A dirty pair of hungry goblin children wander upon the party on the wilderness side of The Untamed Gauntlet. Through difficult communication, the party manages to find out that something bad happened to their clan. The children, still unaware of the villainous nature of man to goblin, attempt to convince their newfound ’friends’ to come and help. Leading the party back to the lair, they are eventually confronted with the fact that the clans own hunting wolves are responsible for the clan’s demise. To make matters worse, it appears the crazed nature of the wolves, due to the arcane effects of the poison has transformed the once ordinary wolves into poison wielding beasts in their own right. Will the party overcome these freaks of nature and their poison attacks, and what will become of the goblin children themselves?
Nothing to see here, move along.
This sixteen page adventure features a five room linear dungeon. With encounters spanning a page or more, the backstory and irrelevant detail is strong with this one.
The exploration of Aegis Studios carpet-bombing of content continues, and probably will as long as different designers keep producing content for it. I think this is designer number six under the Aegis banner? Aegis certainly came on strong with O&O content.
The hook encounter is a page long. It involves two goblin children coming out of the forest, hungry, asking the party for help. This should have been the first warning … a full page for this is long, with separate read-alouds for day and night. To its credit it does present a second hook, for when the party kills the kids; a diseased wolf shows up and you can track it back to the same caves.
Otherwise …
To find the goblin cave you need to make a wisdom check. If you fail you can try again next hour. Each hour you get a +1 bonus. There are no wanderers, so it’s just pointless dice rolling.
The encounters are between a column and a page and half long. Two giants rats? That’s a column of text. Three goblins, that’s a page and half because of all the backstory they could relate to you. An empty room is a quarter page. Two wolves is a page long. This is all textbook padding through history and other detail that’s irrelevant to the game at hand. “The remaining goblins from Area 2 have recently killed a couple of giant rats that ventured into their lair obviously looking for an easy meal. The goblins managed to kill both but only managed to drag one back to Area 2 before the Venom Wolves from below ventured up to see what the noise was all about. It is unknown why they chose to leave the remaining dead giant rat where it was and not claim it as a meal.” In the end I sigh, roll my eyes, and thank Vecna I never have to try to run this at the table. There’s just way too much shit for each room to be able to scan it and run it easily. Padding, filler, poorly organized … it’s words for the sake of words. I wonder if Travis pays per word?
The female goblins are listed with HD:1-1. They have 14HP, 12HP, and 8HP. Is this on a d20? Maybe it’s just me, but something seems off to me …
This is $2 at DriveThru, where Featured Reviewer Megan R. gives it five stars. A quick check of her last sixty reviews shows one three star review (for a Delta Green DM screen) a couple of four stars and mostly five star reviews. This is the world we live in.
Anyway, the preview is four pages. The last page shows the Wisdom Check for the cave, the first room, and the start of the (1.5 page) second room. Room one is a good example of what to expect, only much much much more so, in terms of padding.
By Vance Atkins
Leicester's Rambles
B/X
"Low Level mooks"
… So we have a cleric and thief who found themselves allied in adventures, found their own subterranean outpost, and created a space that reflects their two characters’ personalities. …
This 21 page single-column adventure features a dungeon with 24 rooms and FOUR room with creature encounters! Yet Another Generic Adventure, with a focus on irrelevant background information.
Background information drives me nuts. Specifically, background information that does not contribute to the adventure. ESPECIALLY in an adventure that desperately needs more to it. Designers seem to confuse more words, or background detail, for gameable content. “More is better”, Pay Per Word, failed novelist syndrome … for whatever reason the inclusion of a bunch of garbage that in no way contributes to an adventure gets under my skin. It’s trivia. And it gets in the way of actually useful information, making it all the more difficult to scan room text and therefore run the adventure.
You wanna throw off a phrase here or there in an adventure that otherwise focuses on gameable detail? That’s fine. An occasional sly remark to the DM? Sure. A section on legend lore in a higher level adventure? Ok.
When the adventure is desperate for specificity, gameable content, detail that adds to an evocative nature, or interactivity, and then you include motivations for someone 300 hundred years dead and is Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Adventure … this is when the frustratoion builds up inside of me.
Guardroom – Formerly a guard post and small barrack … the room has been stripped of most useful items.
Barracks – A barracks room, the room has been similarly raided.
The tunnel is one of several in the complex, designed by Dufay to quickly move forces for flanking in the event of an incursion, for storage, or as escape passages.
Storeroom – This room held an overflow of supplies for the kitchen and elsewhere.
Kochi’s piety would not allow him to display presentations of the group’s actions, but he did allow symbolic representations. He also allowed a modest display of captured trophies,
In each of those cases, above, you can see an emphasis on the past. A past that will NOT be interacting with the party in this adventure. The guardroom text starts by telling us its a guardroom, and then explains that it used to be a guardroom. Just as he barracks does. Just as the storeroom does. In all four cases we get some history in the form of “used to be”, none of which impacts the party, today. We know the room is a former barracks [guardroom/storeroom], that’s the room title. The guardroom has a peerhole and a couple of monsters poking around in the rubble, with a small chance of them using the peehole. The door is ron-bound with a peephole, just like every other door in the complex, or so the general dungeon overview tells us, but it has to be repeated here, in this room description. This all detracts from the room proper, the monsters poking about and the peephole. It hides it from the DM when they scan the text and, other information could have been included to make the room far more evocative, or even interactive, than it is. I’m not making the case that every room needs to be a set-piece, but that the focus of the writing needs to be evocative descriptions, scannability and, maybe, some interactivity.
Instead we’re told that the guard room used to be a guard room and that in the dungeon of iron-bound doors that this room has an iron-bound door. The emphasis is, over and over again, in the wrong place.
Unless I missed something, four rooms have monsters in them. 2 giants centipedes, a room with skeletons, and two rooms with a couple of hob/s/gobs each. This is not a jam-packed exciting place to visit, full of the wonder and mystery of D&D.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is five pages. You Get to see the map, which is decent for the size, as well as a boring rumor table, a boring wandering monster table, and some generic background information. A better preview would have included a couple of rooms also.
By Joel Logan
A Hole in the Ground Terrain & Games
5e
Level 1
The players are asked to investigate the cause of merchant caravans in the region disappearing. The adventure begins at the Blue Crab Inn in the small village of Holly Springs. The players adventure next into the wilderness where they soon discover the source at a cave. Inside the cave the players face many tough challenges, have the opportunity to find treasure, and are forever linked to the Tarmalon Galactic Museum.
This 43 page adventure details a cave system with eighteen rooms over about 28 pages. And some museum thing.? It looks like it’s licensed IP from legacy of the Ancients, some kind of computer game? The DM text is some of the most irrelevant I’ve ever seen.
How doth thought sin? Let me count the ways …
The level doesn’t appear in the adventure description, only on the cover. Meaning I have to click the cover picture on DriveThru and hope it’s there. Fail.
NPC’s get about a column each in 5e format. Appearance, Voice, Wants, Morality, Intelligence, Status, paragraph. Better, I think, to put together a sentence or two and then move on with life? Then they would all fit on the same page. Mindlessly following a script (or format) is never a good thing.
There are a fuck ton of town and regional maps. None of which really matter to the adventure. Yeah, you’re in a town and yeah, you travel to a caravan ambush site but the number and degree of maps seems out of proportion. There’s like ten, between the extra supplement and the ones in the adventure.
Sure daring town locations as … “9. Warehouse – Holly Springs contains several warehouses. The ware- houses are large wooden structures used seasonally throughout the year to store livestock, food, and oth- er goods coming and going from and to Holly Springs. “ Why was this included?
Or perhaps the same blacksmith seen in every adventure ever … “4. Blacksmith – Jasper is a very skilled blacksmith and until lately made a very good living. In addition to agricultural tools and services Jasper is a master weaponsmith and also makes an occasional piece of armor or re- pairs for Frederick’s Armor Shop.” These are the sorts of town locations provided, the same generic ones found in every town. The words are meaningless, they add nothing. Generic fantasy blacksmith” would have done.
“The following are the items that Lillyanna sells that the players may be interested in:” Seriously? No? Then how about …
“If the players choose to speak with him at the Blue Crab Inn they will learn the following:” This happens over and over again. THE NEXT PARAGRAPH WILL HAVE INFORMATION FOR THE DM TO READ TO THE PARTY.
“ The fishing and bait shop is exactly what it sounds like. Players can buy fishing supplies, bait, and also fresh fish and seafood.”
Civilized lands, lush farm country. Monsters are very dangerous and appear in 6 out of 7 wandering monster rolls.
I assume the Galactic Museum is something from the computer game? There’s a map, but not details on any of the exhibits noted on the map?
“The players may be very crafty and attempt to setup a scene to ambush whoever is attacking the caravans. The bone dwellers are watching the area and will attack the players late in the night.” Though shalt not avoid the plot.
Gonna track the ambushing monsters? All that detail, provided, is irrelevant since you just find their lair anyway.
“GM Notes: These stairs were built long ago when the caves were inhabited by humans taking refuge here during turbulent times.”
“This should prove to be a hard encounter since …”
“Over the years the tendro snapper has accumulated a small treasure hoard which is scattered amongst the bones and debris on the land inside of 3B2.”
“3B5 Bone Dweller Village – This room of the cave serves as a village for the bone dwellers.”
“The females of the tribe are also forced to do the cooking of meat for the tribe and many of the menial tasks such as gathering water and the mending of tents and clothes.”
“This passage isn’t used near as much as the passage at 3B7 due to the tendro snapper at 3B2 and 3B3. This passage is likely the one players will use to es- cape if they were captured or to delve further into the dungeon to find Elliot’s brother Bartholomew.”
Have I made my point? 1. EMPTY ROOM – THIS ROOM IS EMPTY. 2. ORC VILLAGE – THIS IS THE ORC VILLAGE. It’s like a greatest hits of padding the adventure without really saying ANYTHING at all.
But … it does provide some monsters reference sheets. Ne per page, but whatever, they are included. It also tries to use a bullet point format to convey conversational information an NPC can relate to the party. Most of it is stupid, dumb, and padding, and detracts from the more important information, but, hey, the designer tried.
There’s also a nice little bit where the party can overhear that boys ran away from a ghost ona beached ship, near the village. There really IS a spectre on the boat! It’s not exactly handled well, at all, but the rando idea/rumor is cool
Thus ends my review/non-review of Cave of the Bone Dwellers. The adventure with the most useless DM’s text I’ve ever seen.
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is eight pages. It shows you the NPC’s in the taven and their bullet point layout, and some of the town location descriptions. Judge it for yourself and know that the town is one of the highlights of the adventure.
Gunderholfen… Ancient, abandoned dwarf hold, battleground of arch-liches, cultist base, wizards’ playground, heroes’ bane and treasure-seekers’ tomb. Gunderholfen is a classic, old school exploratory sandbox-style mega-dungeon consisting of ten levels, a mini-campaign setting and one demi-plane.
This is a 420 page megadungeon with 930 locations, ten levels, and numerous sub-levels. About half the page count deails rooms, seven or so we page, while the rest is supporting information like maps, a town, NPC’s, wanderers, etc. Your satisfaction with this is going to best translate with how you feel about B2’s minimal Caves of Chaos descriptions. If you liked that then you’ll like this.
Let’s talk about those chaos caves a bit. From a usability standpoint, Gygax keeps the text pretty tight. The text is one step beyond minimalism. A monster, their tactics, and a treasure. There is generally a short one or two sentences of room description beyond that for most rooms and they tend to be plain. “The room is carpeted, has tapestries on the walls and battered but still serviceable furniture and a cot.” or maybe “There are two cots, a bench, a stool, and a large box (filled with soiled clothing) in the room.” Interactivity involves some implied social bargaining, pit traps, pressure plates for the most part. I’m sure nostalgia clouds me somewhat, but I think B2 is one of the better classic adventures. Not great, but not odious and the text doesn’t get in the way.
The same sort of things are to be found in this adventure. A focus on the monsters and their tactics. A little more explicit social in the dungeons. For the most part a light touch on interactivity with exploratory elements. Short and “normal” descriptions. B2 comes off as combat heavy and so does this.
Let’s look at one of the descriptions: “11. Kitchen (i) A blazing fireplace stands against the north wall while a large grate in the floor occupies the north- west corner. Kobolds are placing mushrooms and dead rats into a huge iron pot in the fireplace.” Two sentences. A ‘blazing’ fireplace but also a ‘large’ grate showing both the use of more colorful language and generic words (large, old, big, red, small, etc.) This is the way of the room description for this adventure, a sentence or two that are not overly evocative. Serviceable. Another room tells us that “This room is lavishly furnished with expensive pillows and silk blankets.”
In addition to a small room description there is also generally a monster stat block and a section on their tactics that tend to take up most of the text for a room. This will also contain some reaction text, like running to room X to get help and so on.
Interactivity tends to the pressure plate kind. A pressure plate opens a hole in a wall. Search a pit to find a ruby. Pull a lever to open/close/disarm something. There are some notes here an there about parlay. I’d say it’s sparsely interactive with more interesting exploratory elements even rarer. And that matches my memory of B2 pretty well also.
It makes a good college try of supporting the DM. The short room descriptions, and explicit easily read monster tactics offset with stat blocks makes scanning the room easy. It does a good job providing some supplemental information, like multiple NPC parties to encounter in the dungeon. Other rooms contains important DM details like, in a room with a rope bridge: “The bridge can be cut through in two rounds.” IE: text oriented towards supporting the DM during play. There are a multitude of rumors and side-quests to pick up in town to add some extra depth to play. Wandering events in town are interesting enough. “A group of beggars flees through the street pursued by a City Watch patrol and an angry noble yelling ‘get that filth away from my daughter’” Likewise, rooms note if they are illuminated or not with a small (i) after their name.
All the writing, editing, maps and art are done by the designer. That’s quite a feat! The writing is not bad, neither absolute minimalism or overblow/overwrought. The editing and layout are not bad either. Layout and formatting change as needed by the situation. The art is even above average and quite charming. At one point I was thinking “this needs an side-view” and there, on the next page, was a side-view illustration instantly cementing what the text was trying to describe. No serious mistakes are made. For a one-man show that’s a great accomplishment!
The maps here tend to the smaller side of things. Maybe thirty-ish rooms per map. It’s hard to provide a good exploratory environment with a small map, with exploration being a key element for megadungeons. Rappen Athuk can be like this at times, as is Black Maw. It’s not a deal breaker, but more commentary on the difficulty of exploration play style elements on a constrained map. I will note, though, the light situation. While the room text notes the illumination level of each room, the map does not. I think that’s a missed opportunity. Being able to tell the party what they see down three corridors, by looking at a “light” nortation on a map instead of running back to look up multiple rooms in the text, would have been a good extra use of the map. Like, noise, etc … if its obvious ahead of time then the map is a good place to help out with that. [Edit: It was pointed out I was wrong about the light. It IS on the map, and on the legend also. I tend to not look at legends, and it IS a little non-obvious on the maps, but once you “get it” it’s easily spotted and not an issue. IE: it’s only an issue for idiots who don’t look at the legend.]
The levels are themed and some come across better than other. Level 6, with a wizard lab, picks up a bit and things do tend to get weirder and more complex as you go deeper than this level. There’s also some individual designer voice in places with several items giving bonuses by also negative reaction rolls for looking like a pansy, or another item with Flatulent Fury. A little authorial voice can add to the flavour of an adventure, helping it stand out from the crowd and have its own voice. Even if its crude.
Overall, tending to the plain and combat heavy side of the spectrum. But it’s not a total hack and it’s not Vampire Queen minimalistic. Or even B2 minimalistic.
And thus I’m back around again to B2. If you liked 2 then you’ll probably like this. If you don’t like B2 then you probably won’t like this. RLM was reviewing Gidzilla and Dark Phoenix. They noted that they were ok movies, but there didn’t seem to be room anymore for ok movies. Given something like this adventure I can understand where they are coming from. This isn’t a bad adventure. In fact, from one person, I’d say it’s a major accomplishment in their life and a credit to them for seeing it through as well as they did. I note, also, the use by RLM of “room.” There’s no room anymore. And therein is the issue. Just about every adventure ever published is now available to everyone. And then there are dozens more a week being published. In that environment, if even a small percentage are good then there’s little room for ok materials. I might choose Rappen for a megadungeon, if I was only buying one. But this is also better than Stone Thief or the draft or Autarch version of Dwimmermount because of tersity and exploration. Adding this to a game is going to be similar to adding Stonehell, but with a smaller map. I’m having trouble getting excited about it and recommending it, but its clearly not terrible either, making it better than 95% of adventure written. I would probably insert it in to “DungeonLand” campaign as yet another megadungeon alongside DB, RA, SH, and BM.
So, a B2 megadungeon. Is that what you are looking for?
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 18 pages with the last five or so showing you the first rooms in the dungeon. They are fairly typical for most dungeon rooms so you’ll be able to get a good idea what to expect from the preview. There’s a separate link on DriveThru for the maps if you want to preview them.
By Vance Atkins
Leicester's Rambles
B/X
No fucking level stated
This twelve page single-column adventure features a sixteen room linear dungeon with hobgoblins-ish enemies. A few nice features can’t save it from itself or the mish-mash of text that makes up each room. It’s a monster! kill it and move on.
There’s a small temple with six encounter areas and then an underground cave with the rest. The temple is a highlight, with statues holding lamps (nicely illustrated by an included photo, btw. Art that compliments an adventure is rare and this was the perfect art choice for this feature.) With four or so rooms per page the writing is kept relatively tight.
It’s doing something weird with the writing though, something that’s off putting and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I’m kind of referring to it as a meandering style. I can’t exactly figure out the specifics, but its a loose writing style, with the focus of the writing, and organization, on things other than the rooms subjects?
There’s a loose phrase of two in the writing that’s obvious. “Examination may show that …” well, no. First you’re using the word “may” and second you’re phrasing this as an if/then. IF you examine the door THEN it [may] show that … It’s much more solid writing to say that there are scorch marks around the handle. (Which is a hint to the lightning trap on the door. I like trap hints for players who pay attention.) In another point there’s some commentary that a certain thing “may make it a dicey proposition!” A loose comment or two isn’t all that bad and if sprinkled wisely can provide a little humor/prodding to the DM.
But this isn’t what I’m talking about when I say it’s a meandering style. There’s weird background padding padding showing up before important room elements. Longtime readers will note that I prefer that obvious things occur higher up in room descriptions. The towering statue glowing red and shooting lazer beams from its eyes should be the first thing mentioned … unless there’s something else even more obvious when you walk in to the room.
Room 5, the monk living quarters, is a good example of this.
5. Manse – Up a short flight of stairs is the former residence of the temple monks. Its occupants were killed or carried off during the incursion from ‘below.’ The sparse furniture and fixtures here are overturned or broken and show more signs of struggle. There is nothing of value left beyond some cookware and thin clothing. One of the ‘guard lizards’ for the hobgoblins in the caverns (below) has wandered in here in pursuit of rats and is tearing apart the decaying corpse of a dead monk.
Up a short flight of stairs … the former residence. Killed or carried off. The guard lizard showing up last. Better would be a guard lizard eating decaying corpses in a ransacked living quarters, or something like it. The adventure text is almost conversational the way it meanders from the room approach (obvious from the map) the background, former room use, decorations, and then finally the obvious thing. And multiple rooms are like this in the adventure. They lack a strong focus. They are not overly long, but the writing feels loose and the interactivity feels empty, not a good combination.
The map is essentially linear. It does have a nice feature or two, with same level stairs and some escarpments to liven things up. But a linear map is a linear map. There’s little room to explore, you just kill what’s in the room and move to the next one.
I find these small and linear adventures quite unsatisfying. I know this is how many people run their home games, but as a prepared adventure it just doesn’t seem worth it. Then you add some substandard text and, well, why?
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggest price of $1. The preview is five pages and shows you the map and the first six rooms. It’s representative of what you should expect, so good on it.
A request to find out what has happened leads to an offer of assistance and a chance to help a lot of people out. All that is required is that the players descend the stairway and rescue the missing townsfolk, although they have been missing a week, which isn’t a good sign. Oh, don’t forget that the stairway is trapped, gets slick with algae and seawater and is used to dump all manner of waste. What could possibly be off-putting about any of that to experienced adventurers?
This 35 page “adventure” has 96 random encounter rolls and four caves. Someone had an idea and expanded it the wrong way. It has the usual poor formatting. A couple of neat ideas doesn’t save it from itself.
Ok, imagine a sheer cliff wall. At the top is a town. At the bottom a sea-side dock. Running up the cliff are a set of stairs, in four switchbacks. 96 stairs in total. Now, the stairs are not actually stairs, they are more like those columns that make up Devils Tower. Except each can, and sometimes does, move independently a bit. The riser height is, on average, about four feet. The town likes to dump their garbage down the stairs to let the high tide take care of cleanup.
There’s a table that lists each stair and what happens on it. And by “what happens” I mean “what happens in addition to the random roll the DM makes,” For, gentle reader, the stairs generally each has the DM rolls randomly as well. Roll percent and add the number of the stair you on, if it’s over 100 you roll on another chart. Yeah you! This could be a gap between stairs, some toxic good, a column moving, or a monster.
How does this work in practice? Do you actually roll for each stair as the party encounters it? That’s cumbersome. “What’s on the next stair?” I don’t know, let me roll. “How about the one after that?” I don’t know, let me roll. This is dumb as all fuck. I don’t see how this works without rolling for all the stairs before the adventure starts. In which case why didn’t the fucking designer do that? I don’t like rolling for the dungeon design during the adventure. I like to let people know what they are seeing/experiencing ahead of time after they ask me what see through the doors, hallways, etc. I just don’t see how that works in practice with these random design things without it all being worked out ahead of time. Which, again to beat a long dead horse, if you’re rolling ahead of time then why didn’t the designer do it for you?
No spider climbing or flying or other forms of magic allowed to descend the cliff/stairs. For the designer has decreed that you shall experience his adventure the way he intended and thus you shall walk down each and every stair. Make your fucking acrobatics roll you tools, that’s what the designer wants. This is TEXTBOOK too high an adventure. fIf you have to gimp the party then the adventure is too high, you should reskin for something lower and/or redesign it. If the lich is casting 99 wish spells to keep you from passwall’ing then maybe the stupid fuck should have picked a different spot to live in. Yes, I know high-level D&D adventures are hard to design. And I don’t give a fuck when you trot it out as an excuse to gimp the party.
I don’t know. There’s a collection element out of Assassin’s Creed … collect all of the dead porters guild tokens … Gotta catch em all! Actually, there’s a small table that lists them all with room to make a checklist and take notes. That’s a good idea. There’s also an NPC porter that seems designed to be annoying but, also, could follow the party if he’s not allowed to accompany them. An unwelcome but non-hostile tag-along behind can be fun.
The main text is well padded and uses the typical long form paragraph style. I just reviewed an adventure that did essentially the same thing. In contact to that, where it had short paragraphs that focused every word on essential detail and was well formatted to find information, this adventure does none of that. It’s just the usual stream of information in paragraph form making it hard to find information during play.
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages. It’s all background information except for the last page, which shows a cross-section of the stairs. That’s worth checking out. Not enough adventure have vertical elements or show how the vertical elements work. But imagine it … a roll for each stair …. ug.
… After clashes with inhuman raiders—some with armor fused to body like a second skin, and bewitched with unexpected powers—it becomes clear they are in league with a yet-undiscovered malefactor. Some of their recent tracks lead to the crater.
This fourteen page adventure uses six pages to describe a thirty-six room multi-level dungeon. Compact and efficient, it presents an environment that supports exploration, role playing, and interactivity. He does this seemingly effortlessly, with well organized room descriptions that are neither minimal or verbose. It has exactly as many words as it needs
So, big ass crater. In the middle is a massive outcropping with a fortress carved in to the top. At night the crater fills with mist. And, unknown to the party, it also gets tougher at night as otherworldly guardians emerge. Interestingly enough, you can also gain substantial treasure robbing the place, in the daytime, with not too much trouble. Thus the cycle begins anew: the players push their luck, trying to explore everything and steal anything not nailed down (and some that is.) Just one more room .. .and then it’s nighttime and things get hard. Or you stumble on an 8HD monster with an 18” move. This is great design. A couple of tough guys running around, some lesse monsters, a push your luck element … Exciting D&D ahead!
Interactivity here is good. Aside from big monsters chasing you, you have glass walls to shatter, statues to fuck with (multiple ones in multiple ways), cauldrons to bubble, weird-ass traps/locks to disarm. D&D’s exploration elements must include these interactive elements. Not all bad. Not all good. Some bad. Some good. Some just ARE. A neutral environment will of things to mess with. It harkens back to the interactive elements of some the best adventures written in the early days … or at least the best parts of them.
Supporting materials are great. The map has loops and multiple stairs on each level. Some rooms have windows. Some hallways are different sizes. There’s a side-view to show how the levels work together with the crater. There’s a summary sheet with all the monster stats. The wanderers are doing somethings. All of the little things that contribute to helping the DM are present. Magic is magical and well described. “Uneven frogs’ eyes, cauliflower ears, and a barbed-tongue handle all protrude from this golden hand mirror—its frame suggesting a gaping, toothless maw.” Oh, yeah, blood activates it. A specific description, a visceral activation, and a non-standard but understandable effect. The way magic items should be.
The writing is solid, and organized. The rooms start with a title. “4. Shrine.” You now now all of the usual stuff that should go in the room, so Guy can concentrate the rest of his text on the meaningful/actionable parts that contribute to the adventure rather than the trivia of what a shrine is. The Petrified Library has “Three rows of granite shelving support hundreds of useless stone book sculptures …” BAM! Done! Now the business of the room can begin, describing the books that are real and how they work. Or “Bridcage: 4 ft wooden cage encloses a pecked, rotting humanoid lower leg, and a few gray feathers.” The rest is a little DM text describing the cage.
Go ahead, stick your arm in that arm sized hole. You know you need to unlock the door. And we ALL know what’s going to happen. But then Guy turns it back and makes something unexpected happen. The party freaks, challenges to overcome under pressure and only bravery wins the day. Go ahead. Do it again …
You can talk to most of the intelligent monsters and guards. They want things. They are not necessarily friendly, and bloodshed will almost certainly happen, but a conversation can lead to melee while “They Attack” monster encounters all lead to the same place: D&D as tactical miniatures combat. B O R I N G. By inserting some motivations and the possibility of parley the role of the adventurers becomes so much more interesting during play.
There are few negatives. The side-view map could be a bit clearer, it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on. I got the general gist immediately, the way side-view maps allow for, but the extra detail took me a second, especially on the undercaverns. There was also an opportunity lost, I think, to include some humanoids. If the baddies treat with evil humanoids them then an evoy party or two, in the rooms or wanders table, may have added yet another element.
Guy knows what he’s doing. He understand supporting the DM. He understand what’s important in an adventure and he he understands how to write it well to be evocative and yet scannable. I know I get shit for saying it, but the best adventures today dwarf almost all of the older/original ones.
This is $5 at DriveThru, and a Print version is at North Texas … and maybe after? Black Blade would know if they have extras. The preview is four pages and hows the side-vide map and the first fourteen rooms. It perfectly represents what you should expect once you buy this. Note the use of Day and Night sections for rooms, and the paragraph form used to concisely convey information. This is what everyone writing paragraphs is striving for (well, most anyway) but fail to achieve.
A writ of salvage has been issued for an area on the edge of the Untamed Gauntlet known as Hangman’s Folly. The Folly is known to have once been the site of a prosperous village that was beset by a witch and eventually burned to the ground. It is suspected that there might be valuable artifacts attributed to the witch within the ruins of the village. Additionally, a local landlord, named Baron DeCours ventured into the same area with a party of soldiers some 10 days prior, with the intention of investigating a string of attacks in the area and has not been seen since. A reward of 100 gold pieces is offered for information relating to the location of the Baron.
This eleven page adventure features a seven room dungeon. Tough monsters, minimal loot, small lair dungeon … it’s hard to love this. There is a surprise or two in store that I enjoyed, but it’s hard to separate this one from the pack.
Yet another in the long line of adventures based around a small Dyson lair map. This is a seven room cave complex with one of two outside locations. There’s a little shrine in the area as well a small ruined tower before you get to Hangman Hill … and the cave in the base of it. There’s no real wilderness/overview map, and my description of the area trumps any provided by the adventure proper. “When the players get to the cave …” announces the adventure. Wait, there’s a cave? “The tower is all that remains of … “ Wait, there’s a tower? Where did that come from? I suspect these were thrown in at the last minute and any kind of outside description orientation overlooked. With no context the locations are jarring.
Note how the intro uses the word Hangmans Folly? The first room or two also are all full of tree roots hanging down, 13th Warrior style. And that withered tree on top of the hill (the top of the hill that doesn’t show up n the adventure, BTW.) Surprise, surprise, you get to a room FULL of tree roots hanging. The roots, it turns out, of a Hangmans tree monster! Oh snap! The adventure got me! Lulled in to it! Tree roots introduced in one room only to attack in another, from foreshadowing of “hangman” two or three times and a tree on top of hangman hill! This reminds me of the time some adventure had some figures, mentioned singing, and I didn’t make the connection to the actual monster, harpies. There’s nothing better than dropping multiple clues only to have the party miss them all and it all click to 100% obviousness in retrospect. That’s a well done set up. And shame on me for ever thinking that a room full of tree roots hanging down could be anything other than an issue. I revel when I get immersed in an environment, forgetting my meta-D&D think. That this managed that is a nice compliment. (Other things I’ve fallen for lately: a ‘wand’ sticking up from the dirt in the garden that was “stuck” and a cactus plant with fruit on it. And I fucking KNEW there sandworms; I’d warned people repeatedly, to the extent they were making fun of me. But I was overcome in the revel of the moment.)
There’s a serious issue with the monsters in this. A small dungeon with seven rooms that has 14 bugbears outside a hangman tree, a ghost, a werewolf, and four wights all incide. I’m not so sure that’s a level 2-3 adventure. While the text and publishers blurb says level 2-3 the cover says 3-4, which is closer, I think, to the truth. And still pretty fucking far off. Those are, IMO, some serious shit encounters for a level 4 group. A smaller dungeon exacerbates the problem, putting other creatures in agro distance and leaving few places to run, escape, leverage for wacky plans. And, of course, the cover says one level range while the advert and text says something else.
This thing has a decent issue with putting information out of place and/or not including cross-references. “You hear splashing nearby.” Well, from where? Nope, doesn’t say. Or the fact that the outside area mentions lots of tracks going in and out of the cave, but not words on what they are … until you get to encounter one, then you get the details. The information isn’t quite where you need it, multiple times.
It like to engage in a fair bit of explaining, like saying that a gold earring left a shrine was by a girl trying to curry favour with the moon goddess. Well, ok, but to what end? I mean, what purpose does this background expository (and there’s already a lot, a few pages of it at the start) serve? Instead we get text like “seven dead bodies” in the roots of the hangmans tree … an excellent opportunity lost to note their roots digging in to flesh, bulging eyes, dessicated bodies, etc. It tries to use descriptive text in the read-alouds but then all but abandons the attempt in the actual DM’s text.
A notable exception is the ghost. One sentence of a read-aloud tells us that “At the bottom of the pool, nearly hidden by the murky water, is the figure of a young human man, secured to the bottom of the pool by a series of thin roots.” This is then followed up, in the DM text with “… an eerie green glow begins to form on the bottom of the pool and a ghostly figure of the man drowned at the bottom of the pool emerges.” That’s not bad, overall. Drowned young man in a shallow pool, tree roots holding him down, eerie green glow, ghost of a drowned man emerging. That’s something that I can work well with to paint a good picture for the players.
The adventures needs a lot for of that short and punchy imagery and less background exposition. More cross-references and context for the outside, and less padded text.
When the party arrives in the small village of Goldendale they find a shortage of metal goods and a community upset with the lack of production. Despite their admiration for the village blacksmith, folks grow concerned about his inability to complete the simplest jobs even though they hear the ring of his hammer throughout the night…
This 24 page adventure has a small investigation in a village followed by a small goblin outpost and then a seven room goblin lair. IE: the usual. It merges seamlessly in to the great mass of adventure dreck, not knowing how to format an adventure while offering nothing unusual in way of adventure.
The usual: a small investigation followed by a run in with the baddies and then a small lair. There must be about ninety bajillion adventures of this type published, as well as a significant number of home game adventures. I’m not gonna rail on the adventure type, it is what it is, but if you want to publish something in this type then you need to do a little more. Why am I buying this adventure, from among all of the other choices I have? This don’t do that. It makes the usual mistakes and ends up just being another also-ran.
If the pillars of an adventure are usability, interactivity, and evocativeness then this fails to meet any of those standards. It’s not actively promoting bad play, in as much as there is no forced morality, railroading, or other sins, but it’s not actually engaging in anything good either.
Usability: The village is described in paragraph long form with NPC quirks, investigation hints, and other data all mixed in to the general morass of text. Multiple paragraphs of text. Full of weasel words and padding, history, background and other things and commentary not relevant to the adventure. This obfuscates anything useful to the DM to actually running the adventure. Better formatting, focusing on a brief description, one or two sentences, and then key callouts of NPC traits and bullets for learned information, for example, would have been better. Or something like that. The specific style doesn’t matter but what does is making it absolutely trivial for the DM to scan the text and locate pertinent information. You can’t bog the DM down reading a great mass of text during actual play. And no, note taking and highlighting are not solutions. Those are crutches the DM has to engage in to make an adventure useful. If the DM has to do that then the designer should have done something to make it so the DM didn’t have to do that.
Likewise we see sections of text in maroon italics, as the default style of the time, that make it hard to read. Yeah, I know those fucking templates from DMSGuild make it easy for an adventure to APPEAR professional. But they stink from a usability standpoint. No fucking italics in read-aloud! (See, I didn’t even bitch that the read-aloud is both too long and also boring, my usual gripes. … except that by bitching about not bitching about it I am in fact bitching about it.)
Likewise we get dungeon rooms, in the actual lair, that follow a strict formatting guidelines. Thou shalt include a Developments” heading, and a “Treasure” heading. And a “creature” heading. Seven rooms in 24 pages, investigation or not, betrays an adventure with half-column or more stat blocks and an overly prescriptive layout/format.
Which ends up being boring anyway. It’s mostly just goblins running up to attack the party. That’s exciting. Interactivity is not the exclusive domain of combat. If you want tactical mini’s then go play Warhammer. Or Gloomhaven. Adventures need things to explore and interact with. And exploring does not mean walking down a hallway.
Treasure: The implements on the workbench comprise a full set of alchemist’s supplies (worth 50gp). Although they are currently stored improperly, they can still be put to use in the right hands.
So … scattered alchemist’s tools (50gp) is what you mean? And that’s not even bitching about the abstraction of using the words “alchemist’s tools” instead of noting beakers, braziers, reagents, tongs, delicate magnifying glasses and the like. Abstractions are boring while details are the soul of storytelling and imagery. Of which this adventure misses the mark again and again.
On the plus side the adventure does let you get information out of someone without rolling dice. “Either through roleplay or skill checks.” That’s a miracle. There’s also a hook where you find clues in a previous adventure: a kobold lair you were to investigate is found wiped out, broken weapons and spearpoints bearing the mark of the blacksmith in this village … sup with that? Note the detail of his mark, and broken weapons, and the “surprise” of your adventure with the kobolds not being a kobold adventure.
I’m being a tad overly harsh in this review. This dude is doing nothing that the great mass of adventure designers don’t do. The fact that they nearly ALL do it wrong shouldn’t be this guys fault. He’s clearly got an inkling of what D&D is supposed to be, with this “you can use roleplay” comment. And like most he simply has not been exposed to, or understands, good adventure formatting. No real railroads, just as there is no real order of battle for the goblin reaction. No real forced morality ot failed novelist text, just as the writing is note particularly evocative or the dungeon interactive.
Get your usability down. Then focus on an interactive adventure. Then focus on evocative text (which I think is the hardest task.) Finally, edit it till your fingers bleed to ensure its usable, nteractive, and evocative.
This is $4 on DriveThru. The preview is only two pages long and doesn’t really show you anything of what you are buying, so it’s a bad preview. At most, it shows the use of paragraph style formatting as the primary means to convey information; you’d have to extrapolate to figure out the rest of the adventure is like this. It also has the kobold lair hook, which is kind of interesting to see alongside the more typical boring/crap hooks.
By Malrex
Self-published/Merciless Merchants
OSR
Levels 6-8
This adventure is designed to be dropped in anywhere, whether by a nearby town, or deep underground. The shrine was constructed in honor of a four armed titan known as The Savior.
This is another entry, for the same map, from the adventure design forum that I run. The map was designed by a third party and everyone had to write an adventure based on it. The summer contest is going on now. There’s plenty of time for the new contest, August 1, so get your ass in gear and write something!
This 8 page adventure describes twenty rooms. A shrine to a titan, it’s full of weird little things and some decent imagery, at times. Good formatting helps comprehension, but it seems a little thematically off, or, maybe, the theming, strong in places, doesn’t carry through.
Malrex uses a format in which each room gets a little paragraph of text, a couple of sentences, that describes the general features of room. Things that one might see or experience when they first glimpse it. He then follows up with some bullet points that detail those various features. Further each bullet tends to start with the feature in question, making it easy to locate. For example, room 17 has a big red crystal in the middle of it and a floor full of thousands of earthworms. The text description leads off with “a massive redish-glowing crystal juts …” IE: that’s the first thing the party will notice and so that’s the first thing in the text description. It’s followed by the swarming earthworm situation. The bullets follow this up with “Moving through the room …”, describing the earthworm situation. We could quibble and say that “The earthworms require …” to lead off the bullet, but “moving” is good enough, besides, there’s only two bullets, one for the worms and one for the crystal. The crystal bullet starts with “The crystal attracts …” In both cases it’s fairly easily, through a glace, to tell which bullet is appropriate for the thing being followed up on.
As I’ve stated repeatedly, the ability to scan the room quickly by the DM at the table is a critical feature of usability. This does that. An initial “what the party sees/experience” followed by bullets that make follow up question/answer action/reaction play easy for the DM to handle. This isn’t the only way to format a good room, for usability purposes. There are probably numerous ways to accomplish that goal, but this IS one of the easiest ways for a designer to implement, especially when they are transitioning from the Bad Old Ways of wall of text to a format that encourages usability. I think it’s easy to describe to someone newly interesting in usability and fairly easy to implement.
Note also that the crystal isn’t big, it’s MASSIVE. This is a key point also. English being an incredibly descriptive language, using word slike big, small, large, old … they just don’t bring the overloaded context that richer adjectives and adverbs bring. Following up on this point, Malrex does something that is quite advanced … he plays with the language. “The floor moves on its own accord” or ten bedraggled and wounded men and women reach towards the 20’ tall ceiling” in the case of some statue columns. Another statue screams defiance at the heavens. Strong allusions and imagery that evoke images in the DM’s head. That, in turn, helps create a vibe for the DM that they are then inspired to communicate to the players. This runs in defiance to the failed-novelist style that many designers employ, where the spew endless words on the page in order to attempt to generate the same effect. More isn’t better, and leveraging the DMs imagination through short, bursty evocative writing is generally the better, though harder, solution. Gaps in the description, the creation of mystery, is what fires the imagination. The less you know about the Pukel-men the more your minds fills in, or doesn’t, and the stronger the vividness. In this adventure when braziers flame to life it causes darkness to hide behind columns. Good stuff without droning on.
Interactivity is great, with levers to pull, statues missing limbs, mole-men to communicate with, and other features. Interactivity is more than combat and gives the players something to actually explore and do in the dungeon, besides loot and kill, is a key feature of D&D. Be it social situations or exploratory, designers often pay lip-service to this key pillar without getting it right. But this gets it right. And any dungeon with a “Scroll of Apologies” to sign your name to is ok in my book. 🙂
It does fall down some though in overall theming. While it starts strong, with giant statue/columns reaching towards heaven, and others whispering secrets about the titan, that titanic theme disappears in other places and the rooms come off, while interesting and evocative, as not really following up on this initial olympian/titanic imagery. Giant worms, hissing mole-men, and writing thousands of worms on the floor are all great also, but perhaps more consistency in musky/dirty flooring and so on would have helped in that other sub-section of the dungeon. It needs just a bit more both in the dirt-section and the titanic-section, to carry the theming consistently within those sub-sections.
Here and there a bit more could have been included. For example, one section has statues whispering secrets about the titan, but there no indication of what those are. A few bullets, or an appendix, would have served the DM well and perhaps dropped hints to other areas of the dungeon. Players love it when their paying attention reaps rewards.
Good magic items, great cross-referencing of the text for those missing statue limbs, etc, show that Malrex knows his shit.
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.
