolves around the next time the party gets ambushed. There is a puzzle of two and those are pretty well done. And with divination magic the party should get by pretty well. It is, after all, an adventure for levels 9-12. Order of Battle is noted in a few places when it is not obvious from the map which creatures will react.
There are a couple of puzzling choices. One has stars that drop off in to a VERY deep chasm. This being high level D&D, though, the party can easily get to the bottom. A line or two about that would have been nice. Likewise I think that a page or two about “strategic campaign play’ could have been in order, giving the DM advice on how to handle various aspects of assaulting/supporting this place with an army, literally or figuratively, of followers. A missed opportunity.
Huso’s got a striking aesthetic in his products. It works well. The vibe in this is excellent and the art and map helps with that. The writing supports that and while generally on the terser side of things it does get conversational at times. That supports the vibe, but the challenge it support the vibe with the words AND make it obvious. The language seems a little too forced a few too many times. Much of it comes across as window dressing, but, that supports the vibe.
Run as a strategic puzzle this would be interesting, but you’re going to have to support that play style yourself. Run as a typical exploration adventure it is quite lopsided to combat and falls down on the puzzles/roleplaying/interactivity. It DOES support a high level play style though, only gimping the party in maybe two ways: fliers get the attention of doombats and piercers while fucking up with the Throne of the Gods kills you and no Wish will save you. I can live with those.
I’m disappointed. I recognize the vision, and it being partially implemented. Going more in one direction (strategic) or another (exploration) would have helped with this. As would some tweaking to the actual writing to maintain the vibe while increasing clarity.
This is $10 at Lulu. There’s a preview available but it requires Flash, and I ain’t got flash at Lulu.
The link to the product in this review is probably an affiliate link. If you follow the link and buy the product, I make some money. Just thought you should know.
