The Warren

Posted on October 2, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simon Miles
Dunromin University Press
OSRIC
Levels 5-8

Baron Ketterall’s lands are beset by a plague of marauding goblins! Goblins you say? Pah! Who’s afraid of a few poxy goblins? But two experienced parties have already gone looking for the goblin lair – never to be heard of again.  Poxy goblins you say? Be afraid, be very afraid…

This 76 page adventure features a two level dungeon with about a hundred rooms described in about forty pages. Featuring about 400 or so goblins of the “Tuckers Kobolds” variety, it’s more of a strategic challenge than tactical one. It’s light on treasure and does a very poor job of presenting a complex environment in a way the Dm can use it well.

The Tucker situation requires some special commentary from me. This is where the monsters know you’re coming and have spent their lives preparing for you. They use every resource at their disposal to stop the party, hit & run tactics, poison, traps, and everything else. I don’t have a problem with this as long it’s done right. Done Right means a couple of things. First, there’s a fine line between the Goblins Are Prepared and DM Is Fucking Over The Party. Goblins that pay to have a dozen wish spells cast is Fucking Over The Party by the DM. Goblins that live in naturally small spaces that are cramped for normal humans, with associated penalties, is more in the correct light. This, gladly engages in that and not the Wish-gimp, and associated, nonsense. Spaces are small which makes fighting and spells harder to cast, traps generally makes sense and are not TOO out there, and the whole thing doesn’t feel like a Gotcha Adventure. There’s also a quid pro quo thing to think about between the DM and party. If you fight 100 orcs and they are all 1 HD and there’s one orc that looks like all the rest but has 100000 HP and disintegrates at will, well, no fair. In this context, if you are playing “normal” dungeons and suddenly get thrown in to this Jim Ward fantasy fest, well, the DM is not holding up his end of the bargain with that orc. There are some hints in the beginning, with two previous parties being killed off, but that’s about all the warning you’re gonna get. And once in You. Are. In. The goblins will harass retreating parties making it very unlikely that a typical scouting foray will make it back. More could have been done in this area to design around the first retreat, or additional warnings in the beginning to ensure the party knows the rules are changing and this is not a tactical challenge but rather a strategic one.

And strategic it is. This ain’t the Caves of Chaos, it’s more akin to solving the Tomb of Horrors with your 200 orc servants. If that’s the adventure you want to run, and the party either knows that’s what’s up or has a chance at an initial retreat, then great. But, like I said, this place is a fucking deathtrap. Well organized patrols outside and inside, including dudes whose only job it is to make noise to keep sleeping parties awake and distract them to wrong directions. There’s a high level of tactics and monster leadership in this dungeon which you’re gonna have to be ok with. Do Chaos monsters do this, to this degree? That, more than anything else, strains the old Belief ‘o Meter. 

The dungeon proper, claims to be three levels, but that includes the outside with about ten locations and then the two underground levels with about fifty rooms each. The encounters are almost all tactics issues. Hit & Run goblins, traps, and heavy heavy poison use. There’s a few “old wizards lair” rooms with more typical interactivity, but the vast majority of the place are tactics rooms for a swat team raid. Or, maybe, a First Ranger Battalion raid. 😉

Treasure seems exceptionally light for levels 6-8 in a Gold=XP game, but the real issue with the dungeon is its organization. Read-aloud is not bad, but the DM text for virtually every room is lengthy and poorly oriented. These rooms end up being complex affairs, with the tactics for various groups frequently mentioned. It ends up being sentences after sentence after sentence of DM text in typical paragraph form. I would suggest that this is not the right way to present this information. Indents, bullets and bolding are SORELY needed to call out important details for the DM to actually run the room without pausing for multiple minutes in each room to digest the text and formulate consequences. As it’s written I don’t see there being much support at all for a DM in running this. There IS a summary sheet for all the monsters, at the end which is GREAT, but the rooms proper need a good rethink in how to organize and layout the text in order to achieve the impact (hell on PC’s) desired. This lack of organization is foreshadowed by the introduction text for the DM in the opening “hook/hiring” scenes. The text is columns long with nothing done to highlight important facts. You either have to memorize it, slow down the game to a monstrous affair, or whip out Ye Olde Highlighter … in which case why didn’t the designer do that for you? 

Likewise support for ongoing effects. Fighting and spell-casting in cramped quarters. Poison impact. These could have been included on the summary sheet in just a few words and quick reference for “Always On” facts needed. Andthe place is supposed to be full of filth and parasites … mentioned once and never again. Imagine, though, a border around each page with some “inspirational” words for filth and parasites for the DM to throw in for each room. That would have been good support for the DM and thrown in a metric fuck ton of great fun for the DM and party.

This ain’t the first Tuckers Kobolds adventure and it won’t be the last. Let’s hope future endeavors come out more like Jim Kramers Usherwood offerings, or those Troll Lord vivking-ish offerings. (Velsham?)

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is nineteen pages, but doesn’t actually show you any encounters, so, poor preview. Your best bet is to look at pages seven through ten of the preview. This describes some general information, like rumors and wanderers and the like. You can get an idea from those pages of how complex information and meaningful information is presented in long column form, making it hard to use as reference during play. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/283730/SM06-The-Warren?1892600

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The Sunken Temple of Chloren-Var

Posted on September 30, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
Peter Racek
Wolfhill Entertainment
OSR
Levels 1-4

Plunged deep beneath forsaken swamplands centuries ago, the Sunken Temple of Chloren-Var now waits to be rediscovered.  Untold fortune, magic, and ancient secrets await those brave enough to enter the Sunken Temple, but only if they can thwart the unrelenting evil which lurks within its dismal halls.

Uh, so, yeah, this is a thing.

This one hundred page adventure features a dungeon with about seventy rooms. MASSIVE amounts of read-aloud lead to an adventure that is nigh incomprehensible. This is then combined with a “generic” system of play, based on D&D, that seems more like a fantasy heartbreaker. Light on treasure, I’m still having a hard time figuring out what is going with it after going through it multiple times.

I don’t know where to start with this. You go to an inn to find no room in it. Then someone gets killed and you get their room. In it you find a hook to the sunken temple. I guess the motivation is redeeming the dead guy by doing what he failed to do in the dungeon? 

What follows is fifty to sixty pages of read-aloud. In italics. I know I’m prone to hyperbole, but I’m not fucking around. It’s about fifty or sixty pages of read-aloud. The vast VAST majority of the text in this is read-aloud. In italics. 

First the italics. It’s hard to read. Italics works fine for a phrase or to call attention to one part of the text but it is TERRIBLE for long stretches of text. It’s hard to read. Box it, shade it, indent it, but don’t italics ong sections of text. It’s a major usability issue.

Of course, then there’s the length of the read-aloud proper. MOUNTAINS of it. There are page long sections of read-aloud. Every room is full of it. It’s unbelievable; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a product like this before … maybe in Sword of the Bastard Elf or Ocean of Lard? But those were Choose Your Own Adventure things … and it feels like even THEY didn’t have this much. 

It’s bad design 101. People don’t listen to read-aloud. I’ll point out again that WOTC study that found that players stop paying attention after two or three sentences of read-aloud. Clearly designers haven’t gotten the message. 

I know the arguments: zero-prep. Easy to run. But man, there’s far, far, easier and better ways to accomplish that. Slapping “Players React” in the middle of a p[age of read-aloud is not the way to immerse folks and have a good game. There’s so much read-aloud, and it forms in to such a wall of text, that’s it hard for the DM to figure out what is going on inside of this place. Further, when the read-aloud TELLS the players what they feel and think, that’s bad read-aloud. There’s no cohesiveness readily apparent to help the DM run this. After a few runs through the text I’m still having trouble figuring out how the place is supposed to operate.

There’s bolding & indents, which shows an attempt to make things more readable. But it doesn’t work well. The room headings are bolded also, so all of the bolding runs together in places giving an even more wall of text vibe. And Wall of Text is a usability issue. A major one.

The system used here is generic, and based on D&D. It feels more like the old Role Aids generic than it does the Eldritch Enterprises generic. I can’t figure out why the choice was made. You didn’t want to include the Labyrinth Lord license? Deeper in to this, there are new systems for fear, lighting (to the extent that its DM advice includes discouraging light spells and the party bringing in torches and oil. Uh … No.) new systems for locks and searching. There’s more than little fantasy heartbreaker going on.

And it’s random, in places, for the sake of being random. Where are the secret rooms? Roll for it! What are some key plot elements? Roll for it! Why is this? It would have been much simpler to just write a standard adventure, I don’t see this sort of randomness complementing the adventure at all. It’s similar, I guess, to the random elements to Ravenloft. 

This is a curiosity only, to see how far read-aloud can be pushed in an adventure. It’s got very low interactivity, with the party fighting skeletons and couple of puzzles. Treasure is very light for a Gold=XP system, as core OSR is. Let’s hope future offerings are better,

This is $6 at Drivethru. The preview is sixteen pages. In spite of this, you’re going to get no sample rooms, so it’s a failure. Scrolling to the end, you do get to see the (VERY long) intro, and all of the read aloud, which IS an excellent indicator of the sorts of room formatting you’re going to get. Look on my Read Aloud ye mighty and despair!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/271274/The-Sunken-Temple-of-ChlorenVar?1892600

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(5e) A Mishap of Ill Portent

Posted on September 28, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Travis Legge
Self-published
5e
Levels 1-3

While the characters shop in the marketplace of a small village, a thunderous boom interrupts the peaceful commerce. A large plume of smoke rises from the outskirts of town, and the locals rightly determine that the source of the blast must be the home of a local wizard named Tsendur. Investigating, the party discovers that something terrible and powerful has been stolen from the old wizard that threatens to unleash the power of a long dead Titan and endanger every life on Ghelspad!

This 25 page adventure features a six room tower, on fire, described in three pages. It probably takes place in less than two minutes. It is more like the inciting event to a new adventure path (which is what it is) than it is an adventure. But at least you gain a level after those 100 seconds! The writing is poor, but it does make good use of fire, exhaustion, and terrain rules to create a little scene that’s different than most.

While in town you hear an explosion and see a small home with attached three-level tower on fire in a major way. Unknown to the party, the wizard on the top floor is trapped and unconscious under rubble and will die in 20 rounds. Thus, the time limit, which the party is unaware of. “That’s Franks house” is, I think, the extent of the urgency conveyed. This amounts to a hidden rule and those are typically not good things in D&D. Knowing there’s someone in the house, trapped, allows for more tension as the party makes decisions balancing risk and reward. It’s a small thing to add someone yelling that they say Frank go in the house, but it’s a key issue. The town guard is, of course, otherwise occupied preventing panic. I get it, but why have a town guard at all then? Just put a little work in to your pretext hook people, it’s worth it.

Likewise the use of skill checks in this adventure is poor. DC 14 to notice figures in inside the house. DC 12 to calm someone … to say they say figures, and so on. It’s rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice, for trivia. “Make a DC 10 check to talk across the room” or “Make a DC 12 to tell the sun is shining.” There’s a right way and a wrong way to do a skill check and this thing is absolutely engaged in the wrong way. (ok, Calming someone might be ok, it’s the “trivia” aspect that gets me, every time.)

There’s not a lot of read-aloud, but what there is has an italics font, never a good idea for long sections of text; it impacts readability. It also refers to the party in third person: “While the structure is largely intact as the characters first come to the scene, the fire is quickly spreading.” Uh, ok, so, no effort at all then? THis lack of effort continue to some of the editing: in one of the rooms it looks like there’s meant to be some zombies, but its never mentioned, just some scaling guidelines to include +1 zombies if the party is tough. So, not an editor but rather a copyeditor? Either the text is missing or its unclear, both jobs for our editor. And a good one would have perhaps pointed out that spending a bunch of your word budget (three pages in 25 …) describing the door situation in EVERY SINGLE ROOM is perhaps duplicating what the map shows? But, that’s an editor and not a copyeditor.

Putting all of this nonsense aside, Travis is trying to create a situation in which there’s a burning building that the party needs to deal with. His support of this is admirable. There are rules for the smoke and terrain. There are smoke inhalation rules handled via the exhaustion levels. There’s locked doors to deal with. There are fire-immune zombies to deal with. And, of course, there’s the trapped wizard. Putting out the fire is also handled, including a bucket brigade.

He’s done a good job by layering things to make the 90 second adventure an interesting little problem to solve. The multiple obstacles, the appeal to common techniques are all good. He’s also got a series of maps showing how the fire spreads minute after minute. Maybe a summary sheet of the rules, in a less verbose context, along with the fire spread map, all on one page, would have been nice. Still, it takes the concept of the “all session long fight” to a place that is WAY more interesting thAn it was in 3e or 4e.

It’s a decent little ENCOUNTER if you can get past the little issues and make the timer better understood. It’s also 25 pages for a single encounter, and the beginning of a new adventure path. I get that people expect a certain page length, but how far can you stretch things? 25 pages at least …

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages and doesn’t show you anything of the adventure, making it absolutely worthless. I don’t care about the fucking art or backstory, I care to get a preview of the content I’m actually buying to use: the encounters. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/281612/A-Mishap-of-Ill-Portent?1892600

Posted in 5e, No Regerts, Reviews | 4 Comments

Annihilation Rising

Posted on September 25, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Lloyd Metcalf
Fail Quad Games
1e/5e
Level 5

Monsieur Nerluc clings to the local mountainside. Villagers tell frightened children that the monstrous form of earthen stone is just a natural rock formation. It’s a lie they’d like to believe themselves. Monsieur Nerluc is, in fact, the lord of all tarasques, and strange cultists seek to waken him. If they do, his age-old toothache will begin to throb, and he’s going to be horrendously angry.

This sixteen page linear adventure is everything one comes to expect from a 5e adventure and nothing as one would expect from an OSR adventure. A quick 1e conversion cash grab, it’s full of skill checks, inspiration, low treasure and long read-aloud. Joy.

This is a drop-in adventure for use when you need a quick break from your game. Of course, it’s set in the designers home system, Altera, has a strong “French influence”, the setting features ley lines, and there’s supposed to be a bunch of tarrasques, with the one in this adventure being their king. So, you know, seamless drop in to your campaign world! Seamless doesn’t have to be generic but the more idiosyncratic your ideas the less seamless the adventure, obviously. Or, maybe, not obviously, since this adventure goes there.

I use the word “adventure” loosely. There is really no hook to speak of and it’s just some linear encounters after that. After meeting some hippy cultists on the road you go up a mountain trail to tail them, get caught in an avalanche, get a task from some griffons to kill a troll, get carried to the top by them, and fight the head cultist. Dishes Done!

There’s no real hook. There are a few rumors and an actual nice bit of advice to throw in some earthquakes leading up the adventure. I like that advice, the more continuous integration of adventures rather than obvious stand-along adventure modules … but I do note that it runs counter to the advice that this is a side-trek adventure to thrown in when you need a break, etc. But, the main point here is that there is no hook. There’s no reason for the party to follow the cultists they find at all. They seem happy and I guess it’s their talk of waking the tarrasque that is supposed to que the party? Do gooding? It’s VERy tenuous. 

The first cult encounter is another bright spot. Hippy cultists rather than the dark brood that most cultists in fantasy tend to be. Hippies are more like real life … which is scarier and more relatable. I think Hack ‘n Slash did a take on this in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. It was good then and is good now.

Read-aloud is LOOOOONG. The entire thing is low on loot for a 1e Gold=XP adventure. The text continually makes reference to skill checks, inspiration, and other 5e mechanics. Clearly, a 5e adventure that just had stats replaced in order to sell a few 1e copies as a cash grab. I LOATHE the cash grab side of conversions. They seemed to plague the earlier spate of reviews in the early days, as designers just slapped a 1e, OSRIC, or LabLord label on their two encounter Pathfinder linear suck-fest. 

Oh! Oh! And that Avalanche? You either die, get buried alive, or make 3 DEX checks for 6d6 damage each time. And if you fail one you have to make a second check or get thrown off the cliff. Is this adventure serious? 

Clearly, just a quick 5e stat-converted to 1e for cash. And a sucky 5e adventure at that. That avalanche is a doozy! It’s too bad, I was really looking forward to a more historical take on the tarrasque. Serves me right for having expectations. In fact, if I ever rename the blog it’s going to be “Misaligned Expectations” or something like that.

This is $4 at DriveThru. There’s no preview, otherwise you wouldn’t buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/283071/Annihilation-Rising-1E?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

(Review) Saving Throw Fanzine

Posted on September 17, 2019 by Bryce Lynch

Jim Kramer is the guy behind Usherwood Publishing. Several of his adventures appear on my Best & Regerts list, including Arachnaphobia and most his Bone Hilt campaign series. He does EXCELLENT maps and, doing layout for a living, his layouts are top notch. He’s a behind the scenes guy, doing layout work for many things, including Knockspell and OSRIC. This 64 page fanzine was put together by several folks as a fundraiser to help with expenses after his third(!) brain tumor. I’m going to review the adventures. You should go pick this up because you’re not an asshole. And, also, because the adventures are quite good. Also, there’s a lot of OTHER content in it, beyond the adventures.

Sorcerer’s Stone – by Keith Sloan [No Level Given]

This five page adventure describes a dungeon with about forty rooms. On top of a hill is a ritual site where a cult gathers to … perform rituals and make human sacrifices. Underneath is the dungeon with a couple of evil priests (who think the cultists are amateurs) and a traditional “ogres, spiders, etc” dungeon. The map is good with decent complexity, same level stairs,pits, some water features and the like. Decent loops. Each room gets a bolded room title to orient the DM, a good touch. It is, essentially, a minimally keyed dungeon. “2. GUARD CHAMBER: This old guard chamber is empty.” and “A Carrion Crawler has made its way into this room.” tend to be the extent of the descriptions beyond stats and treasure. This does allow for about 24 rooms per page, but I would have preferred to see four or five more words, or, perhaps different words, in each room description. Instead of a carrion crawler moving in (and, as an aside, a lot of the descriptions are like that “X moved in”) I’d like to see something like a carrion crawler hanging from the ceiling, or munching on a goblin or something. A more active description. The cult activity outside is done well but could be organized better with bullets and bolding, and non-monster interactivity is a bit low. One more pass through to make the rooms active, clean up the outside, and insert a little more interactivity  and this would have been top tier.

Perladon Manor – by Gabor Lux – Levels 3-5

This delightful five page adventure describes fifteen rooms of a ruined manor over three-ish levels. Melan uses a single-column paragraph form, but arranges the sentence/text order well to put First Things First and then expand on them later, with good use of bolding. The encounters are great examples of the non-standardized style of D&D, with stabbing frescoes causing shadows damage, hypnotic patterns caused by magical loadstones, and inscriptions providing hints leading to more adventure. High interactivity and a fantasy vibe that is not constrained by the rulebooks provide a great adventuring adventure in a small page count and room count. 

The Tiled Labyrinth – Guy Fullerton – Levels (It’s got a minotaur)

This two page mini-dungeon is a labyrinth with about fifteen rooms. It provided three maps of the level and a small set of rules (close the incense burner) on changing from one map to another … which basically means the rooms stay the same and the hallways/doors switch layouts. It’s a clever idea for representing a labyrinth layout … minotaurs traditionally have a hard time in D&D having their lairs represented in anything other than “you’re confused at intersections” mechanics. Guys descriptions are good, with the details focused on player-oriented things and activities. Rich soil, copper watering cans, inset stone shelves … Guy slaps in the extra adjective/adverb to spruce up his descriptions well. One of the incense burners is a vented statuette of a heroic man holding decapitated bull head … with a lever to open/close the vents. Plus there’s a red meteoric long sword of sleek, angular design. Sweet! A good, if small, entry from Guy.

Lizard Man Lair – by Steve Smith Levels 5-7

This fourteen page adventure describes an outdoor lizard man lair. It’s complex, in a way these things usually are not. There are multiple factions, other race NPC’s, slaves, animals, varying terrain. Guidelines for several different approaches are offered up. It is, perhaps, more complex than can be handled in two-column magazine format, something that I sometimes thought in Dungeon Magazine. Meaning that it’s deep and complex but that the 2-column format doesn’t work well for this. I’m not saying it CANT, but that it would be a lot of work. As a standalone product it is both of limited scope (one lair) and better suited for a more leisurely layout/format that could be targeted to its complexity and depth. Good ideas in it.

The Mere Beneath by Guy Fullerton, Allan T Grohe jr and Henry Grohe – Level 5

This six page adventure details about 25 locations in a dungeon level with a large water feature. A great adventure in a fanzone full of great adventures. The map is interesting, complex, and offers on-map details to encourage creativity and help the DM. The wanderers are doing things. The creatures in rooms are doing things: bloody-faced from finishing a meal or tearing apart something. Writing is evocative with small little room text written so as to be more than the sum of their parts, inspiring the DM to greatness and to build upon them. Zones and multiple levels themes are well used. Creatures are just a bit from norm with ghouls and ghasts wearing bone masks. It all combines to give that non-standard OD&D vibe that I love so much. I might put this in my Darkness Beneath binder, as a sublevel from the waterfall in the Crabmen level. (And perhaps the level title implies a relationship to Darkness Beneath? The tone matches well.) A solid marriage of usability, interactive, and evocative.

This is $13 at DriveThru. Go get it!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/288750/Saving-Throw-fundraiser-fanzine-for-James-D-Kramer

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 11 Comments

The Village and the Witch

Posted on September 16, 2019 by Bryce Lynch

By Davide Pignedoli

Daimon Games

LOTFP

Levels 2-3

This fifteen page supplement has some tables in it that lets the DM generate a witch, a village, and some opposition to the witch in the village, as well as some witch events. It’s not an adventure but rather a situation-builder (in fact, I think the designer uses almost the same words.) I think it’s good at what it does.

I only review adventures … but sometimes I buy the wrong thing, mostly because it’s in the wrong category on DriveThru and I don’t really read the descriptions. And sometimes I’m feeling curious and go for something adjacent. Like this supplement.

A theme I haven’t touched on in awhile is how different adventures have a need for different sorts of organization. Exploratory things, like dungeons and so on, fit the room/key format really well. As free text they work less well. And room/key doesn’t necessarily work well at all in other, non-exploratory situations, like a social adventure. Understanding what sort of adventure is being written, or what a specific portion of the adventure is trying to do, is key to getting the right format … which in turn is key to helping the DM run it, a major goal of the designer.

And that’s what this supplement is doing: it’s providing the DM the tools they need to build a situation in a village that has a witch in it. There are seven or so tables that describe what’s going on in the village, organized via die drop. The die drop helps determines the layout of the village with the results of the dice being the structures and situations involved. Thus we get a little information about the village, the basic layout of the place, major features, the witch details, and who opposes the witch. The tables, taken together, are excellent as inspiration and for building a situation. And that’s what they are trying to do: build a situation. This ain’t Seclusiums “they have green eyes” bullshit. It recognizes the dynamics required to create tension, and therefore adventure. The booklet tells you several times that Things Have Reached A Boiling Point. The tables help with that. The opposition is dynamic on the tables. The witch events are dynamic. The tables are designed to strategically locate open gas barrels in a village where everyone lights their cigarettes with a blowtorch they carry. This is not passive. It’s meant to create a situation FOR PLAY and create a situation it does!

A couple of quirks about the supplement. It doesn’t go out of its way to get the party involved. It’s more like “you see a mob” or a burning building, ro someone complaining, or so on. Thus the hook tends to be curiosity, although the motivations of the witches allies and of the witches opposition may also lead to them trying to get the party involved. It feels natural … but it’s also one of the more … reachiest reaches in using the tables for inspiration. It’ also could have used a summary sheet of the tables. They are spread out over the book, one or two per page. The surrounding fifteen pages of text and art do a good job of adding content to the tables and setting up the appropriate vibe to get the DM in to the mood, as well as providing some examples of how, say, the village priest is an ally to the witch. That’s all great. But, if the core tables were on one page then it would pretty trivial to crank out a village on the fly when the party reaches it. Or even attach it to my DM screen or put it in my binder. Which gives me an idea … what if EVERY village had a witch in it with things boiling over? What fun! 

I don’t have a problem with tables. I love The Dungeon Dozen, the rear of  the 1e DMG is great, and I use tables sometimes to generate ideas for an adventure or a room. The brain tends to work best, IMO, if given a couple of things to work from. “Make a village to adventure in!” is a big ask. But, if you seed the task with a few random rolls, well, the brain is good at making connections between things. This recognizes that and takes advantage of it.

I’d have no problem paying for this as a supplement. It’s not an adventure, so I don’t feel I can slap a Best on it, but it’s certainly worth checking out if you want a village generator that gives you not Tavern Names and General Stores but playable situations.

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows you some intro/framing pages and then all of the core tables for the die drop. You’re seeing the core of the generation in the preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/251586/The-Village-And-The-Witch?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 1 Comment

Spiral Isles

Posted on September 14, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Jere Hart, Shane Walshe
Stygian Studios
5e/OSR
Dead PC's

The adventure is designed to give dead characters a chance to return to life, or as the framework for a campaign into the underworld.

This 57 page pointcrawl details an underworld location in which the party can attempt to return to life. It’s large, with locations having as much detail as a Wilderland hexcrawl. Like Wilderlands, the DM needs to bring significant abilities to bear to flesh the locations out. But it DOES provide the sort of unified cohesion that is missing from many hexcrawls. This place is themed and consistent. It’s easy to recommend … if you know what you are getting yourself in to.

There are 21 islands in a little spiral island chain. Each island has three or so locations on it. There are some ferrymen that will follow certain routes between islands, generally each island being connected to three or so other ones in this manner. Oh, and you’re dead and a ghost. If you manage to collect enough lifepoints you can, at the last island, make it through the magic door and come back to life. And there are a lot of other spirits between you and there to beg, borrow, steal, and kill you to take your lifepoints away. And a few to help you.

I always got a bit of a baroque vibe from Blue Medusa. If you lighten up with that vibe a little and combine it with Planescape and Sigil and turn THAT setting down by about a factor of five or ten then you’ll have something akin to what’s going on here. And maybe some Hunger Game Capitol turned down some also. 

You wake up in the middle of an island. It’s PACKED with other souls. Shoulder to shoulder. Too much jostling and the people on the edge fall in to the void, forever lost. If you stand still enough, they say, you will be rescued. One end has a small coral with some mindless people in it. Eventually it fills up and a large Spanish galleon shows up and hauls them away. You can see some ferrymen off shore … you’re told not to trust them. Crowded, crammed in, ignorant, this is how you start. But of course you were adventurers and not like the people on the island. As you work your way up the island chain you encounter thugs, villages, towns, cities, the mob, rebels, rumors, cultists, swindlers, and just about the whole gamut of society. The further you travel, the more lifepoints you must have, the “wealthier” you are, and richier/more cosmopolitan the islands become. The goal is the last island, which has a door you can pass through if you have enough, bringing you back to life. 

Along the way are factions. Thugs. Thug rebels. Rich people galore with their motives. Governors of the regions, organized guard groups, cultists, The Real Rebels, and Mayor, pulling the strings. It is from this, the factions and dynamics, that a significant tension is created. A wants X and B is trying to stop them. Who are you helping? Are you joining a faction? Are you working against another one? Or are you just trying to ignore them all and keep them from manipulating you so you can get your loot and get out. Hey … they all have a lot of loot … (loot being a way to gain lifepoints.)

It’s a city adventure with all of the massive social intricacy and subplots that bring. It’s a hexcrawl/pointcrawl, with the openness that brings. It’s pretty fucking kickass, and reminds me a lot of that Mothership adventure I reviewed recently, Dead Planet.

The ideas presented, the settings and scenarios, are great, with the writing a little flat. It a bit too workmanlike in its descriptions, not trying hard enough to really convey the evocativeness of the situations encountered. That makes it a little harder than I’d prefer to really run with and make my own. Still, it’s got terse writing and it’s easy to grasp the overall situation of the many locations easily. 

There’s a myriad of little mini-systems and other details that pop up, all pretty well handled. At times it does seem like some weird heartbreaker of a system, but it doesn’t go too far overboard. 

I would note, that for a huge expansive setting, the NPC table only has about twenty entries. You’re gonna need to think fast on the fly or do your own NPC table ahead of time in order to come up with the, inevitably numerous, NPC’s the party tries to interact with. Flavour is the name of the game here and some serious margin work to include more on most of the pages would have been a nice touch and an opportunity lost.

It’s a hexcrawl-type product, in hell, that does the planes better than just about any other product, even if it’s not really a planes adventure. If you go in expecting a hexcrawl type product then you should be satisfied. it’s also got a lot more in common with OSR type adventures than it does the bland railroads that seem to dominate 5e. It’s got conversion notes for both 5e & OSR.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Naughty designer! No cookie for you! How are folks supposed to know what they are buying? You can get an idea of the layout, in miniature, from the kickstarter pages but it’s not enough to see the actual content. Major miss.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/279703/Spiral-Isles?1892600

(And I’m not a gonna mention the fact that the Armory is missing a list, however brief, or its contents … when turning weapons in to mana/lifepoints is one of the major themes of the adventure.)

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 2 Comments

Gellarde Barrow

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 

By Michael Moscrip
NGR
NGR
No Level Given

GELLARDE BARROW is a small site based adventure about the joys of robbing from both the living and the dead, wacky hijinx are bound to ensue.

This twelve page adventure details a small barrow tomb with ten rooms in about four pages. Decently interactive with evocative descriptions in places, it does tend to bog down descriptions with minutia. It seems to enjoy testing the limit of how many words you can have in a paragraph and still have it usable. It’s a nice adventure, especially considering it’s a new author, but gets rough to use in places. 

The dungeon is small but has several nice features. The creatures inside ALMOST act like factions. Some bandits. A hippo. Some stone golem-like things, and a root monster. And, of course, the undead. While they are not really factions their own little zones feel unique to them and it FEELS like they have some relationship, no matter how small, to some of the others. This, along with the evocative nature of the text, makes the place seem like it has a lot of depth.

The text descriptions in the various rooms do a good job working together to form a kind of cohesive vibe. The same-level stairs inside are steep . 10’ raise in 5’ of space. That conjures up a certain type of picture in your head. A corridor thick with tree roots, giant trilobites, and the undead rising up THROUGH their stone sarcophagus with an erie green glow. This place does a pretty job of both feeling like an ancient barrow (and I LUV barrow adventure) as well as feeling like a classic dungeon crawl adventure. 

Interactivity is pretty good also. There’s levers to pull, water to raise and lower. Hallways full of tree roots and caskets to break in to. The key here is, I think, the anticipation. There is an element of the unknown. Of barriers and obstacles, things to play with and challenges to overcome. Most adventures just have combat, maybe with a skill check somewhere. This, however, does things right by having a mix of things in the dungeon. It’s SO much more interesting, as a player, to be able to squeal with horror and delight as things are uncovered and your actions have reactions and/or consequences. 

Topping things off is a great magic item: a wooden mallet that lets you hammer two things together. ANY two things. Like nailing an incorporeal ghost to a wall … with suitable example provided in the adventure. The item is described not mechanically, with a skill roll or plus to hit, but rather by what it does: nailing two things together. This is MUCH more mysterious and wondrous, and is the right way to do things with magic items. 

On the down side, the headers used for rooms is some kind of weirdo font, hollow, and not the easiest to read. A little Order of Battle, especially for the bandits, would have been nice also. They are just generic bandits, as described, and could have used a gimmick, like royal tax collectors or orphan fund or something to give me a little extra. 

But, the length of the text itself is the main issue. It’s using a traditional paragraph format but it’s also trying to be smart about it. It bolds the major features and puts the text after those words in order of things that might be important about it. This essentially mirrors a common format I like to encourage beginners to use. It falls down a bit though because of the sheer amount of detail that some of the rooms engage in. If A then B. If B then C. There are hold 1” deep every 3” along the roofline except on alternate Tuesdays. This is getting in to Trap/Door porn, the condition where some designers seem to believe that a two paragraph description of every trap and/or door is needed. There’s also an element of disconnectedness in places; the first room goes through the description of a large chair as the main feature of the room … only to later note that there may be a bandit asleep on the chair. Now both the chair and bandit are bolded, so your eyes will be drawn to it, but somehow this feels wrong and/or confusing.

Speaking of confusing … parts of the dungeon can be flooded. WHICH parts I’m still not sure. There are text descriptions with “the corridor to the best of the room X up to the height of stair Y” and so on. Reading it twice I still don’t get it. A little shading on the map would have done wonders to show the potential for water. Again this looks like a Dyson map and it feels like people just take his maps and don’t alter them much if at all. The map needs a little context, that would have pretty much eliminated my (continuing) confusion.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $3. The preview is four pages and, alas, showing you nothing of the encounters. Bad Zz!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/280259/Gellarde-Barrow?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 6 Comments

Halls of the Bonelord

Posted on September 9, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Alexander Langlet
Stealth's Modules & TRPG Content
1e
levels 1-3

… Pillage the Halls of the Bonelord, an ancient king who’s name has been lost to time. …

This five page adventure is a dungeon with twenty rooms. Single column, It is one step removed from being minimally keyed. There’s a decently evocative sentence or two here or there, but is short on mundane loot and interactive content.

Well, I say “short on interactive content”, but … to its credit the adventure does not have every monster attack as soon as the party opens the door. There’s snake, shadows and skeletons that only attack when the party fuck with them/their room. In some cases this causes to arise that most delicious of things: zany party plans to get the treasure. A long abandoned alter, covered in dust, obvious loot on it … and a shadow flitting about. Fuck yeah I’m goon try my luck! Or a large snake, coiled around some loot. Or some skeletons guarding a massive set of double doors. This is some fine examples of exploratory D&D play. Pushing your luck is tied to the resource mechanic in Gold=XP systems. And I fucking love temptation (and, as a player FALL FOR IT EVERY SINGLE TIME.) Beyond a few instances though, there’s not much here beyond some combat. And that’s too bad. Interactivity means more than combat and those few examples of pushing your luck are not really enough, I think, to support a twenty room dungeon.

Treasure is low here, there’s not much at all. Which I always find weird in an OSR game. The goal of the game is to get the loot and I think there’s an implicit agreement between the DM and the players that there WILL be loot in the dungeon, especially in a single isolated level like this. If not then the DM will, I think, fall short on players in a classic Gold=XP style. What’s in it for me, as a player, if you remove the gold from gold=XP but keep the system? There is a decent amount of potions and a wand … maybe I’m just discounting the XP from those too much.

The main baddie is a 3HD AC3 skeleton. That’s a fearsome combo for lower level players, but probably ok with some running away. There’s also a room with 60 cubic feet of green slime in it. Yes, CUBIC. A 20×30 room 10’ high filled to the ceiling with green slime. My mind is furiously working out all of the possibilities with that much green slime at my disposal …

There’s a sentence or two that’s a good start to some room descriptions.  “Piles of dry and cracked snakeskin are scattered in this room …” or a dry & dusty room with two skeletons with polearms guarding a set of double doors. A sack is tattered and a bowl engraved with opals. A bock of grey stone with a black cloth draped over it, a silver bowl and fist-sized gem on top and everything covered in dust. It’s not bad. Not enough of the rooms do this and it’s inconsistent in the rooms that do.

The room content is close to being minimally keyed. In one room a couple of kobolds stand guard armed with slings and staves. That’s the extent of the room description … Vampire Queen turned from stat block to sentence.

Low loot, inconsistent description, low-ish interactivity … at least its not padded.

This is $1 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Put a preview in. Even if the adventure costs $1. Even if it’s 2 pages long. Give us a view of what we’re buying!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/286824/Halls-of-the-Bonelord?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

(5e) The Right to Arm Bugbears

Posted on September 7, 2019 by Bryce Lynch

Curtis Baum

AAW Games

5e

Level 6

Strange humanoids are gathering in the nearby Forest of Mists and have been exploring ancient ruins using maps stolen during the robberies. Can the party stop these creatures before they are able to raise an army of kobolds, gnolls, and bugbears?

This 28 page adventure contains seven encounters. I don’t even know how to summarize it. There’s nothing to it but, essentially, monster stats?

Sometimes I am a loss to convey what an adventure is and this is one of those times. 

Let’s imagine a minimally keyed adventure with seven encounters. “4 orc guards” and “1 bugbear sargeant” for example. To each of those lets’s add some read-aloud. Something like “The bugbear sergeant notices you and says It’s time for weapons practice boys!” But also lets make read-aloud lengthy in places at a couple of paragraphs or more. This is, essentially, the adventure. Yeah, I know, if you abstract enough you could describe many adventures this way. You don’t need to do much abstracting to this, though, to make it happen.

Each scene (since that’s what they are, not encounters), has a little section at the beginning. It describes doors. Lighting. Mood. History. Walls. It’s the same offset format for all locations, covering each of the same topics. It’s as if someone had a form they had to fill out and they just blindly went down the boxes typing things in. Some of the form boxes are clearly supposed to be mechanical. Giving the DC of a door in some sort of fixed format has been popular for awhile, especially in Tactical Miniatures of 4e. And that’s what this feels like. Just a little bit more pasted on, just like 4e adventures/encounters/scenes were, so you could call it something more than a wargame/boardgame. This adventure is just one step removed from the The Fantasy Trip, and it’s not a big step either. There’s a puzzle at some locations to work ot after your fight. You get to roll perception to figure out some guards talking to you are actually Orcs In Disguise! Monsters attack no matter what, even if you give then a 200gp bribe. Just fight your fight and go to the next DM encounter. 

Look, I know D&D covers a wide spectrum. But something has to mean SOMETHING, doesn’t it, in order to have some kind of interactive discussion? The scene setting in this is terrible, perfunctory. It takes 28 pages to describe a couple of combats. This is not the D&D I know and love. I don’t know, I’m glad people feel enabled to write stuff. I just fucking wish they’d take some time and figure out HOW to write stuff. I just can’t go on with this review. THERE’S NOTHING TO THIS FUCKING THING

This nonsense is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is excellent, you can figure out exactly what you’re getting from it. I suggest page two for an excellent look at the “scene overview” form, read-loud, and bold adventure styling. 


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/286401/5E-B12-The-Right-to-Arm-Bugbears?1892600

Posted in 5e | 10 Comments