By Phil Martin
Self Published
Knave
Level 2
Come for the frogs. Leave when it all goes to hell. The small hamlet of Roudenbush moulders on the edge of the Great Cheerless Swamp. Built at a crossroads, the town sustains itself on a mix of merchant caravans stopping for provisions, those that seek treasure in the swamp, and the bounty of the swamp itself. Wooden, thatched-roofed residences and stone municipal buildings make up the town. Two weeks ago, a tide of giant frogs breached the town’s outer wall, causing chaos in the streets until they retreated back into the swamp.
This thirteen page adventure uses three pages to describe seven overland locations and a five floor wizard tower. Napkin notes for an adventure, it exemplifies the IF rather than a THEN.
My brief foray in to products recommended that live in Itch has ended as I am, and no one else, is completely shocked. I find it FASCINATING in what both people seem to be willing to pay for nothing and in what people are willing to publish. For Money.So, some giant frogs showed in a a town int he swamps and rampaged through. I guess you’re going to do something about it for some reason. There’s some abandoned wizards tower in the swamp with a magnifying glass turning frogs giant. That location is called Frogtown. There’s also a wandering knight called Sir Robin Hell. Get it?
I’m in a foul fucking mood this morning. This thing isn’t help that any. I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it. Fourteen pages and it manages to put in just a few with encounters in it. This is nothing more than napkin notes. It’s not an adventure. It’s possibilities, rather than specificity.
What do we mean by this? There is some rather common tendency to be seemingly afraid of outcomes. It is as if the designer is terrified of actually stating something concrete may happen. In this sense it is more like a hex crawl but without the scope of a traditional hex crawl. You come across a village of 100 gnomes living in a mesa. “The hive-mind seeks the return of myconids that have gone missing, believed taken by the lizard folk as food / offerings. Will exchange fly agaric mushrooms from their grove for myconids that are found and returned “ I’m paraphrasing the set up but the outcome is from the adventure. This is classic “giant hex crawl.” But it’s not “overland journey to the adventure site.” In the starting village there are a couple of NPC’s. The are not specific to the adventure, just a list of NPC’s for the most part. One of them is a guy you can hire, Buckingham Craddlethatch. The second floor of the five floor “end site” tower in the swamp reads, in its entirety “Ruined arcane library and alchemical lab. Most of the tomes are mildewed and illegible, but an intact Chaos Spellbook can be found among them. If Buckingham Cragglethatch is with the party, he finds a book bound in human skin. Perusing it, he will suddenly announce that he must leave immediately. “
Those two encounters are representative of most of what is going on in this. They are possibilities. They are the “collapsed stairwell to another level of the dungeon that the dm COULD expand upon if they were so inclined.” In a traditional hexcrawl adventure these are the core of the adventure. It’s a wide open area that the party brings themselves to in order to exploit. Contract this to the standard “overland adventure” portion of adventures where to travel to get to an adventuring site. These are instead dangers and Lair, with associated lair treasures. And then contrast these two types of things to the keys found in most adventures. Obstacles and encounters to overcome. Those three encounter types serve much different purposes, influenced by the scope of the adventure and environment.
The muddling of the streams here results in adventure that is nothing but napkin notes for a small adventure.
No more itch for awhile.
It’s Name Your Price at itch, with a suggested price of $5.