Forgotten Shrine of the Savior

Posted on June 5, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
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.

You can pick this up on Malrex’s blog.

https://www.themercilessmerchants.com/post/freebie-forgotten-shrine-of-the-savior

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 7 Comments

The Cistern of the Three-Eyed Dwarves

Posted on June 3, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Grutzi
Tiny Pink Tentacle Publishing
OSR
Levels 3-4

… Lightning strikes unaturally often, sometimes even from a clear sky, people have strange dreams and all metal seems to be charged, throwing sparks at the slightest touch. There have even been reports of wild magnetism around the town! The case is clear for the rulers of Graycoast: Someone or something is using the heretical forces of electricity.

This 34 page adventure details a 20 room dungeon in about thirteen pages. It plays with a new descriptive style to try and communicate information in short, pertinent bursts to the DM. The theming is a bit idiosyncratic and the word choices could be better in places, but a solid adventure.

Awhile ago I went and created an adventure design forum, linked off of my review blog. It was supposed to help me organize for another project. Then I went and got busy and essentially abandoned it. The users, to their credit, are still there and had an adventure design contest. (I think they are running another one right one, for summer, in the Project Workshop forum) This was one of the entries.

All entries used the same map. It’s color-coded to help with comprehension, has different elevation areas noted on it, and has enough interconnections, in a twenty room map, to allow for at least a bit of exploration elements to adventures. My only negative would be the the brown floors and black walls of the cave areas tend to run together more than I care for.

This adventure contains not only the dungeon but a little wilderness region, about 3 miles by 3 miles. The region is torn by polluted water, contaminated by heavy metals.  The knights of the smashing hammer, a steam religion, won a religious war against the followers of the cult of the electricity. Clearly, some idiosyncratic theming. The cult is in the dungeon and the steam knights are camped out nearby, searching for them. There are weird machines in the dungeon/town, and some electricity traps in the dungeons, but it doesn’t go full on overboard in to steam knight armor or anything like that. It’s more a fire religion/water religion sort of thing, with stuff manifesting as magical effects, rather than true technology. So a kind of pretext theming rather than explaining. A little jarring at first, but easy enough to get used to and, like I said, it doesn’t go full on silly.

For this adventure instance, it uses about one page per room, a little more in some places and a little less in others. Single column, but not really an issue. Single column is an issue when your eyes need travel all the way across the page to read. That’s not really the case in this because of the bullet-list style format used.

This style will be the most noticeable thing about the adventure at first glance. It uses little icons, instead of bullets, to denote what the text is referring to. So a little eyeball is what you first see when you enter the room. A little magnifying glass is what details you see if you search something further. A litt treasure chest or gears call attention to the treasure or trap, and so on. Thus the single column is mitigated by bullets and the bullets (icons really, they are too large for bullets) help you locate information.

It’s an interesting idea that I think needs a little more work. It FEELS like it’s taken just a little too far. The whitespace, bolding, full-line-separators, and icons/bullets don’t quite live up to the platonic idea of easy to use. It’s not the full on “must include all sections for every room” shit that Dungeon Magazine sometimes did, but neither does the separation produce the clarity that I think was the end state goal. A little playing around with the formatting might help. It’s not bad, and as a first shot at a format is a great first attempt result, but it’s also not the solution. It may be, on reflection, that the organization is centered around the icons/bullets/sections. A more conventional style, using the icons to call attention, might produce a better effect. I don’t know, I’m just talking out loud.

Anyway, good interactivity here. The map is conducive to catwalks, lava pits and things to get shoved off of in combat. Treasure stuffed in cracks, “I look up” situations, fun little things to explore and investigate abound in this. Some treasure is interesting, other is a part of the environment/machines that you can steal. In one case there’s a secret door hidden behind a statue, with the statue details calling attention to the door. Little clues that help lead attentive players to more interesting outcomes. It’s got the interactivity desired.

It makes good use of cross-referencing to point the DM to pages with more information on NPC’s or curses, etc. Finally, there are also points where what you BEYOND the room you are in show up. You can see blue light in the distance down a hallway, that sort of thing. This shows a real sense of the designer picturing the rooms as a whole and how they work together.

There are some minor misses here and here, beyond the bullet/icon tuning issue. The intro/background is a little bullet crazy, something I saw in that Masque of the Worms review. The text block is still a good way to convey general information. Bolding & bullets work great to call attention to specific text you need to reference during actual play.

There’s also some misplaced text/information, specifically in the wilderness areas is where I noticed it. Three or four bullets describe a little town, just enough for a little character. But, in the dungeon, there’s a note about a rumor you can pick up at that town. That would have been better in the town. Likewise a tower getting struck by lightning frequently … better in an overview than the specific tower description. Likewise the time it takes to search a hex only exists in the one hex where the dungeon is located. Better that be general information for when the party searches other hexes also, right?

The writing could also be kicked up a notch or two. A “small wooden box” is under a bed at one location. Ok, sure, I guess. Small, Wooden, and Box are all fairly generic words. “Six double bunk beds stand at the walls.” This isn’t the most evocative test ever.  Big, old, large, small, there are better adjectives and adverbs that convey more imagery.

But, not bad, especially for the timelines I think the contest involved. I’d run this before I ran a thousand other adventure I’ve reviewed.

This is free at DriveThru, with a PWYW attached a full page count preview. Check it out!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/277874/The-cistern-of-the-threeeyed-dwarves?1892600

Posted in No Regerts, Reviews | 17 Comments

(5e) Creeping Cold

Posted on June 1, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Ian McGarty and Jayson Gardner
Silver Bulette
5e
Levels 1-5

In Creeping Cold, the players find themselves trapped at a remote waystop with a group of travellers and employees. As the days creep into nights, a mystery unfolds as creatures and people begin turning up dead. Who could be behind the murders? Will the characters find out? Will they survive? Or will their bodies be uncovered by the next group of adventurers seeking shelter from the Creeping Cold?

This forty page adventure uses 24 pages to describe being snowed in at an inn, when bodies start to show up. It ends with the party trekking through the snow to track down a missing girl, to end up in a small cave lair where they kill a were. Decent summary sheets are present, along with walls of text and LONG read-aloud. A S&W version is also available.

I was surprised when I cracked this one open. There is a summary sheet with all of the NPC’s in the inn, to aid in running the social portion, along with a timeline and a summary of winter/cold rules to assist the DM in running the adventure. That’s great; it shows an understanding of prepping materials for the DM to assist them in running the game. This continues with summary sheets details various information for various skill checks at different success levels. That’s all great; it puts what you need in an easy find and reference location. Big NPC social situations, in particular, benefit from summary sheets, and putting the scenario-specific rules and timelines on the summary sheet also illustrates the kinds of things a designer can do to help the DM at the table.

To top it all off, it says something to the effect of “make sure and award situational bonuses for creative play during the investigation.” I love it when 5e D&D is run like this, as opposed to boring old “the rulebook has all knowledge and must be followed religiously!”

It also is smart about the map of the inn. A map, with room names on it for the DM, showing various large items in the room, augmented with descriptions of each room in something akin to, but not exactly like, room/key format.  This is an exploratory dungeon, it’s an investigation in an inn. Room 7 tells us nothing but “Franks room” tells us what we need to know when the party goes off to search Frank’s room. We can find it instantly instead of digging through the text until we stumble on to room 7.

And then the designer messes it all up.

There are mountains of read-aloud. A column in some situations, representing something happening during the timeline. There is NO way in HELL my players are gonna let me read that much. I’d get interrupted in a hot second. I guess I can allow a small pass for a scripted event, but this comes off more naturally with NPC reactions and bullets for information imparted, or something similar. That leads to a much more naturalistic environment for play.

Further, the text, in most places outside of the summaries, come off as a wall of text. Bolding, whitespace, indents, bullets, etc are not used at all to break things up and pull out important information. It’s all “let me read this long paragraph and hold it all in my head.” Not good. This extends to the cold rules summary page, which needs bolding and better formatting to call out the important stuff and/or  a reduction in “padding” text to concentrate on the pertinent details. “If a creature’s hands are mildly affected by frostbite then they have a -1 to attack rolls” could better communicated. Frostbite – Hands – -1 attack or some such. IE: an actual reference.

It also has to fight against the default D&D spell list, full of divination, curse removal and the like. It’s hard to have a plot with the standard D&D spell list, you have to target low levels. This DOES do that, but it also handwaves that the were is a special type that normal stuff doesn’t work on to help get around the issue.

Finally, the summary sheet for the NPC’s could be better. It tries to concentrate on the their goals and a few personality traits, which is great. That’s what it should do. It also misses in that area though .One NPC is highly superstitious but that’s missing from the summary. Self-assured, cocky, rude, SUPERSTITIOUS would have been better than just the first three alone. That alone adds a lots to the NPC and should be a shame to miss. Also “infected” would have helped some. About half, I’d say, are missing that key trait. “Shrieking” is a great character trait, mentioned in the text description, for example, and the “excitable” word chosen. Both, together, make a strong NPC in summary.

Still, a much better effort than the first few Bullete adventures I reviewed. Getting the read-aloud under control, as well as the wall of text issues, would go a long way to bumping this up. The extra issues, like the NPC summaries, are really just tweaking and hard edits.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad publisher! No cookie for you!
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/275712/Creeping-Cold-5E-Version?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 2 Comments

Spire

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Simon Forster
Sky Full of Dust
Generic/Universal

The Spire. A towering edifice a mile high and nearly a third wide at its base. This conical spike pierces the fertile soil of a small valley, standing before a narrow pass that cuts through the Perilous Mountains. From a distance the Spire is as black as night, but upon close inspection it is made of dark volcanic glass, seamless. Openings lead inside, to dark levels that rise high, stretching from its Roots and the obsidian tunnels that criss- cross underground, to an interior garden and woodland. Higher still are levels where water is collected from rainfall, feeding a waterfall that waters the woods inside; excess rainfall cascades down the sides of the Spire, pooling around its base to form a small lake and a river that flows down through a gully below.

How much work you gonna put in to using something you buy?

This 168 page adventure locale used a triple-column layout to describe a small adventurers town and great Spire that rises above it, full of dungeon levels. About twelves levels and about nine or so rooms per level, the overview and town finish on page 41 with the rest being all dungeon descriptions; there are no appendices. Rich, complex, and imaginative it is also maddingly frustrating and inconsistent. Generic/universal means no stats or gp values and the map/key layout is one of the worst I have ever seen. As a source of inspiration it’s great. As a usable tool, well, not so much?

If I wanted to write an adventure usable for all systems, and went in with the knowledge that you’d have to spend some time valuing treasure and stating creatures, then you’d have this adventure. It’s creative, imaginative, full of exploration and interactivity. Mystery abounds, some explained and some not. Rich with an abundance of ideas and a complex social environment it is wonderful in concept and great in execution … if you’re looking for a general regional reference/fluff/inspiration. As a device at the table not so much. Which is a euphemism. Usability-wise some parts of this are as bad, while those same areas, maps for instance, or ok in other areas.

Ok, massive obsidian spire, with some dungeon levels. Around it is a town, built up from adventurer support. It’s got three churches more friendly than frenemies. It’s got bandit gangs, pickpocket gangs, smuggler gangs, merchant guilds, cults and more. It has A LOT going on. The perfect adventurers town. Party shows up, goes in to the dungeon, and as they come out to rest, etc, little sub-plots and other individuals show up. People met in the dungeon have connections outside of it. Want to get your hands on X? Then go see Bob over in the shantytown. The town is built around interactivity with the party. It concentrates on things that the party will want to, or may want to, interact with. And then it adds some relationships and complications to those things. And thus adventures outside the dungeon are born, sub plots, complications, fun. It’s fucking great. I could go on and on about the peculiarities of the churches, people, and places. They are rich, easy to grasp, and focused on players interactivity. Exactly as things should be. Events and personalities abound.

The dungeon levels are themed and are similar to the town. They are oriented towards actual play and interactivity. There are social opportunities aplenty. Rich encounters with exploration elements emphasized. Things to mess with. Places to loot. Creatures to talk to. Problems to solve. This is exactly the sort of thing you want in an adventure. Exactly.

Well, except for the usability. That sucks. A lot.

Simon had some usability ideas. First, two-page spreads. Facings pages for each room, a map and a descr, with maybe some going a little over for supplemental information. Great idea! He is also using mini-maps, so each room has a little inset map showing where it is on the big map. OMG this sucks. A lot. A lot alot. What’s missing are numberers. So the “big” level map, which doesn’t really take up the entire page, just has a layout, no numbers or anything. To find an individual room you have to flip through the pages until you find the mini-map with the correct shading that tells you that’s the room the party has just come upon. Mini-maps and shading that are pretty hard to make out at a glance. I could excuse the lack of scale & size, but, taken as a whole, it comes off as artistic inspiration of a level/room rather than a key piece of the usability puzzle, which it should be. And those individual maps are not always easy to understand. There’s one “The Den” that still makes no sense to me, I can’t figure out how the multiple rooms shown fit together and how they fit on the main map. It’s gotta be dumbly obvious and it’s not close to that.

Bolding is weird in places, not bolding something important but rather a kind of “I always bold the name ‘Church of Bob’”   The Restless Dead left this chamber years ago, the text tells us in one room. Restless Dead, the faction name, is bolded. Other places need cross-references, to lead the DM to the locations mentioned in the hint, etc.

The room text varies between good and poor. One room will go on a meandering description of history and have no real solid room descriptions or they’ll be mixed in. Another will be rock solid in terms of general overview and then paragraphs with follow-up information, making providing an overview and then following up with the players quite easy. Still others lie n the middle, unfocused in their individual writings and organization but full of rich information.

The “main entrance’ to the spire is buried in text about halfway through the book, seemingly at random. Find the right level that leads to the outside. Then find the right room on that level. Then the preamble to that room has the entrance description text, before you get to the “entrance room.” It’s as if it was written in a vacuum.

Little quests and other tasks are sprinkled throughout the dungeon. “The Church of Bob might ask you to do xxxx” says the text of a room that has xxx in it. Wouldn’t this be more appropriate in the Church of Bob text, or on a quests summary sheet? While there may be a lot fo connections and relationships the ability to to put it at the DM’s fingertips is just not there.

It’s generic. That means no monster stats and little in the way of GP values. What is a “Rain God?” That’s up to you, there’s not even an appendix to give a little overview, it’s all inline text and even that is sparse to nonexistent. Simon does have a few appendices on his blog, including a monster one, to help support this stuff. I have to wonder though if it would not have been a good idea to have a “localizer” page included for, say Gold=XP systems and so on.

And then … it switches. There will be a level with numbers that’s easy to follow. Or a level that has the room text laid out perfectly. And then it will switch back on a different level. It’s frustrating.

As is, this requires extensive highlights, note taking, study, and localization. You’ll have to be an expert on how each level works (Maestro, I’m looking at you) to run the level. That’s not great design or even good design for usability. Imaginative? Rich? Complex? Interactiv? All yes.

The PDF is $13 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages long. It isn’t really representative of the dungeon levels, but in reading through it you do get a good sense of the “adventurers town” and a hint of the factions and richness contained in it. You have to squint, but you can extend that richness to the dungeon as well … though I think the dungeon levels bear little resemblance to the town stuff in terms of usability, etc.


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/230389/Spire?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 8 Comments

Ruins & Adventures #3 – The Sanctuary

Posted on May 27, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
(No designer listed)
Mesozoic Press
B/X
Level 5

The ruins of a small village hide a dark secret.

This twelve page adventure describes a 20-ish room dungeon in about six pages. It has a slow feel to it, with writing that tends to the blander side of evocative. It’s not exactly bad, from any particular standpoint, but nor does it distinguish itself.

Well, I don’t know where to start. How about that one sentence synopsis? It’s a half-build village with a hole in the ground that leads to the dungeon. It’s handled in one three-sentence read-aloud. So, not really a village with a dark secret, more of a hole in the ground with some pretext words thrown at it. Maybe less time spent on the background, at a page, and more time on the environs/dungeon would have been in order.

Anyway, dungeon. It’s got some 5hd undead. And a room with nine zombies (are those still a challenge for level 5 characters?) and an undead tentacle monster with a couple of traps. The complex feels empty, as if the rooms are full of nothing with an occasional monster popping up.

Read-laoud tends to the longer side of four-five long sentences per room and comes across as … staid? I mean, it’s there. It’s accurate. It’s not overblown. It’s just like the world’s least imaginitive-but-competent DM is reading you. It comes across as fact based rather than leaving deep impressions. There is a bench against the far wall. There is an iron door on the west wall. There is a set of wooden shelves on the north wall. Ok. Sure. It’s not exactly doing aything wrong but the writing isn’t exactly next-level either.

I can pick apart small things. One read-aloud section has a note that “As you push forward …” which is awfully close to telling the party what they do/how they react. The overview of the dungeon, proper, before the keys start has some bullets with general information. Floors/ceilings, doors, and then everything slick with water. The slick with water stuff should have probably been moved to the first or second bullet, since it is likely to be references more than the door issue or the general environment. (It also has a mechanic for running on slick stone,) Likewise, a bolded word or two would have gone a decent way to drawing the eye to the correct bullet text. Another room notes that, in the DM text, “There are four dried ink pots on the writing desk each with a silver collar …” This is in contrast to the other DM text follow-ups in that area that begin “The painting is of …” and “The large chest contains …” and “The small chest contains … “ Note how those start with the primary object, meaning I only need to look at the first word to determine if its the correct chunk of text that I’m looking to relate to the party. The writing desk, though, is buried deeper in the sentence, causing me to work harder. Yes, I actually do know I’m a git, thank you very much.

An alcove is “small” and other areas are “large” and so on, the issue being the use of the more boring/generic adjectives and adverbs instead of selecting another word that brings more imagery along for the ride. Likewise there are little historical one-liners that contribute little. A statue once held a candle .. .which has no impact on the adventure. Frank the bad guy hated a statue so he destroyed it … and other little one liner historical backgrounds that bear no meaning on the adventure. Not exactly a sin at one line but not contributing either.

One room, with a dangerous roof, notes pieces of the roof on the floor, with a great hint. Another trap is directly behind a portcullis … so the party should already be aware. Both are good examples of enabling exploratory ad careful play for players paying attention.

So, not much good and not much bad. I could quibble with the amount of text in certain areas, but it does an ok job. I find it dry though, and not really distinguishing itself in any way means I, personally, would look elsewhere.

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. The preview doesn’t work. I wonder why this isn’t free?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/275813/Ruins–Adventures-3-The-Sanctuary-B-X-Essentials?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

(5e) Masque of the Worms review

Posted on May 25, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Kelsey Dionne
The Arcane library
5e
Level 1

Baronness Elenore Rennet has yet to return home from a masque at Moldavia Manor two nights ago. Can the players find her and uncover the hideous secrets brooding inside the grim estate of Count Moldavia?

This sixteen page adventure features a dungeon with six rooms described on four pages. It’s formatted well and evocative. It’s creepy. It’s lacking a bit on the interactive side of the house, but it’s not a museum tour by any definition. I’m going to praise it and then nitpick, but it’s a good adventure.

Take a deep breathe and stay with me here. I promise I know what I’m doing. Ready? This adventure was written for streaming play, like Twitch. But it’s good! I know, There have been others, and the cnic in me notes this is a new way to market. In this case the “written for streaming play” seems to mean the inclusion of a high-res digital player map. Oh, there’s some mention made of being optimized for play and drama, but, since those are core elements that every adventure should do it’s not really relevant to just twitch play. It’s like saying “written down on paper!” or “uses roman numbers!” Well, yeah. Duh.

But, I get where the designer is coming from. While _I_ expect those things it’s clear that most designers don’t. They write dreck after dreck with shitty ass formatting that fights your attempt to use it in actual play. Even the major publishers, WOTC & Paizo, do this (so it’s no wonder people imitate them.)  

But this designer rages against the dying of the usability. Kelsey notes in one small list the changes she’s using. Each encounter on one page. Bulleted lists and bolded keywords. A summary sheet of monster stats. Short room and area description. No paragraphs of droning text. Briefly explained non-encounter rooms. That’s her words! “No paragraphs of droning text.” I can’t tell you how revitalizing it feels to see a 5e adventure from someone who gets it.

And it’s all here. There’s a summary sheet for the monsters, stats all in one place for ease of use at the table. The encounters/rooms don’t span more than a page. Smaller, less interesting rooms get less text. Other features, like a pond out back, are just mentioned in passing. We were told “A dark pond next to the manor ripples in the chilly wind. Low clouds gather overhead.” What more do you need to run this? Nothing. There’s nothing there, why else would the designer devote more space to it? It’s not driving the adventure, it is at best setting mood and creating space for tension, hence its inclusion in the first place. This is exactly what SHOULD happen in ANY adventure written for use that the table. (That, of course, being the dirty secret of the publishers. At. The. Table. Isn’t their market.)

The designer actually fucking says “This adventure is meant to be run at a glance” It’s the first fucking words of the “A word to the GM” section that includes that small list I mentioned earlier. This designer gets it. This is how EVERY adventure should be written. Eight years. Three adventure reviews a week. 90% utter garbage. And then this, a bright jewel buried under the 5e DriveThru cesspool. This adventure delivers on the promise of usability.

You know what else it does? It has more than throw-away hooks and consequences. The baron hired you. He can pardon you. Or make you a knight. Fuck yeah he can! Consequences? If you brough back the big bad alive then he makes you fucking constables with full on cloak pins and writs! Consequences for different decisions! Rewards that are meaningful and drive future roleplaying! And further hooks with the baron turning evil (and some more boring stuff about returning to manor.) Things that drive the world AROUND the party. The environment they adventure in. Rock. Solid.

NPC’s get little offsets. A little one sentence-ish description, quirk, secret. Just enough to run them, easy to find in the text. One little girl is hiding on the grounds. Her secret is shes’ afraid her mother got taken by The Willowman (a folk story) because she stole some cookie. Word for word, that’s it. It’s fucking great. It appeals to Scared Little Kid imagery. It appeals to folklore. It appeals to Slenderman and everything else in the woods. And it tell you every fucking thing you need know to run it by including “(a folk story.)” Note how specific it is. Not that she was a bad girl, but that she stole cookies. Not a monster, The Willowman. The designer doesn’t include any more words because they don’t need to. The specificity and evocative nature of it give us all we need to know to run it.  Bad girl is an abstraction. Stole cookies is specific. It didn’t take any more words. It wasn’t two paragraphs. Perfection Personified. At one point a body is holding not a wine bottle but a bottle Amontillado wine. Specificity for the win.

The bad guy is crazy and mutters to himself. Because the designer is actual good, she includes for us a page of his ravings. On a page, so you can print it out to have it always at hand instead of flipping through the book to find it. Bulleted. Little snippets, just about two-ish sentences each. Just enough to get the DM started out. Perfect. The designer recognized we needed this and they provided it. IE: what a designer is supposed to do.

Let’s cover the misses now. One of our hooks has a section heading of “Appeal to discovery” with a bolded section saying “dark discovery.” This is meaningless. The first hook has a section heading of “Appeal to reward” with knighthood, pardon, and 100gp all bolded. It’s easy to tell what the reward is, it’s bolded. The second section heading is Appeal to Heroism. That’s pretty self-explanatory, the same old do-gooder stuff. The third id the Appeal to Discovery with the “dark discovery” bolded. This tells us nothing. Further, the normal text mentioned “dark rumor and mystery” … an abstraction that is NOT specific. Bolding some rumor, mystery, or something else would have been better here. Then the DM’s eye would land on it, thanks to the bolding, instead of the generic “dark discovery.”

The map is hard for me to read. The player map is 12 meg and done digitally, no doubt for streaming/online play purposes. The DM map is the same map but with numbers, etc. It’s busy for that purpose, the “artistic” quality makes the number not stand out well, and the detail of the map, meant to inspire, is instead hard to read if running off of paper. I’m a big advocate of overloading the map with additional data, like a checkboard floor, then not needing to mention it in the text, but it can’t be to detriment of the core room/key usability. Larger numbers, in boxes, off to the side, with arrows pointing in, or something, maybe? It’s busy in a way that’s not useful to DM and even begins to detract. Not disastrous, but not doing what I think it wants to do.

The cover (which I love, and is the reason I bought it) implies a two-story manor. Some of text also implies that, with climbing up to open windows being mentioned. The map seems one story though and I can’t figure out from the text if there is a second story or what. Either some text was left in or the text isn’t clear.

The bulleted format with bolding words well, along with the evocative descriptions, to give the DM what they need to run it a glance. But there are individual misses. The bulleted lists are not always formatted with the most obvious thing listed first. When the players open the door and the DM does their glance and summarizing for them then the most obvious and/or important things should come first. You don’t put 12 charging orcs at the bottom. In some cases the most obvious things are not first. A kitchen with bodies … do you mention a kitchen with dead bodies first or a kitchen with pots on the stove first? If the bodies are last then that implies they are hard to notice, I guess? But this was the results of a monster massacre, not a serial killer hiding bodies. Similarly, sometimes important things are left out. A common example of a room description is a library or kitchen. You don’t need to describe what it looks like or its contents, we all know what that it. You only need to describe what important and/or relevant to the adventure. There’s a grey area though. Let’s say the room is called a library, or study. Somewhere , deep in the text, it says there’s a secret door behind a bookcase. (Because there should ALWAYS be one there. Likewise, waterfalls. Life should be wondrous and magical.) But … that’s the first mention of a bookcase. As a DM you don’t know to include a bookcase in the players description, it wasn’t in the initial description. A bookcase in a library? Sure, but it relies on a kind of implicit understanding rather than a more explicit statement. If there’s a bedroom, is it fair to put a secret door under a rug on the floor if I never mention there’s a rug on the floor … until three paragraphs later? I like relying on universal knowledge and troped to add flavor … but I get nervous when something requires your knowledge. Of course, every medieval bedroom had rugs on the floor … A bookcase in the library isn’t that egregious, but it still feels wrong to me. It should have been a mention higher up.

More seriously, I think the chosen format of the adventure tends to run the text together and create a wall of text effect. The bullets and bolding work well, as to the offset boxes. The sections headings though don’t do a great job separating areas, or maybe I mean getting that message across to the DM. I look at it and my eyes glaze over at the full page instead of focusing in on just the room, one of three on the page. I don’t know if this is a layout/style template provided by DMsguild or what, but it stinks. Nire indepts, better whitespace, the background image, idk. But I do know it doesn’t work well.

Ending on an upnote, here’s the first bullet point for a room. Great imagery. Draped. Fresh. And then red smears and handprints to juxtapose.

• The hall is draped in fine white curtains; the walls are freshly painted white to match. Red smears and handprints dot the walls.

This is a good adventure. It easily hits the usability and evocative marks. Interactivity could be a little better, but it IS a horror adventure (I left unmentioned all of the Poe inspiration and references.) and that requires some room to build tension. Or I’m making excuses for something I like, won over by the blatant explicit appeal to usability, this blogs core thesis for eight years now.

This is $3 at DriveThru and easily worth that. The preview is fiv pages. The second preview page shows you the bullet/GM list I mentioned. The third the hooks/Appeal to Discovery section I mentioned. The third is the outside of the manor, with the little girl I mentioned, the pond throw-away, etc.The fourth some typical rooms. It’s a good preview, showing you what you’re actually getting.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/251360/Masque-of-the-Worms?1892600

Posted in 5e, Level 1, Reviews, The Best | 10 Comments

AA #42 – Dead in the Water

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Lang Waters
Expeditious Retreat Press
OSRIC
Levels 3-5

You crack your eyes open, surprised to be alive after the sudden storm. What was it that woke you? The hot sun? The stillness ringing in your ears? Bruised, you disentangle yourself from rope and debris on the deck and pull yourself up on the rail. You peer out across a sailor’s nightmare—a sea of glass. Not a ripple in the water as far as the eye can see. Not a whisper of wind touches the sails. You’ve heard stories of ships becalmed for weeks, throwing horses overboard to lighten the load and conserve water. You remember stories of starvation and cannibalism. You see other ships in the distance listing, torn and low in the water. Old. Dead. And you are too…dead, in the water.

This sixteen page adventure details a ship graveyard political situation, with several factions. Becalmed, the party needs to find a way out. It’s an interesting environment with plenty going on. It also suffers from layout and editing issues that make extensive prep a requirement.

After a storm the party is trapped in a ship graveyard, an area becalmed. Six-ish fellow ships are there also, in various conditions. One has four survivors, desperate for food, water, and escape. There’s also a “sand-man” in a steamship scooting about the area salvaging parts, and an evil sorceress (as Hag) who wants the sand-man dead and causes the storms/becalming. Finally, there a tribe of locath unda da sea who want to be mostly left alone. Oh, and the hags lacedons swim around in packs in certain areas. And the other ships are essentially mini-dungeons full of resources and hazards. And under the sea is giant octopus, ruined city, an abysmal depth with a ship about to slide in to it, and a few other goodies. Finally, there’s a timeline to drive some action.

You get all that going on? That’s how you write a fucking adventure. LOT’S going on. Factions. Motivations. Timeline. Timer (food/water in this case.) The motivations make sense, they appeal to understanding. The survivors sometime eat each other, dicing to see who goes next, but they collect their skulls with a solemn promise to bury them on land … desperate people doing desperate things to survive … but bound to each other. At the heart of this adventure is a great concept with lots of stellar components.

That are poorly organized.

If you are going to run this effectively then you are going to have to read it multiple times, spend some time with a highlighter and take a lots of notes. I don’t believe that I, as a consumer, should have to do that. That’s the job of the designer. If you, as a designer, choose to not do that then I’m likely to spend my lucre/time with something that does. There are about a billion adventures available these days and I don’t need to settle. That comes off a little harsh, as if I’m directing it at Lang personally; I’m speaking generally about the hurdle the designer my pass these days.

NPC descriptions are long, one taking up a column. In that specific case it turns in to a wall of text, everything running together with little to no whitespace or bolding to help. A couple of locations, such as the locath camp,. Are presented as a numbered site locale … room/key format is great for exploratory dungeons but too strong of adherence to that format, in EVERY situation, is not called for.

On and on the text goes, adhering to editing value that cause spells and magic items to be bolded but not important facts. Long long text blocks in Ye Olde Fonte Style that all runs together. This does NOT fall in to the sin of being an Adventure Novelization, the way many adventures do. It does, however, lean that way. And that MUST be the case when you emphasize long text blocks over usability at the table.

The ship description for The Intrepid mentions a room 7 … that doesn’t exist on the map. There’s a journal on a body, and the last entry is about a mummy returning at night. And then there’s stats for a mummy in the text. Uh, so, I do what’s in the journal text?

This needed a completely different layout and style. The factions laid out better. Summaries. The ships in a format that doesn’t rely as heavily on room/key for EVERYTHING. It has a good idea but my days of beating my head against an adventure wall in order to get it in to runnable shape are over. I wonder if, in this case, it was playtested by someone other than the designer and/or what the notes were?


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/274221/Advanced-Adventures-42-Dead-In-The-Water?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 4 Comments

The Crypt of Rokar

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Michael Mills
Cannister & grape
OSR
Levels 1-3

Buried deep beneath the barrow mounds of the Wild Wood, Rokar the Terrible slumbers fitully in his sarcophagus, his bride beside him. What terrors protect Rokar as he dreams his fevered dreams? Do you dare enter The Crypt of Rokar in search of treasures and knowledge beyond imagining?

This ten page adventure describes a small tomb with fourteen rooms over four pages. Giants rats, yellow mold, zombies, and a ghoul make up your opponents, all found in their usual environments. Read-aloud is not overly long, in general, but not very interesting either. There’s nothing to separate this from any other low level small dungeon.

What if you don’t do anything bad, but you don’t really do anything good either. What’s the measure of a man in that situation? How do you make a determination, a decision to choose one thing over another? That’s easy for me; I expect more and in a crowded marketplace don’t settle for anything other than the best. Well, except for the fact that I bought it in the first place.

A damp library? What could it contain? Yellow mold. A storeroom full of crates and barrels? That means rats. I do indeed like the classic, but there’s a difference. You’ve got to do them well and they just are not done well here. Let’s examine this from the standpoint of last-minute adventure prep. The players just exted you from the liquor store, asking ifyou wanted anything else other than Krystal and japanese single malt. They are about three minutes away from arriving. If I provided you this map and said “you’ve got three minutes to key the adventure” then you’d come up with something that said “2. Library – Yellow Mold. 3. Storeroom – Rats.” If that’s expanded in the most obvious way possible then you have this adventure. It brings nothing new over you writing “Library – Mold” or “Storeroom – Rats.” That might be ok if it did it really REALLY well, but it doesn’t. It’s drab.

I will note a few of the more interesting things it does do. At one point it notes that zombies, locked in a room, fed on the canopic jars kept within. This is the old zombie trope, and one that I’ve seen reintroduced lately. I’m quite fond of it. It seems like the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s had zombies that were just lifeless bodies swinging swords. This new trend of flesh eaters brings so much more than that, being able to immediately leverage forty years of pop culture zombie imagery.  There’s also a little bit of hints captured in the read-aloud. That storeroom read aloud notes the smell of decay and faeces. The library notes a smell of damp and mold, hinting at the yellow stuff. It’s not consistent, but when it’s there I appreciate it. There should be a back and forth to D&D. The DM mentions something, the players, the smart ones anyway, dig deeper asking follow-up question. And thus player skill is rewarded. It’s got a couple of rooms that do this and I’m happy to see that.

It’s also inconsistent in its logic. The front doors are busted open but some statues nearby retain their bejeweled eyes. Those zombies that fed on the canopic jars? That’s backstory, the read-aloud gives no hint of a room in chaos, jars smashed and bloodstains on the floor, etc. Just the usual anti-septic description.

“Many books appear to be damaged by decay or pests.” the library read-aloud tells us. Puddles of books, rotting in damp, gnawed upon, all are words that evoke imagery much stronger than “damaged by decay or pests.” That’s an abstraction, a conclusion. Rich adjectives and adverbs appeal to sensory information instead and allow the party to draw their own conclusions.

Nitpicky shit: The level is only noted on the cover, so when I’m on DriveThru looking for a Level 1-3 adventure I won’t know this is one unless I lick on the cover to enlarge it. I’m not sure that’s the wisest decision from a consumer ease standpoint. There’s only about 1400gp of treasure in this. I think I would have expected more, seems low. Especially since there’s a wight in this Level 1 adventure, that can only be hit by magic items.

Finally, let me mention to deriguour text. You know the stuff. “The DM should blah blah blah.” or notes that you should read the boxed text to the players when they enter the room. I just skip this shit, but, as a point of interest, is this really doing anything but inflating page count? If you’re buying an adventure on DriveThru do you need to be told to read boxed text? Even if you DIDNT know that do you need to be told that? In this case it explicitly notes DM’ing in the players favour. I’m not cool with that. Is there a place for this genero information anymore?

This is pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. There is no preview. I get it, it’s free since it’s PWYW. I don’t give a shit, stick in a good preview anyway.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/275375/The-Crypt-of-Rokar?1892600

The players should have a reasonable chance of survival, however a certain amount of danger and risk is necessary to keep things interesting.

As game master you should adjust the number, strength and aggressiveness of encountered creatures to ensure this occurs.

When the players enter an area on the map you should read aloud the boxed text in its entirety. You may also add any additional information from the game master’s notes immediately thereafter as you desire. This may be necessary if the players fail to find a crucial item, exit or other plot device.

Posted in Reviews | 11 Comments

Spire of the Kobolds

Posted on May 18, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By Megan Irving
Aegis Studios
O&O / BX
Levels 1-2

The Untamed Gauntlet has many mysteries. The Spire is one of them: a huge tower of gleaming rock pointing towards the heavens, with a winding dungeon carved beneath it. Currently, a clan of Kobolds have found it empty (or empty-ish), and are using it as their base. Fearful of invaders, they have thoroughly trapped the upper levels, hiding their best treasures at the very bottom. The party has been issued a writ of salvage for a simple task in the Gauntlet (perhaps a location or goal detailed in another Odysseys & Overlords adventure module.) On the way to their destination, the adventurers see movement near the Spire. They know that monsters periodically move into the Spire, and might have treasures worth pursuing.

This nine page adventure details a small eleven room dungeon on about 2.5 pages. A pretty straightforward hack on a small map with little exploration, it’s just a few kobolds in a hole. It’s focus is on dry descriptions rather than evocative environments, and goes through contortions to use a map without any modifications. Weird. Not egregiously bad, but not good either.

The spire is huge tower of gleaming rock pointing upwards towards the heavens. On the way somewhere else the party sees movement near it. They know that monsters sometimes move in to it and might have treasure. This is, just about word for word, the introduction to the exterior description of the Spire and the inciting event. There are not any more words than this to describe the outside environment, spire exterior, or the moving monsters. The only other words are a stat block of a kobold hunting party and how they react to being avoided or fought.

I’m a big fan of FOCUS but abstraction has to be of the appropriate level and it’s not in this opening salvo. Either it’s three paragraphs of generic information that’s not needed or you need to change a few words and give us a little more concrete under our DM feet. The pieces are too far removed from each other to put together. Dyson (it’s a Dyson map) has a nice little rendering of the spire next to the map that, taken together, provides a little more inspiration. It’s still lacking though. It’s the designers job to add that little bit of inspirations and it’s not there in either the spire or “the movement.”

Room one is an “imposing hall” with “arcane carvings.” Again, a level of abstraction. Telling us the conclusions that we would draw from a more concrete description. Not a longer one, but a more concrete/evocative one. Imagine if different words were chosen to describe the hall and the carvings. Ideally they get the willies as they come to THEIR conclusion that it’s an imposing hall and the carvings are arcane. The adventure does this sort of thing over and over again, avoiding the concrete and instead relying on conclusions and abstractions. A room with “mostly junk” is not the value add I’m looking for in an adventure.

Other room elements are missing. The kobold king wears a dented crown, never mentioned again. Those arcane carvings get nothing more noted about them. Throw aways not impacting the adventure. You can do this, a little, but in such a small adventure I would expect more interactivity and follow up of individual elements called out by name.

The map, a Dyson one, is small and I’m not a particular fan of those. OSR games tend to work best in exploratory environments rather than Lair environments. You need room to breathe, in my experience. Accepting that, though, the map itself is treated a little too holy. I’m guessing it came pre-keyed and the designer want to expand a bit on sections not keyed. Rather than put additional numbers on the map, or features like tripwires and oil pools, they instead rey on the text. There’s a fair bit of text between the description of room one and room two, one describing some storerooms and another a ramp leading from rooms one to two. This seems a tortuous workaround to the problem of just putting  notes 1b and 1c on a map. I’m pretty sure Dyson don’t care, from his website language, and it these notes, tripwires, oil pools, etc would go long way to both overloading the map with useful information and removing some of it from the text. This allows the text to focus more the actual adventure instead of describing where the tripwire is in the room, or where the oil pool is.

On the nitpicky side, lots of tripwires and lots of traps, all of which get almost the exact same description. Spotted with remove traps, etc. Pulling this out to a general section in front of the keys would make the individual descriptions shorter, allowing more focus on the actual room and easier scanning during play.

This appears to be for a game/setting called Odysseys & Overlords, which appears to just be B/X or a derivative. There’s almost no real treasure in this, but for a magic sword, which makes it suspect as a Gold=XP game … if indeed it is one.

It’s not a terrible thing, but it’s not a good thing either. And the level of abstraction pushes it to the bad side of line. One of the best descriptions is of the first ramp: “A long stone ramp leads down into the darkness at a steep angle. Strange skittering and echoing noises can be heard from below. There are torches on the walls, but they aren’t lit.” Downward at a steep angle in to the darkness, skittering echoing noises. Those are the sorts of descriptions I can get behind. It paints, in just a few words, a visceral picture, a feeling.

This is $1 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Boo! Boo I saw sir! Boo! Show us what were buying before we buy it!


https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/275268/Spire-of-the-Kobolds?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 6 Comments

(5e) Krillo’s Tomb

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Bryce Lynch 
By John Heffernan
Island of Bees
5e
Level 3

The adventurers are hired to enter into a catacomb to discover the treasures inside before a rival faction of thieves can get there first. Their employer, a goblin named Krillo, offers them all of the treasure that they find inside, and only asks to keep the relics and magic items. Can the heroes enter into Krillo’s Tomb and escape with their lives? There’s only one way to find out!

Yeah yeah, 5e on a Wednesday. My raging against the entropy is less successful than usual and I’m behind. I’ll do some OSR on Saturday.

I’m an open-minded person not an ossified old man.
I’m an open-minded person not an ossified old man.
I’m an open-minded person not an ossified old man.

This 34 page adventure has six “scenes” that compose the dungeon exploration. The core adventure is on about fourteen pages with the rest being pre-gens and a dwarven runic language treatise, as well as rules for a Stealth minigame. It’s not all together terrible for a newer game, but it is rather boring, with an emphasis on mechanics rather than en evocative environment. IF it were evocative then it would be a fairly normal 5e adventure. IE: straightforward.

Bob the goblin hires you, for 100gp, to go loot a tomb. He wants the magic and you keep the loot. Seems there’s a mercenary company of archeologists (!) on their way soon and he wants to loot the place before they arrive. He’ll give you 100 more gold if you do it non-violently! Yes, you have to stretch for the pretext. Yes, the nonviolence thing is fucking weird. Yes the tomb is strangely devoid of cash, you might get 300gp more in the tomb. For the sake of my own sanity I’m going to ignore all of that.

The scene thing is WEIRD. It’s like little set pieces. In scene one you are trying to sneak past the guards outside the tomb. There’s a little map with things to hide behind, and rules for sneaking and guards being on alert and spotting you. There are notes about the guards being helpful, and how they get annoyed and call for help. I’ve never played Metal Gear, but I suspect the designer has. This is straight out of “the stealth level’ in every video game every game that has one. It takes a page of text to describe the scene, ? to repeat the stealth rules in the appendix, ? to describe the general guard attitude, ? for the stat block, ? for the aftermath and seven sentences to describe where the seven guards are. Likewise for a mummy chase scene. It feels videogamey, with the blind mummy jumping from platform to platform and the party trying to be quiet. Not exactly a bad idea, but the focus on mechanics makes it feel like a videogame rather than a living breathing D&D adventure.

And it’s all written in this weirdly abstracted/generalized text style. “The north half of the left room has an altar in the center with an imprint of a laying dwarf carved in the center. Stone tables are covered with rolls of fresh bandages, and a series of empty clay jars. The roof is domed and covered with stone spikes that jet out.” Very fact based text. And that’s true of every encounter. In fact, A LOT of the encounters are like weird Grimtooth traps you’re trying to navigate, at least the Grimtooth “room” traps. Lots of elements and a convoluted mechanism.

Once of the scenes takes place between two other, when a door opens. While a big door opens a bunch of thieves come out from behind you and start blasting away at you. While the door opens. That’s the scene. Others are more like some weird Grimtooth room that you’re trying to navigate.

And then there’s the dwarf runes mini-game, with the party trying to decipher the runes in the tomb for clues. I’m not opposed to these sorts of things, in fact I think player puzzles can be fun. But this particular one seems more like the dwarven runic language being described and the party trying to figure out the entire thing. I could be wrong about this and it could be fine in AP.

As a Challenge Dungeon or tourney dungeon this might be ok. It’s hard to get past the focus on mechanics though. I wish it were more evocative. That might smooth over the mechanics and make it something to whip out for a D&D tourney.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggest price of $3. The preview is eight pages long and a good one, showing you the first three scenes. This includes the “sneak past the guards” scene, a “dungeon exploring” scene, and the thief/elf-bandit attack scene. Elf bandits attacking. Thematically, modern D&D is missing something.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/275492/Krillos-Tomb?1892600

Posted in 5e, Reviews | 9 Comments