{"id":10313,"date":"2026-03-09T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10313"},"modified":"2026-02-16T10:16:46","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T15:16:46","slug":"the-lair-of-the-bog-lich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10313","title":{"rendered":"The Lair of the Bog Lich"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 1-2<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A village deep within the steaming marshlands is experiencing strange phenomena. More and more villagers rise from their beds at night in a mindless stupor, wandering out into the bog never to be seen again. The desperate villagers have promised a great reward to anyone who can find their loved ones and stop whatever dark magick stole them away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This eight page adventure uses three pages to present six rooms inside of a small dugout\/ruined basement. It is trying to do the right things, generally, but confuses form over function, resulting in a muddled mess of rooms in which you generally just stab things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My complaints here seem familiar to me. Which must mean that I have reviewed this publisher\/designer before and then picked something else out to give them another chance and see if the issues I had were a trend or a fluke. And then forgot what I was doing when I rolled back around a couple of weeks later and ended up thinking \u201cwow, this seems familiar.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only three of the five pages are actually used for the adventure. Meaning that all of that effort from the other five pages could have reasonably been put in the actual dungeon instead of the support material for the dungeon. THE ADVENTURE IS THE MAIN THING. Spend your fucking effort on the actual adventure. THEN, after you have created a masterpiece, you can add in some support material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the start of each room is a little sentence of two in italics. Is it read-aloud? Is it a room summary? Fuck if I know. Sometimes it seems like read-aloud and sometimes it reads like a room summary for the DM. \u201cYou spy a ruined tower behind a curtain of willow leaves, naught<\/p>\n\n\n\n
more than a collection of crumbling stone walls.\u201d That seems like read-aloud, right? I mean, it\u2019s in italics and thats shity and it\u2019s in second person and that\u2019s shitty and it\u2019s got that folksy shit and that\u2019s shitty. But, it seems like read-aloud? But then in other places it seems more like a DM room summary? \u201cBehind the gate, a long rectangular room holds a pool of thick,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
oozing mud in the middle.\u201d If the room had people screaming in it, or was brightly lit with a broadway show going on, or had an obvious huge ancient red dragon in it then that little summary section would not tell you. But it seems like in read-aloud it should? So \u2026 I\u2019m confused. What the fuck is the point of the the italics text that kicks off every encounter\/location? I don\u2019t get it. Not read-aloud. Not a DM summary. I don\u2019t know, REALLY bad read aloud?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because, again, there can be a shit load going on in the room that the read-aloud\/summary text just does NOT cover. The description up there is just fucking weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After that comes a lit of bullets. Yes, this is the \u201cwe use bullets for everything\u201d kind of adventure formatting. That\u2019s not necessarily a good thing and does NOT always lead to better idea presentation. Anything, used too much, becomes cover. If everything is a bullet then nothing is, right? And therefore nothing is emphasized for presentation to the DM? The same with the bolding that occurs INSIDE each bullet. It\u2019s not that all information needs to be bulleted and each noun or whatever in each bullet needs bolded. The use of formatting is for emphasizing and highlighting, calling out to the DM certain things that are important or that they may need to find quickly or something like that. \u201cHey, this thing here is more important than some of the rest so pay attention to it. \u201c And you can\u2019t do that if you use the techniques for EVERYTHING. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The random tables here are weird. Here\u2019s a six entry random table on alternate names for swamp. Fen, mire, bog, etc. Why do that? Why not just present the data if you want to do that? There are, I don\u2019t know, half a dozen of these sorts of tables taking up space. A waste of space, IMO, And in other places, like the wandering table, the entries are doing something. Yeah! But it\u2019s so mundane that they might as well not be. \u201cCrocodiles, laying in wait,\u201d Ok \u2026 \u201cCarcass crawler, digesting its last meal.\u201d Sure. There\u2019s no specificity there. A body half sticking out if its mouth? Ok, I\u2019m down with that. \u201cLaying in wait.\u201d B O R I N G. What put it in at all?Bt, then, in a work of genius, on the map page there\u2019s a little three-entry table for \u201cwho is held prisoner. \u201c Things like \u201cpox-riddled peasant sobbing quietly.\u201d ey! Great! War veteran missing limbs. Great! Thief trying to pick the lock. Great! Each has specificity. And that makes them worth putting in. Likewise the \u201crandom gore\u201d table on the same page is great. It\u2019s like those two tables were done by someone else because they are the only two that really stand out as interesting and actually adding value to the adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOnce a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.\u201d That\u2019s one o the bulleted items in the DM text. Background. Telling us what once was. And the adventure is full of this. The entries are full of nonsense. \u201cHow to make an entry seem long but not actually add any value\u201d Window dressing effects. \u201cIt glows blue\u201d Backstory. \u201cOnce a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.\u201d Shit like that. But, ultimately, all you do in the rooms is stab something. As one would expect, I guess, in a six room adventure. \u201cI remember a time in America when an eight page adventure contained the Steading of the Hill Giant chief, with two dungeon levels and a gazillion rooms that made sense together!\u201d  Nostalgia is a terrible thing. We remember Steading, one of the best adventures ever from many standpoints, but forget the hundreds of shitpiles that existed also. There have always been shitty adventures and this is just the latest version of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did, however, find this HILARIOUS. \u201cThelich cast a ritual to reach out into weak-willed minds nearby.\u201d Yeah yeah, there\u2019s a lich, a weak one, and it\u2019s summoning weak willed people to its lair to like suck the life out of them. (Hey baby \u2026) But, then, also in the hooks section: \u201cA random party member begins hearing the lich\u2019s call and is driven towards its lair.\u201d BURN! Your character is weak-willed!  Suck it Galdalf! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There\u2019s no pREEEEEVIIIEEEEWWWWW! You gotta put in a preview man, so we can tell if we want to buy it or not. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/555050\/the-lair-of-the-bog-lich?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Andreas WilleMedora GamesOSRLevels 1-2 A village deep within the steaming marshlands is experiencing strange phenomena. More and more villagers rise from their beds at night in a mindless stupor, wandering out into the bog never to be seen again. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10312,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/555050.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10314,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10313\/revisions\/10314"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}