tenfootpole.org

By Roderick Waibel
Sacrosanct Games
5e
Levels 1-10

Normally a time of year for celebration of the harvests, there is a tangible pall over the keep.  People are on edge, and a level of inherent distrust seems to be festering underneath weak smiles and cordial habitual greetings.  It seems as though the harvest celebration is happening out of routine, rather than genuine excitement. It is as if somehow the people are trying to use it as a way to get their minds off the pervasive sense of dread that is brought with each wave of fog. The circumstances that brought you to the keep are varied, but one thing is for certain: something is amiss.

This 236 page adventure uses about a hundred pages to describe a multi-level underground caves/tunnel/dungeon with about 250 rooms. Maddingly, it develops well but it missing in a kind of overview to get the DM oriented to it. Combined with a casual writing style, you can tell its got some interesting things going on but the amount of work required to massage it in to playable form would be substantial. 

Multiple levels of a single mega-dungeon here, with a very brief regional map. The adventure is, though, in the dungeon. It starts with some ant tunnels. They take up a pretty substantial part of the adventure, about fifty of the 250 or so rooms. Then it leads to some intermediate caverns, and then a large underground cave with several subterranean races living in it. It ends up with a more traditional dungeon down there, in a tomb with some cutists, etc. 

The ant tunnels and upper levels are relatively interesting from a ,,, developing story? standpoint. You get this initial impression and then there are little hints of things going on that develop in to more. It has a kind of developing horror present in it. It also reminds me of the Buggems lair in Legion of Gold, and, Gamma World My Favoritests, I am perhaps biased.

Things tend to go downhill after that. The underground community section has five factions present, but while each get a decently extensive write up I don’t feel like it lives up to its potential in any way. And the final dungeon levels, in  a temple, etc, do bring back more interesting ideas again but … it just feels off.

The thing is not organized well. For such a large adventure, 250 rooms and level one through ten and 260 pages, it feels … sparse? Almost half the pages are appendix but it’s really lacking in organizational, or summarizing data that could help orient the DM to the play of the thing. A few overviews would have been in order, and the ones that are present could be much better. The humanoid settlements get a page of so write up each with their motivations but then revert to traditional room key. And the write-ups are not really in a manner that help you use them. It’s more of a style guide that one could then use to develop DM aides and text for running an adventure. The lore guide full of background data that helps you write the actual play guide, so to speak. Oh! I like that analogy! And it works so well for so many descriptive errors in an adventure. “This room used to be …” Hey! That goes in the lore guide that the adventure writer uses to write the adventure! Not in the adventure proper! And this adventure does that a lot, with used to be’s and this is that way because Y …  That sort of tex almost never contributes to the actual play of the adventure and gets in the way of the DM running it.

Descriptions also feel sloppy. One that sticks out, aboveground, is with some caravan ruins. A short description of a ruined wagon, torns pits of cloth, destroyed goods. Then the DM text mentions, in an off hand way, the survivors relating … whit, what? Survivors? And also that the ants rendered people … ants did this? It’s as if the writer knows what they want, what they have in mind, but they don’t get it down on the paper in a way that orients the DM to the actual play. Information is not well organized. The focus is not on the core of a room but rather tangential room details. Muddied descriptions. And then, when the text gets LOOOONG, and it does get column-length or longer in places, it becomes nigh impossible to discern playability. 

I note as well that this thing could use a lot more cross-references. There’s a bunch of mini-plots present but no help for the DM about where to find out more. You’ve got a missing relative? Better read all 250 pages to find out their name; it’s buried in there somewhere! Some cross-references would have helped a lot. It aso uses room name description “Laboratory” and so on, but also mixes in commentary “Looks like a hot time!” or something like that. You can totally do things this way … but given the weakness of the room descriptions and DM text then an evocative room description would have helped orient the DM to the room in a much better way. 

There’s also some weirdness in the communities giant cavern that is strains disbelief. The entire thing in on a piece of graph paper with 1 square equaling 300 feet. Those are pretty tight confins for five factions plus some wilderness. And there’s this 1 kilometer zone around each community where you encounter those inhabitants … which means around three-ish squares in the middle of the map where you DON’T have those encounters. It feels really small for what it is. And then there is some conflicting information about one of them, with mi-gos servants collecting sacrifices/slaves .. .but they also can be befriended? That doesn’t have to be impossible, but it feels more like an error than a possibility. 

Megadungeons are difficult beasts. They require some special organization to help the DM run these large and complex environments. Combined with the casual writing style in this it comes out as a product in which individual zones (of which there are a lot. yeah!) and rooms have pretty good ideas that hit over and over again, but they don’t fit well for the DM to run at the table.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. Page eleven of the preview/page sixteen of the book shows you the Abandoned Camp encounters with the survivors/ants thing I referenced earlier, for you to draw your own conclusions. Read the last three or four pages of the preview to get a sense of the writing style. It’s an ok preview, but would have been better also showing some dungeon pages.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/167926/Depths-of-Felk-Mor?1892600

Patrick/Frogama
Frogsama’s Greyhawk Adventures Blog
5e
Level 2

A new lumberyard was established in the Gnarley Forest, but the morale of the workers is low because of recent attacks by orcish raider. The party is hired to protect the workers and kill the attacking orcs

This 45 page adventure details a few encounters as the party attempts to protect a lumberjack camp from raiding orcs. The first in an adventure path leveraging Greyawk, it drops in Melf, G1, and other references to a living Greyhawk world. It is cumbersome at times, with misses in organization and reference material, but the basic set up and delivery, the concepts behind the adventure, are pretty nice. 

The party overhear a conversation in a bar with a lumberjack telling a merchant that he better fix the problem. This leads the party to the lumberjack camp that is eventually attacked by orcs. Questioning, or tracking them back to their camp reveals most are afflicted by a plague and the party finds a village of zombies being used by a disease-cult for training. 

The designer, on their blog, states that they think that 5e is the best for story driven games and, I think, they might be right. At least close enough that argument is just splitting hairs. It is no surprise then that this adventure is chapter one in a campaign arc and is story driven. What’s interesting to me is how there has been a more than passing attempt to write a story based adventure that is not a railroad. There IS a kind of natural progression to things that flows from it, but there are also alternatives and advice for the DM for parties taking different paths, in most cases. This sets it apart from most of these sorts of adventures, in a good way. Things do get harder, I think, once the party is deeper in to the adventure, in later chapters. If this more open-ended approach can be kept then the designer will have solved that age-old “story without railroad in an AP” quandary. Future entries will tell. 

The adventure relies on challenges and encounters that are not combat, or, at least, a mix of them. I can think of two combat encounters, both more … open-ended things, and several more that are not. That’s a decent variety and I, as always, appreciate both the more opended-ended nature of the combat encounters and in having non-combat ones as well. What you get are maybe three types, in total. 

First, the combats, which tend to be on a larger open-ended village/compound style map. The first is the party reacting to an orc raid while the second is an assault on a village by the party. The second, in particular, is the kind of encounter that I love: a wacky plan. It being an open-ended assault, launched by the party, there is an opportunity for the party to come up with a plan on what to do. Which will, in my experience, inevitably be dumb and not go off well and lead to WONDERFUL things happenning during the game. This sort of player-driven activity is at the heart of good D&D. 

Second, there are some potential combat situations that are telegraphed as “you’d be dumb to do that.” In one case the party sees a field of zombies that they need to get through, ala a walking dead mega-hoard. This is set up very similar to a 4e skill challenge … maybe a little too mechanistic for my tastes (which was always the problem with most 4e skill challenges) but the variety here, and intensity, of getting past the hoard should indeed be a memorable experience, I’ll give the designer that. Another encounter, with a camp full of orcs with stomach viruses, come off in a similar way except without the skill checks. It’s pretty obvious that the party is out of their league and that telegraphing leads to solutions other than combat.

Finally, the third sort of encounter, again with a couple of them present, is more window-dressing. These are NPC encounters on the road, or a brief stop by a castle being built on the way to the camp, or the initial lumberjack camp interaction. The party is essentially just meeting people and experiencing the world around them. This last category goes in to the worldbuilding category, as it tries to bring some holistic world to the party, give them a feel that things are going on around them, and introduces some history, like refugees from the G series adventures. I can absolutely see where this is going and we’ll have to see if full advantage is taken of this in other entries to follow-up on things like the castle being built, etc.

It’s going a couple of other interesting things as well. One of the few skill checks (outside of the skill challenge anyway) is a medicine roll while looking at a plague victim. It’s got a low initial value and there are various levels of success that reveal some interesting things about the plague that add to the story, up to and including “its clearly man made.”  The skill check for the zombie hoard also has an interesting fail condition: an orc scout gets eaten. He led you there, showed you, most likely, and tying the characters fuck up rolls to a negative for the party, and taking care of an NPC while at it, IS in fact, and interesting story development. It’ has a slight mechanistic component, you no longer have an ally, and a strong story component; nicely done. It’s also got decent DM advice in places, like “well, the dudes you are talking with should know the answer, I’ll look it up and get back to later with it.” … specifically acknowledging that there’s no shame in this. And he’s right.

And there are some substantial misses here as well.

The maps are ALMOST great. Note that two of the combat encounters are, essentially, wide open village-y battles, with a third being an orc camp with a social element. The maps for all three locations fit an interesting scale. They are not battle maps, and they are not “countryside” maps. They tend to show the village and just a hint of trees/features beyond them. The scale of these maps is just a bit claustrophobic for me, for this type of encounter. The maps do show things like huts, hay bales, etc, to hide behind and so forth. That’s great, it’s what they should show, larger features, for these sorts of Wacky Plan sorts of encounters. I wish though that it showed just a little bit more beyond the village edge proper. The ability to come in, find a rise or hill, or some larger trees nearby, etc, would have helped with the lead in. It does do this, to a certain extent, but it needs just a little more to be truly effective.

There are some occasional text inconsistencies, like in the number of elves present in a certain encounter: three or four? This is related to the need for a decent edit. These editing issues present themselves in several areas. There are simple misspellings, as well as awkward phrasings here and there throughout the text. More importantly, certain elements are “missed.” For example, some names, generally bolded in the text, are not, making it harder to find them. In other areas the names of important NPC”s are missing altogether, or, if included, are in the appendix in the monster stats sections rather than in the text you’re running from.

Other text is … disorganized? Sometimes it appears that text appears out of order. A message arrives for the party while they are at a camp … but this section is AFTER they have moved on from the camp. In other areas important information is depeper in the text then it should be. The zombie encounter spends a lot of time talking about zombies and the environment, in general, before getting to there being dozens of zombies present. There’s a generally expected arrangement of facts that one would expect and the organization of parts of the adventure doesn’t seem to follow that. So while it MAY be present, it’s not where you expect it to be. 

But, whatever, that’s a practice thing, mostly. You write, you learn, you think about it, you go back and eit again with fresh eyes. As a plot based adventure that’s more open-ended than most, it’s decent. But more bullets,etc and less paragraphs for relaying important information!

This is free on the designers blog:

By Davis Chenault
Troll Lord Games
5e
Mid Level? or High Level? It says both ...

A long journey under an azure sky filling with brackish, boiling clouds ends at a large oak tree. Here, from a muscled branch, a man hangs limply by a thick rope strangled around his neck. Beyond, a dim, rising, yellow moon silhouette’s a village. Snaking, ashy tendrils of smoke coil above rooftops, lights glitter in windows while a miasmal fog creeps down upon the village from freshly churned fields. Then, as sudden as lightening, a fife and fiddle begin a joyous tune. This stops as abruptly as it started. All that now can be heard is a rope straining and groaning with the weight of the hanged man.

This 21 page adventure describes a village with about two dozen homes and about twice as many people. A number of who want to kill you. The setup is good, the people are interesting, their descriptions are evocative … and it’s mostly unusable because it uses room/key format on the village instead of providing the DM the tools they need to run a village of murderous people.

Some people in the village hung an innocent hang. The man hanging from the tree is the first thing the party comes across on their way in to town. What they don’t know is that in punishment the gods cursed them the abyss, and they can only appear in the mortal realm, village and all, for two days a year. During that time some are content just to live their lives as they once did. Others are now murderous, corrupted by the abyss. Also, their heads are not well attached to their bodies and their bodies rot over the 48 hours, especially the last 12, that they are in the mortal realms. In to this the party stumbles three hours in to their return. Also, if the party can kill EVERYONE in the village inside of the remaining 45 hours then the curse will be broken … although it’s not clear to me from the adventure how the party learns of that. There’s one couple who seem to be willing to, slowly, reveal the curse, but that’s it.

So, about 48 people in the village. About Twenty or slow motivations/how they react. About 48 or so different descriptions. A pseudo-timeline of events. And each has some kind of idea/something they know, or don’t, about the hanged man, which investigating is the pretext to start the adventure … although this is never explicitly mentioned.

Unfortunately ALL of this is buried in room/key format. Building 1, from the map, someones home, with the key named as such: “Bill & Bertha Henderson.” Then there’s a description of what they were like in life, before the curse. Then there’s a description of what they do now, their current personalities. Then there’s a description of what they know about the hanged man/that situation and some more personality about their characters now. Then there may be notes about events and/or how they react to the timeline/party that the villager is getting ready to throw. Then there’s some notes about how they react to being attacked. Then stats.  Then there is a description of both of their heads … since they can fly off of the body and fly around on their own, eventually. And this is repeated about 24 times, once for each building. For about forty people in total all the buildings. 

And the content is great. From what they know about the hanging to their current goals, to the head descriptions. It’s almost all oriented towards actual play. “Almost” meaning theirs some information about their past lives and other details that are NOT actual play oriented. Normally I’d comment how this gets in the way of the encounter keys, but not in this case.

That’s because in this case it ALL gets in the way of running the adventure. I believe this adventure is unrunable in its current form, at least without serious highlighting and note taking. Embedding the timeline as well as the subplots in each NPC home description was NOT a good choice, at all. 

What this needs is a seperate timeline section, with the subplots integrated in to that and cross-referenced to their NPC entries and a seperate section for the subplots. Thus, a list of of subplots/how NPC’s react. A timeline. A brief NPC description. A table of NPC descriptions and personalities/notes that is cross referenced to the timeline/plots/events/map. THAT would make this adventure runnable, a hell of an adventure at that.

Are you willing to put in that work?

I’m not. I believe it’s the designers job to do that. This would be a terrific adventure rereleased in a usable format.

This is $10 at DriveThru, with a C&C version available also. The preview is six pages. The last two pages give you two entries for homes in the village. That should give you idea of what to expect with this adventure, how things are laid out, etc. Note the intermingling of data. Keep that all in your head. Then augment it by twenty more houses and forty more people. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/292858/5th-Edition-The-Hanged-Man