{"id":10430,"date":"2026-05-20T07:33:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T11:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10430"},"modified":"2026-04-28T10:35:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T14:35:17","slug":"under-the-caustic-river-ahnd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10430","title":{"rendered":"Under the Caustic River Ahnd"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Dale Houston
Duck & Crow Press
OSR
Levels: Low\/\"Rookies\"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Under a raging river of turbulent, caustic water that melts organic material in moments lies the decrepit remains of a nefarious wizard\u2019s lair. Opening a passage under the river would mean commerce and prosperity, and every brave adventurer worth their salt knows that a wizard\u2019s den is guaranteed to have some reality-bending magical loot! Get ready for some liquefactive necrosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 32 page adventure uses about eight pages to describe seventeen rooms in a wizard lair\/passage under a river. Great specificity. Good challenges. Good formatting. A good and solid basic adventure that, white not exactly the most memorable, is setting everything up for success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the first adventure in Dale’s Undying Expanse series. It\u2019s not Thundarr, or even gonzo, but there are absolutely hints of it, at least in this adventure. The premise here is that there was once this fortress spanning a river. The river is caustic, like, full on acid. Up and down the river for ten miles along both banks is a prismatic wall. One of the former fortress dwellers was a wizard who hated the locals, it seems. Anyway, time passes, wizard dies, fortress collapses, and now there are just some crumbling remains, a passage UNDER the river. Trade routes anyone? And, as usual, there are some bandits hole up and some wizard leftovers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rumors here are interesting. You get about a page of them, sixty, arrayed in ten tables of six each, by topic. So, each village, the bandits, the river, etc. That\u2019s a nice way to zero in on various topics the party may be asking about. The villages in the surrounding area map are tied in to the hooks and half about a column each; a couple of notable businesses that an adventurer might visit and a couple of people, all don in a manner that\u2019s easy to follow, terse, and full of flavor. \u201cBig Hierome: Always laughing, compulsively eats sweets; this brute manages the bulls when they get a bit too feisty\u201d The hooks, likewise, are short but have that specificity to them that helps a DM bring them alive. \u201cMagistrate Yeldo of Flont will pay the crew six month\u2019s wage to open the passage.\u201d or \u201cJane Blood, local crime boss in Rockton, will forgive your incredible debt if you open the passage. She wants it to be a toll road.\u201d One of these is exactly a \u201cpay the party\u201d thing, but its founded in something realistic, wanting to open a trade road. This helps elevate it beyond the normal old \u201csomeone hires you\u201d hook that people toss out. And the crime boss one is grounded in her entry in the village, \u201cUnassuming and simply dressed local business woman; rumored to be a heartless psychopath in charge of a criminal gang, has a large number of \u2018cousins\u2019 always nearby. \u201c There is MORE than enough there to make Jane a mainstay of the adventurers life, both in this adventure and in future ones. You can really riff on that and yet it\u2019s terse. That\u2019s good writing. It\u2019s specific. Cousins. The rumor. Dale hits these very well and is certainly in the top tier of folks when it comes to that part of the adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each room entry is offset in a little light green box with an entry that could be read-aloud or room details to summarize to the players, and then some well formatted bullets, starting with a bolded keyword, to help focus the DMs attention in on the things of import in the room. There are little embedded tables or \u201ctracker boxes\u201d present as well, where appropriate. Nothing goes on for more than a couple of sentences, making it easy to scan and parse information at the table during play. A little \u201cmodern\u201d in terms of generous whitespace, with rooms taking between a third of a page or a full page to describe, but it\u2019s all easy to use. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The text does a decent job of being evocative as well. \u201cLow oily fires giving little light\u201d or \u201cCauldron: A mess of \u201cvillager stew\u201d is thickening in the cauldron. \u201c or \u201cTarp: Made of human skin leather, faces and hair still intact. It is recently made and still a bit damp. \u201c Still intact. A bit damp. It\u2019s a tarp. Good word choices to really bring these things to life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interactivity is decent as well, both in terms of individual rooms and in the larger context. One room has a trapped demon in it. Pulling a lever in an earlier room releases the demon and he starts to move throughout the dungeon. Peepholes show you other places. An initial room has a bunch of skeletons on stakes in it \u2026 it\u2019s full of crude traps (think jugs of river water and sharp sticks) \u2026 but the skeletons face the individual traps, so you can use them to help navigate across the room. Of course that\u2019s how the bandits inside navigate it. There are consequences for your actions. It\u2019s not world ending, but you can feel them. You could do enough damage to collapse the ceiling and flood the place. Oops. No trade route. And if the demon gets loose then there are some notes on what happens in the game world; not the end of the world but trouble for a while. Coming out of the dungeon on the other side of the river \u201cThis is where some of the \u201cbad\u201d kids from Rockton come to smoke, drink, and make out.\u201d and you freak the kids out. Drunk bandits. Stripping magic inlaid circles of their inlaid silver. The rooms have consequences, many of which are telegraphed in subtle ways for those paying attention. A rubble filled room with gold braziers stuck in the rubble. Dig em out? What about those crumbling walls, signs of impending collapse? Prisoners of the bandits to free, connected to the town (and, potentially, hooks.) You\u2019ve got the dungeon environment to interact with, the walls and rubble and leaks and such. You\u2019ve got the bandits and their ogre boss at the beginning. You\u2019ve got old wizard shit. Lots to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Things are also supported well. There are a couple of art handouts, one of which cleverly conceals some imps hiding that negates surprise if you notice them in the drawing. Handwritten notes. A good hex map, new monsters, notes on the dungeon map about \u201calways on\u201d things like the leaking walls, so the DM can emphasize them<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dungeon map, proper, is a little busy and not the easiest to read. While the use of color to highlight text is done well through the rest of the adventure, the dark maroon keying blends in a bit much, and the \u201cart\u201d use of shading on the map, with rubble, makes things a little less clear then I would prefer. It\u2019s not a disaster in any sense, just not as clear as I would prefer. And, we get a little sloppy with the use of the word \u201cturns.\u201d That skeleton\/trap room \u201cFollowing the paths takes 3 Turns to get to any other wall, 4 turns if moving cautiously\u201d Thirty to forty minutes, or three to four actions, you think? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are just nits. This is a solid adventure. Easy to use, evocative, interactive, with lots of fun specificity. There\u2019s a 4HD ogre and an 8HD demon, so, challenging for a level one group, but it does a solid job. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, showing you the intro, hooks, rumors, villages, and numerous dungeon rooms. Great preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/540645\/under-the-caustic-river-ahnd?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Dale HoustonDuck & Crow PressOSRLevels: Low\/”Rookies” Under a raging river of turbulent, caustic water that melts organic material in moments lies the decrepit remains of a nefarious wizard\u2019s lair. Opening a passage under the river would mean commerce and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-the-best"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/540645.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430","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=10430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10431,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430\/revisions\/10431"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}