tenfootpole.org

By Jim Pinto
Port World Games
Generic/Universal
Level- Ha!

The Valley of Brycshire has been infested with a foreign and strange problem for a quarter of a century. This alone is not unique to fantasy gaming. Most adventures start with, “There’s something rotten in Denmark.” But it is for this very reason King for a Day works so well. It starts simple enough with an errand or a missing woman, concepts PCs can easily understand and want to solve. The hook is baited and slowly they come to realize there are a lot of problems in Brycshire. Too many, in fact. And no one seems interested in fixing them. There are nonhuman tribes fighting a war no one can see. There are two groups of cultists, shockingly similar, yet with nothing in common. There’s a local Baron, unable to think straight and unconcerned with the impending extinction of his people. Underneath it all, keeping their intentions hidden, is the Dagon Cult. The cult is fixated on serving three masters who in turn serve a disguised god, who is lying to everyone, including the cultists and puppet masters. Every layer of the mystery is buried under another lie. The enemy at the end of the story is never named. Not in this edition and not in the previous one. I thought it was obvious who it was. But some people didn’t agree and fabricated endings I didn’t intend. And that lie makes me happier than any truth I could reveal.

This 373 page book attempts to paint a picture of a small region with a cult problem and many other intrigues. It is, instead, an unusable mess that spends a lot of time either touting itself or being purposefully ambiguous. 

This frequently comes up on lists of Best Adventures. I’m gonna assume this appealed to the Pathfinder Adventure Path crowd and that they were amazed to see a sandbox? Otherwise I just don’t understand why people think this is a good adventure. A quick google to learn its history instead turned up people say it was SUCH a good adventure or people saying something like “I’ve read through this book several times, made pages and pages of notes & scribblings, and have been working for over a year on bringing this into a playable adventure that I can DM for my group. All during this time, I have been wishing repeatedly that there was an index at the back of the book rather than all my Post-It page markers with notes on them sticking out everywhere around the edges of the book.” A lot of people seem to be saying how great this is … but there are not a lot of Played comments. This causes me to raise an eyebrow. Either this (Revised) edition fucked up the origional (as, say, kickstarted Rappen Athuk did), or peple are just reading this instead of playing it, or It Was A Radical Departure from the ham-fisted adventure paths at the time. This version, that I’m looking at right here, is not playable. There are some good sandbox adventures and many more acceptable or not terrible ones. I can’t see anything radically different in this one that would make it more appealing than those.

The region has a lot going on in it but the core of this is a cult playing the long game, poisoning the water supply, slowly turning the people apathetic. They just don’t care about anything anymore. And it’s not in a radical way, something obvious, but, if your kids go missing you should give a shit, yeah? They don’t. Parallels to the modern pharmaceutical industry and its pills, removing both the highs and the lows from list so everything is just kind of bleh? Well, no probably not. There are, listed, 39 storylines in this. 39 separate things/plots/etc going on that range from minor to full on campaign themes. There’s a lot going on here, probably too much even if the product was perfect. That does give the DM the ability to pick and choose and perhaps use this as the basis for SEVERAL campaigns, and it also means that a good deal of space was wasted in other circumstances. Although, I do think it would be fun to run this, like, three times, name changes and the like, dropping in different plot elements, all eventually ending in the same way/cult. “Jesus fucking christ! It’s the same campaign!” Always down for a good “appeal to the player not the character. I’ll speak to those later.

There are going to be many issues with this adventure, but the most immediately obvious is the conversational tone in the writing combined with the smugness of the designer. What A Clever Boy Am I gets real old real fast. And the designer speaks to the reader directly and frequently, if not continually. “The gamemaster must see everything at once. The PCs want to see everything at once, but the act of discovery is everything. The more the gamemaster knows and understands about the environment, the more she can ‘wing it’ when the PCs go off course. After all, a great percentage of roleplaying is improvisation, but sandbox play can be more demanding on a gamemaster’s freewheeling spirit. Gamemasters that aren’t comfortable with this style of play should map out each scene or segment of play ahead of time, drawing players through the story by the nose. And if this is your intention, I recommend not playing this adventure at all.” That the designer condescends to allow us his secrets is a great honor indeed! I suppose I could get over the smugness if it were not married to the conversational writing style. As a reminder, I’m looking for four things in an adventure: usability at the table, evocative writing, interactivity, and overall design. If you’ve really created a masterpiece of design then I can be forgiving in some of the other areas, and it’s an easy c- if you can use what you’ve created at the table. All stabbing is going to be frowned upon, generally, as is Victorian laundry lists rooms, extreme minimalism, and purple prose. Conversational text gets in the way of locating information in the adventure. I’m not dying on any hill; it’s theoretically possible that you could write an adventure using conversational text and that it will still turn ok. But possible and probably do not have the same definitions. Adventure writing is, at its core, technical writing. It MUST assist the DM in running it. That’s why it exists, its entire reason for existing. And the conversational writing leads to both padding of the text, making it harder to locate information, burying the important parts of text in surrounding walls of conversational tone, and a cognitive difficulty in parsing the text to pull out the portions you need for the game RIGHT NOW. I mean, you don’t seriously expect me to keep 370 pages of text in my head, right? I’m going to hit this again and again and again in this review. A book filled with underlines, highlights, post it notes, and separate notebooks of data and excel spreadsheets is not a success. It means that the designer has fundamentally failed in the core purpose of the adventure. I don’t care. It’s its written in iambic pentameter in inuit then, maybe, it shouldn’t fucking be written in iambic pentameter in inuit? 

Let’s talk storylines. Plots. Whatever. These start on page 290. Of 373. “Border Disputes” is a minor plot. It takes, oh, a page and a quarter to describe. Humanoid tribes have turf and they put up rocks to mark the edges of their turf. A border marker gets vandalized and no one knows the graffiti of the new tribe. A couple of villages are suggested as places remote enough for warring tribes to fight over. That’s it. There’s nothing else here. Oh, there’s preaching: “While this is not an important storyline, certain players come to expect combat with humanoid species as a staple of fantasy gaming. Border Disputes provides an organic method to introduce physical threats to the campaign. Without this storyline (and a few others), the gamemaster can ignore most of the humanoids in the valley, especially if it seems unlikely Brycshire could support so many creatures.” But anything else? That’s on the DM. This is, at best, a series of events in a better written adventure. But, hey, want to run it. Let’s turn to page 556, where the locations start. Hmmm, a footnote for “Abandoned Farms” on page 59 tells us that “Goblins from the Carrembarrow Hills have been spotted on the edge of Thursley Bog. Someone from Osathorpe travels to Halford in order to report it.” That seems useful. Ashley Forest is described starting on page 60. It has a small note about two tribes using the southern tip to trade, as well as a couple of other events related to the forest, a wild boy a dead orc, humanoid on humanoid ambush. Seems like something to remember. Ah! “Avendeep, a couple of sentences on page 64 about a locale in the forest. It has “another passage into the orc tunnels.” Basing Hall has a note about the Roughskin tribe nesting there occasionally. Ah, Carrembarrow Hills. “Border Disputes and Warring Tribes. The Carrembarrow Hills are

where problems start, but the valley floor of Brycshire is where most fights seem to end.” Seems like a major site to me. Ok, an hour later I’ve scanned the location, up to page 146 and noted the places where humanoid tribe shit happens. I have now reached the orc Caves” section. That’s nine locations over two pages for the Blood Eye Orcs. Regale yourself with “3. cave stairs Massive stairs are cut straight from the earthen cave, breaking through into the natural cave entrance above.” This is all generic content. Ok, lets see, page 160 is people, let’s scan that also. Ah! Blood Eye Orcs appear on page 174. Wait, no, they belong to a major plotline, not the minor warring tribes plotline. Ah ha! Page 176 are the Bog’gog, a small tibe of peaceful goblins. Led by Bez. Is there an entry for Bez? Lets flip back and check. Ah, yes, there is! /4 page to tell us he’s a pacifist. “He now understands the value of life and death.” Seeems lie that could be said in less than ¾ of a page, but what do I know? Ok, back to the Bog’ogog. Nothing relly good here. Ah, Broken Fangs on page 178, aggressive warline Gnolls. Led by Remmock, we’ll need to go look that up later. Another ¾ page to tell us about some gnoll names and other trivia, and that they will blame the tribe of eight in border wars. Ok. Ah, yes, page 249, their leader does have a separate entry. Hates Snygg. Better go look that up. “Alpha, Intelligent, Hunter” hat’s fucking boring. Hmmm, ok, lets grab a map, print off a copy and note the tribes on it and locations on it, maybe with territories? Seems like a good idea. Oh! Looks like page 51 has a list of factions and MAYBE the tribes are on it? Eight of them maybe? Ok, lets pop out the handouts PDF. It’s got all of the locations in it and who appears. Ashley Forest says “Duncan Fangrin Gnolls Gremock Spearfang Order Of The Serpent Snygg Tribe Of Eigt Viviene” Ok, some of those looks humanoid. Serpent? Oh, hmmm, those are hippies who dress up like snakes, not humanoids I guess. We can dig through the rest of these to try and find humanoid sounding names also. So, I’ve read everything, made by notes, stuck in post-its, and created maps and a kind of event timeline. I’m now ready, after a couple of hours, to include one of the more minor and throwaway plotlines! Yeah me! Remember this feeling. 

Obviously this is absurd. There is some kabuki regarding organization, cross references and the like, but it’s just that, kabuki. I don’t think it actually does anything to help you run this, or, mostly even, prep to run this. This is, likely, not an adventure. It’s a regional setting with a lot of suggestions and the possibility of a lot going on. It has, through its obtuseness, crossed the line from adventure and/or sandbox in to regional setting. And I don’t willingly pick out regional settings to review. I don’t know how to review fluff. 

As a regional setting the organization is still shit. But, clearly, you can see how this might be used as a starting regions for the players. They go about their business exploring dungeons and the like and the regicide, apathy, coups and other intrigues happen around them. That SHOULD have been how this was organized. It’s not though, there’s not nearly enough to the locales to support adventuring “down time.” 

Plus, there’s a very strong, explicit, Harn vibe going on. We are solidly anglo-saxon with this. Laets and Cnihts running around. You know what those are, right? How about compurgation? No? Shit is just thrown in to complicate things. This should have been a more generic setting instead of going hard core down the angle-saxon path. Yeah, it adds flavor. You’ve also got 30+ “storylines” to dump in. How much complexity do you want in a supplement? The hundred court. The shire court. All tools for you to use, but, also, not directly referenced anywhere in the adventure. COULD either of those show up as play elements? Yeah, there’s noble intrigue. Do they deserve all of the space they take up? No.

You can see why people got excited about this when it came out. And, even, why it might be interesting today. The scope here is quite large, with lots of people, places, and plotlines. And there’s always something quite impressive about these larger scope products. Rappan, Night Below, GDQ … the larger scope products have room to breathe. They are rare beasts and its hard to not be impressed when you see them. Even cynically, someone got it out the fucking door, no small feat in and of itself. You can FEEL the possibilities in these things, including this one, and that is a magnificent thing. If the purpose of fluff is to inspire then it got it right. I’m not sure it’s possible to pick this up and NOT feel that way. Time slips, but I suspect that in 2013 something like this would have been a revelation. Not just a single plot. Not just room bashing. A campaign in which to house your OTHER campaign. It’s in that weird category of a regional setting that has things to do. Not just geography and history, people and place names, useless trivia, but things that can happen. This is a dynamic home base. And that’s a great thing.

It’s also the case that this is pretty multifaceted. Once you wade through the self-aggrandizement and conversational tone, you get several levels to the plots going on. We’ve got the standard warring tribes thing, that I went through in detail. There are a few other things of this ilk going on, standardish humanoid trouble and the standard “normal” cult activity. Then we’ve got some politics; the dude in charge of the region is the Regent … and would to continue to rule. So we’ve got the spies, troops, noble shit going on, economic stuff. Then we’ve got the main troublemakers: the Dagon cult. Lots  and lots of things leading to this and lots of the humanoid and politics lead to this also. They have a subtle APATHY poison in the water supply, there are kidnappings, all sorts of machinations. A standard home base would have little of any of this, maybe some hand waving about orc tribes raiding and burned farmstead before you go off to stab them. Here it’s more integrated, and the consequences more integral. A great home base might have some politics in it. But, again, seldom to the degree this thing has, so we’re adding yet another level. And then there’s the real trouble in the region, the Dagon cult, underneath it all, doing their thing. Anywhere you dig in this you’re going to find something going on, from the straightforward to the subtle. The amount of actual fluff, beyond the anglo-saxon culture stuff, is at a minimum here, perhaps raising its head most prominently in the NPC descriptions. Again, the scope and layering here is impressive. 

There are few specifics here. What you get are outlines of things.Think of them mostly as events that could happen rather than locales, with a lot of unnecessary commentary and “questions for the DM”; how does the party react, what does Bjorn do, how they react is up to the DM. And the organization of the booklet, for that, is just no where near where it needs to be to run this effectively. Fuck me, it’s also nowhere near where it needs to be for a DM to just understand what is going on. The comments about a year of study with notes, highlights and post-its are spot on. 

I have led you down a path to a certain opinion, and no doubt several people have opinions. Let us consider that in view of (what I anticipate) to be the reactions of the last review of a similar product, Brink of Calamity. These are, essential, the same product. This booklets scope is substantially larger and Calamity is less of an series of plots and focused more on specifics. This is an outline format, almost a book of lists (a list of anglo-saxon terms. A list of NPC’s. A list of Places. A list of Plots) and Calamity beds more towards room/key. But they both require SUBSTANTIAL prep to get you to a home base type area that you can use with the party in the way in which they intend, rather than just stealing one or two plots. What for the difference? Other than circling the wagons for one and burning the other at the stake. 

I don’t see this adventure as being fixable at home; to do so would require a complete rewrite. You can steal parts, of course, but there’s nothing special here to steal, the magic comes from the depth, scope, and layering. An editor needs to eliminate the conversational style. The NPC’s need shortened immensely. The anglo-saxon/normal fantasy village shit needs to be cut; its flavour can be integrated in to the NPCs, places, and events. Cross references need to be prevalent. It’s needs a brief summary of the MAJOR plots, then a list of places with their plots in them/directly after them. This could be followed or preceded by the major area spanning plots. It needs a few other things also, like home base shit and some normal home base plots, Mike is having an affair with Mary the innkeepers dog, and so on. I know what a fantasy village looks like, I need the deets on the Mike/Mary thing and that Bill is a serial killer who worships the local orphanage. There should be an event timeline, or at least a suggestion if inserting things in a particular order in the background when the party if off on the other side of the region, so that when they come back they can see the school marm is missing, has been for a week, and none of the searchers can find her. Ignoring the socio-economic implications of what I’m about to say, if every megadungeon were scattered throughout this region, how do I drop some shit on the party in an effective way when they return to town, or pass through the village of Pigsty on their way to Stonehell? Oh, sorry, I mean when the party feahfang’s the local frith-borh to avoid the nithings being healsfanged by the gemot. It’s been a few years, maybe it’s time for a “You can actually use this one” edition on kickstarter?

And, quoting from the adventure, “And don’t be afraid to say, “There’s something really wrong here.” 

This is $20 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages and shows a portion of the second booklet, the handouts and people/places reference. That’s a really shitty preview of the adventure. The preview should give a potential buyer a view of the product in a way that they can make an informed purchasing decision once looking at it. And this don’t do that at all.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/112514/king-for-a-day-revised-edition?1892600

Archie Fields III, Matthew C. Funk
Witch Pleas Publishing
5e
Level 1

Set in the richly detailed settlement of Greenspires, a town nestled among the elven ruins of the Hinterwoods of Witch Pleas’ Legends of Lohre setting, this tale begins at the cozy Drunken Dragon Inn and escalates quickly. A goblins raid becomes an epidemic of the un-dead, with a zombified child stalking his cellar and a grieving father wielding dark magics. Old John Stuart’s Mill is more than a dungeon crawl. It’s a reckoning of morality, justice and consequence.

Before you go bitching, think a bit about my direct and indirect illocutionary force. 

This 28 page adventure is a rather simple and linear affair full of terrible choices when viewed through an OSR lens. Beyond the normal D&D stuff, two of the encounters provide an explicit challenge to the characters to solve, one simplistic and one more difficult, that involve morality in a more nuanced standpoint than it is generally covered in D&D. The more interesting one is worthy of inclusion in a game, perhaps, and fits in well to my People of Pembrocktonshire villager vibe.

This is a 5e adventure, but they stuck it in the OSR section of DriveThru. Normally I’d pass that by, but then they called it “John Stuart’s Mill.” Ever the sucker for marketing, I eagerly dove in. Who’s that Australian philosopher, you know, the one who posited that every time you drank something other than tap water you were making a decision to kill a child somewhere who doesn’t have access to clean water, because you could have spent that cash to help them/donate?

Just as we saw with the NASA adventure, our crossover friends may be perfectly competent in their own fields but have not been born with the innate ability to present an adventure in a useful way. This results in an effort that has a rather higher bar to run it than what I would prefer, or, even, when compared to other adventures from the more mainstream designers. These sorts of adventures, attempting to crossover to other audiences (in this case, classes and the like, using D&D to help ground philosophical concepts) face the added barrier of audiences new to the game, and thus needing that rigor that comes from good deign principles across the Bryce pillars. There are The Old Wounds: long sections of italic read-alouds. It has been known for quite some time that long sections of read-aloud causes players attention to drift. Phones come out. Limiting this to two to four sentences and making it interactive instead of exposition dump is the better choice. And, of course, there are studies showing the increased cognitive burden of long sections of italics. But, every adventure does it and thus the pattern repeats as new designers learn their mistakes from old mistakes. And the fucking font is small. Grrr…

But then the other issues: Eight linear encounters. We must agree to disagree on the modern trend of giving the players no agency in their lives. I recognize that this is the reality of the modern game, and yet I must insist that a game with agency is a more rewarding game. Decisions are, after all, the conceit of game theory, yes? (Ha! You see?! You see?! It a fucking activity and not a game!) 

Lest you think it’s all fun and games down this linear path of encounters, you will also get to enjoy a mary sue. I thought we had left this far, far behind us, but I do seem to be seeing a resurgence as of late? The sheriff is clearly a werewolf and, at one point, a giant wolf charges out to scare off some goblins attacking the party, reducing the number the party has to fight. Conan becomes king by his own hand. No, this is not a power gaming fantasy. This is design in which the players, running the characters at the table, get to be in control of the game with the DM as judge, not some Storyteller bullshit. Players in charge. And don’t go misinterpreting that statement in to Storygamer territory. My scorn here is somewhat lessened because the wolf attacks when the goblins are throwing their first firebombs, disrupting their attack. Telegraphing whats to come, for smart players paying attention, is generally good design. As presented here its rather a bit blatant, with no player skill required to figure out whats going on. Meh.

I can go on. Purple prose from novel writing instead of evocative descriptions from technical writing: “ Greenspires’ humble buildings huddle in the chill of the night, the brave little lights in their windows pressed against encroaching darkness, flickering faintly upon the antediluvian emerald spires of the elven ruins.” or “The scent of cedars, pine and oak permeates the night with a heavy impression of the Hinterwoods’ age.” At the mill there are various sounds; a hobgoblin butchering an animal that is screaming very loudly. Goblins arguing in the next room. These appear, though, in the rooms in question and NOT in the room in which you hear them. I can beat a dead horse here explaining ad nausea why this is  bad, just as I could spend time describing why the opening “run in to the bar to get help help” scene is unrealistic, bread immersion,  and ineffective in creating the emotional response that the designer is going for, or the backstory exposition that muddies up the DM notes sections of encounters making it harder for a DM to locate for what is the absolute most important thing in adventure design: running the adventure at the table. But, instead …

Let’s talk orc babies, in which my perfect knowledge of adventure design that can never be questioned instead turns in to shaky opinion. 

We gotta go in to this with a couple of statements. First, at some point things changed from Nature to Nurture in the role of Evil in a humanoids alignment. When there is a god of evil and you are born evil then many of our moral arguments fall apart.Slaughter thy orc babies as ye may, Old time is a-flying. You do have a soul, there is an afterlife, and you WILL be spending eternity being happy or punished up in Olympia or the Seven Heavens or wherever. Maybe figure out what Eru Lluvatar thinks the meaning of good is? I don’t care if you like the official changes WOTC made to humanoids and their relationship to evil, that assumption is where we have to start our discussion in the modern game. If it help you live with yourself, go look up the appropriate Aurelius quote about the othering and generalization of people in order to justify doing things to them you otherwise could not. While you suck him off. The moral question is more interesting in 5e than our pre-Nietzian OSR versions. 

Alignment, used in the way its used here, does NOT make the game fun. I don’t care what version the game is and I don’t care what your decision was in killing the orc babies, a DM that modifies the game based on morality is a bad DM. This adventure makes one damning statement in it: “Don’t decide who is ‘right’ among the players. Instead, let the world you craft respond to the players, ideally with deeply meaningful consequences to their actions.” Absolutely the fuck not. There is no place for morality in D&D. It’s supposed to fucking fun. Go story game activity if you want to trauma bond and moralize. I’m drinking beer and eating pretzels. I sucked diseased cocks all fucking day, eating literal shit, dealth with my commute, got bitched at at home by everyone on earth for not taking out the garbage, and, then, to relax, some fuckwit DM is gonna moralize at me? I think not. Do NOT do this in your game. Can there be consequences? Sure. Orcs don’t trust you. They sing songs about you. Whatever. But you must divorce it from moral decisions. Fortunately, the adventure doesn’t do this, in spite of that bullshit statement.

The philosophy portion appears twice, explicitly (although I believe you can see some shadows in other areas) in the adventure. The first is with two goblins attacking you. That have clearly been beat up. That are clearly incompetent. That are clearly going to, at a minimum, rob you. Except they don’t. What do you do with them? The adventure explicitly notes that it is designed around utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, and thus this encounter makes sense in that context. I mean, the entire goal of the adventure is to bring to life philosophical problems for discussion and debate, so, you know. It does that. This is the weaker of the two problems presented in the adventure. It’s rather straightforward and, I think, hamfisted. Designed, bluntly, for one reason, that stated debate.

And then there’s encounter two. John Stewart has braved the goblin attack, abandoning his wife and children, to run back in to his mill, under attack by the goblins. You find him in his basement, next to a boy. A boy with ashen skin, kneeling next to a goblin, still twitching in his death throes, tearing at it with his hands and teeth. ““Please…please don’t hurt my boy.” The man is John Stuart, and the zombified boy is his son, Emmett. Emmett is temporarily distracted from the PCs by feasting on the goblin’s corpse, so they have some time to talk to John.”

Jesu Christo! Nice touch there with the goblin still twitching and this being Ye Olde Flesh Eating Zombie. I mean, the gobbo was going to kill them, right? None of that ham fisted morality here, abstracted away in to academia. Dude is RIGHT in front of you. He loves his son and brought him back. Is it permissible for the chronically underfunded state school for orphans to have a pet tarrasque? What could possibly go wrong? The real world is messy as will be a discussion about what to do here. There are no right choices, only wrong ones. 

As a teaching adventure spur debate in a classroom, the two explicit philosophical situations do what they need to do. The overall packaging of those two is rather poor. It is going to be a hard adventure to pick up and run at a table,  accessible to those not overly familiar with D&D. As a teaching aid, this aspect needs to be approved substantially. Font, exposition, organization, you don’t have to go OSE style here here but you do need to make it much easier on someone WANTING to use it. As is the barrier to entry is rather large, which means a focus on trying to run the adventure instead of the adventure itself. 

This is $7 at DriveThru. Stick in a fucking preview and help a prole out so I can make an existential choice on if its worth buying or not! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530608/old-john-stuart-s-mill-1st-level-d-d-5e-adventure?1892600

Ganz Vargle—(Neutral Evil, he/him) a human man in his early 50s with gray starting to set in his dark brown hair and beard. He tends to dress fairly well, reflecting fashions from more populous cities closer to the coast, though he’s not ostentatious. Ganz is friendly and outgoing, but he hides a dark past: in his adventuring days, he sought to summon a demon with whom he could bargain for power, power he could use to change the world for the better. He found the witch of the wood, Moldred, who furnished him with the forbidden knowledge and materials necessary to call the foul spirit. The demon demanded a terrible sacrifice: the lives of Ganz’s adventuring companions. Though Ganz cared for his companions, he believed their sacrifice would be worth the good that he might ultimately accomplish with his magical might. Ganz slaughtered them all in their sleep in a profane ritual, but the demon was as deceitful as he was cruel: after the deed was done, he told Ganz that the best thing that a blackguard who’d sacrifice his friends for power could do for the world was to die. The demon afflicted Ganz with a terrible curse that would gradually weaken his heart and lungs until they cease functioning, and Ganz has been trying ever since to find ways to alleviate and remove the curse. The powerful talisman possessed by the witch Moldred can remove his curse, but when he approached the witch for help, she told him that he’d doomed himself by his own wicked hand and that his end is well-deserved. He swore on that day that her talisman would be his— that if she wouldn’t give it to him, he’d return and take it by force.

https://www.lukesurl.com/archives/comic/281-auto-whats

I fucking love Kant in this. “Because the Monster Manual says so! Don’t pretend you don’t know what evil is!

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/23

By Michael J. Bojdys
GrantWerk
OSE
Level 1

You wake in a locked cellar, heads pounding, contract signed in spilled ale. A dagger’s gone missing. A debt must be paid. And something in the dark wants more than gold.

This 32 page adventure uses three pages to describe six rooms in an underground smugglers den. I guess it’s inoffensive. There’s a compliment for you. How does “meh. whatever” sound as a puff quote to list on the back cover?

I can’t stand what my life has become. Someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea. An adventure that uses three pages out of 32. Or, perhaps, if we are generous with the page count, seven pages out of 32? But, certainly, only six rooms and only three pages to describe those six rooms. Pre gens, house rules, appendices, backstory, game world, all thrown in. I do this page count to room key comparison for one specific reason: to show what a farce these types of adventures are. It’s hard to argue that this ratio is inherently wrong, (or that anything is or is not wrong or right) but it’s certainly clear that MANY an adventure would have benefited by a much strong focus on the ACTUAL adventure and less docs on the supporting material. When these page counts get to fucking lopsided its clear that the designer doesn’t know wat they are doing and didn’t really want to write an adventure; they wanted to write their house rules and setting. 

But on to this particular set of trouble. So, yeah, you wake up in the dungeon. I guess you signed a contract drunk in a bar last night and agreed to go get a dagger in this smugglers lair. While I’m not a fan of these sorts of forced scenarios in which you have no agency, they are slightly less odious when they are very first adventure for a campaign. Setting up things to come, don’t you know. I still fucking hate them and wish different paths were chosen for the framing. Forcing the players in to, say, a desert island with limited water heat stroke rules for wearing armor feels more abusive to me then the agreed lie that this is what we are doing tonight to play D&D and outfitting out party for an expedition to the very same locale with the same issues. But, whatever, minor issue.

Ok, the dungeon has a zombie in it. Got it? That’s the only keyed encounter with a creature. It also has a ghost that wanders around and attacks you. Every turn there is a 50% chance that the ghost moves one room closer to the party from its random starting location. 2HD so we’re looking at a 9 to turn it. And you’re gonna need a magic weapon to hurt it. And there’s one magic weapon in the adventure, the +1 Dagger you were sent to get. I wonder if this adventure was playtested?

The background information for the DM is a mess. It’s a combination of intro for the players and their characters and a lot of backstory that is irrelevant to the game at the table. So you need to dig out things to tell the party from the larger info dump of useless trivia. Not the strongest start.

Rooms are … ok? Not ok? I mean, I’m gonna bitch. They aren’t done right. But, you can run them. Basically, each room is going to take up about a column. You’ll get quite the short description of the room before it moves on to a longer section telling us information that the map tells us: where the exist go. I’m glad to see that this important duplicative information takes up more column space than the room description. Then, running on from the exist information we will get some follow up on things in the room the party might examine, the contents of a chest or something. This is likely to take up half the column. You can follow it well, except for the contents kind of running on from the exits. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. 

The descriptions are fine. Not awfully inspiring but more than just facts. The designer has clearly tried to spice them up with adjectives and adverbs, and sometimes this runs in to being purple. “The air hangs cold.” Uh huh. I get what the designer is trying to do, and their heart is in the right place, there are just better ways. Like showing instead of telling. You can see your breathe. There’s a stillness. … Oh, wow, the air hangs cold, eek!

There’s not much in the way of interactivity. Search for a secret door. Stab the zombie and ghost. Jump over some sewage. It’s six fucking rooms. 

I’m annoyed that it took 32 pages to present these six rooms. This is just a throw away adventure attached to the rest of the campaign content, sold as an adventure. That annoys me. The actual adventure is nothing special. Id’ say it’s a typical six room lair, which means no room for anything to happen. It is written just slightly better than most of those, but that’s still the bottom of the adventure heap. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages and shows you the confused intro and the ghost. No rooms. Then again, if it showed you a room page then you’d see half the actual adventure … poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527981/signed-in-ale-sealed-in-wax?1892600

By Tim Edmonson
Ghost Ape Games
2e
Levels 1-2

He was never meant to be a necromancer. He just had the grades for it. When the players stumble across the talking corpse of a failed wizard named Bob, things spiral fast. One page of an ancient entropy-powered grimoire is already inside him. Another waits on a savage island ruled by saurian warlords, wild elves, and ghost apes that don’t sleep. What begins as a weird jungle crawl becomes a siege defense, a dungeon delve, a psychedelic fever dream, and possibly the start of a reality-hopping campaign. Or they could just go home. If Bob lets them.

This 82 page single-column adventure details an episodic journey centering around a level-4 lich who thinks he’s a fun guy. I don’t really know what to say here. It is what it is? It’s an amateurish effort, but that’s ok. The tone, adventure-path nature, and basic mistakes in information delivery are really offputting, but only the information delivery issues are actual valid criticism?

In D&D’s long history there have been some shifts in how the game is played. These are communicated through the official rules, or through the published material like adventures, or through the way most people are actually engaging with the game, or with the visibility being communicated in online social platforms. There will be ad-nauseum arguments about the official play, the actual home play and so on, but for better or worse there are memes about the style of certain editions or eras. 2e is solidly in the plot & story area meme, and this adventure unabashedly follows that, noting it explicitly. You can’t really criticize a man for doing an episodic adventure when you buy a “story drive adventure”, or for the comedic elements when it’s communicated up front. I know the 2e crowd is fierce, so we’re going to talk a bit about this just to ensure there’s fair warning, and then I’m going to cover some of the more issues with the adventure that lead to a “but is it a GOOD story based adventure with comedy elements?”

You’re gonna start in a village of cat-people. When you reach the lich, Bob (yes, that’s his name) he’s gonna cast hold person on your group and then do some magic tricks for you before running away and escaping. He’ll later keep up a constant banter with you as you drag his dismembered body around the rest of the adventure. He throws in comments and so on. This is 100% a railroad, errr, episodic adventure adventure path. It is solidly High 2e. Are you chill with that? I’m not, but I bought it anyway and can’t really criticize a man for doing what he said he was gonna do in the sales pitch.

But Bryce’s pillars stand apart from that. This is a rather amateurish affair, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s a single column effort, which remains difficult to read and comprehend. I know that the point seems trivial, but the eye travel study on comprehension is real, as is the anecdotal data for anyone who has had to use single-column. It’s just going to be a little more difficult to comprehend the adventure and use it. 

And then there are the asides. There are a lot of these. This one, early in the adventure, is a good representative example of what I’m talking about: “This episode is meant to open in media res—no meeting in a tavern, they start to learn how to be a team and how to play the game immediately. Characters either begin here in their home village or are here on personal business.” It explains what is about to happen. Is there a need to explain what is about to happen? I don’t think so. I’m a big fan of the designer framing what’s to come, in terms of how it works, but this isn’t that. It’s not explaining how the different areas work together or the tone, it’s instead just repeating everything that’s to come in a different tone of voice. And that’s just padding that is of no use and just gets in the way of running the adventure.

And then text grows overwrought and purple in places. “You find a patch of earth that hasn’t been claimed by vines. The river gurgles behind you, dark and sluggish. The trees here lean in, like they’re watching. The air smells like burnt grass and rotting fish. You can make camp. You can rest. But you are not welcome.” This isn’t consistent, but, also, it’s clearly trying for this epic adventure vibe (it says so explicitly) and I’m guessing that this is a part of that. The purple prose is not great. At all.

But it’s also not doing an altogether terrible job with the descriptions. If we take that purple section above, it’s not too bad. A gurgling river. A patch of earth not claimed by vines may be on the edge of purple, but the air smelling like burnt grass and rotting fish isn’t bad. In other places we get a decent description of mudmen attacking the village that ranges from te usual to very good. “A child screams. You hear the splash before you see the thing—humanoid, muddy, crawling on malformed limbs. It twitches like it’s listening to the ground. Someone yells, “It’s in the ground!” and you see dark veins stretching out from the water, moving in the soil, like the river itself is leaking something alive. As you watch, another mud creature forms before your eyes, first pseudopods made of stinking, corrupted soil, then something resembling a humanoid figure with arms and a large torso” I hate the pseudopod thing, in general, and corrupted soil is a conclusion that should be a show don’t tell thing. But, hey, not bad. We’re not saying “three mudmen attack”, it’s instead trying to describe them, something the adventure tries to do consistently, and that’s a good thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and make an assumption from this that dude is an ok dungeon master, just not a great adventure writer.

If we follow through with the mudmen encounter, this is the next thing that happens once they are defeated “When the last Mudman collapses into a puddle of inert sludge, the village is in shock. Farmers report rot in the irrigation ditches. The elders whisper about the water. Something is poisoning the land.“ This is a crude and amateurish attempt to have, I believe, a chaotic battle aftermath scene in the village. People all over the place, side conversations, helpful and unhelpful injections from by standers and so on. I think I am not alone in reading that in to the description provided? And, yet, that’s not a strong description of it or how to run it or anything close to it. And I’m sure we all know what I what I think about supporting the DM. 

In other places there’s a certain degree of disorganization of the text that requires you to be completely familiar with it in order to run it effectively. This comes to pass time to time; the designer has lived and breathed their adventure for months while any of us who have simply bought it to run and read and re-read it can never know it as well as the designer can. Thus, after entering the dungeon we get notes about a second entry point to the dungeon. I think, perhaps, it should be obvious to everyone that “Entering the Dungeon” comes after “Outside the Dungeon”, but not in the kind of stream of consciousness layout from a designer that knows the material inside and out. Likewise, somewhat later in the adventure we’ll get notes buried in a paragraph about how the second entry point is in this particular room being described right now. Perfect if you know the adventure inside and out and less perfect if that’s not the case; it just looks like throwing information in wherever … or almost a subcase of  room 54 reacting to the inclusion in room 1 … in the description of room 54. 

This is hardcore story mode 2e. It’s got a slapstick comedic element that, on going, that proves that the Mork Borg call is coming from the inside the house the entire time. But, beyond these tonal baselines, it’s also not the easiest to follow and run with as a DM. 

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1. The preview is five pages. You get to see the mudman attack. This is enough to show the conversational tone, asides, and sometimes decent imagery and sometimes purple imagery that is conveyed. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530935/son-of-a-lich?1892600