tenfootpole.org

By Tyler McIntosh
Table Rock Independent Press
OSR
Levels 4-6

AN ANCIENT EVIL FALLS FROM THE HEAVENS ONTO GOAT HILL AND ALL THAT STANDS IN ITS WAY IS A RAGTAG GROUP OF HOBO ADVENTURERS.

This 36 page adventure present a two level dungeon with about fifty rooms, a coupl of factions and THE END OF THE WORLD. It is trying to present a changing environment, over the adventure timeline, and has some new terrifying creatures, The descriptive style is hard to manage and the timeline elements is not organized as ideally as it could be. It is, essentially, a hack with some faction play.

This adventure centers around a dungeon with three specific acts. In the first you dive in to find the McGuffin. While inside you find orcs and goblins in conflict with each other. Returning to town, SOMETHING HAPPENS which indicates a major game world problem; it seems the MCGUFFIN is going to end the world, etc. The second dive in the dungeon then happens to stop things. The third act has you, potentially, then dealing with the orc/goblin faction play in the dungeon as a kind of “clean up” operation. 

The acts, and the various events that are a part of them, are awkwardly organized. The back half of the adventure is the dungeon, devoid of events. The front half has the events in the various acts. So, you get text like “The second time the orcs encounter the party, they will not attack and will inform the party that Boarstein wishes to make them an offer.” So, during play i the first two acts, in particular, you’re going to need to keep track of the various objectives and integrate them in to the play. This is made more troublesome by the somewhat conversational, and long winded, manner in which these various things are communicated. You’re going to need a separate notepad to keep things straight and substitute for a clearer organization method. 

The main problem here are Void Creatures, and a unique ability they have to suck your soul/brain out of your face. They are striking enemies, but the adventure suggests that the first encounter, the first time a party member is about to die, a rando goblin or orc shows up and body slams the party member out of the way so they are the victim, telegraphing that the party needs to take care. Not perhaps the most elegant solution but it does what it needs to do: telegraph and give a hint that this is a common save or die situation. Even if it does take a column to communicate,

The text here is … interesting. It’s abstracted. It’s a novelization of the text of the adventure. “The heart of the camp is its fire. Travelers gather to cook, eat, and trade stories.”  or “The glitter of gold reflects your torch’s light as you pass by this niche. Upon investigation, you find coins mixed in with the decayed offerings laid out on the offering Stone.” So there’s a lot wrong here. From the second person. To the novelization aspect to the writing. Do the short cutting of the back and forth between the DM and the players. What if they didn’t investigate? Why remove the ability of the players to look for themselves? This is an absolutely critical aspect to RPG”s, the heart of them, the back and forth of players doing something and the DM responding. You want to write a neutral room, one in which the interactivity can take place by the players, not shove something down their through in read-aloud.

Read-aloud which can be extreme in some cases. I think the opening section is like a page to a page and a half. 

There’s so much else going on here with the writing. In one room the DM notes say that interacting with a statue will reveal a secret door “Secret door on the east side of the room. Statue can be turned to open.” There is no other mention, anywhere in the read-aloud or elsewhere, that there is a statue in this room. The party is supposed to go to the local lord at one point, but that tie, the prompt to get them there, is tenuous at best, even though the entire “plot” depends on it. The place is full of skeletons and zombies, for you level four to six cleric. There’s a hobo camp at the start … with all of the hobos being level three. It just defies the kind of world building in which immersion can take place. Or, facts in which a game can take place. Some of the monster descriptions are actual monster descriptions “This orc stands a head taller than the rest and has huge, curved tusks. A spiky crest of stiff fur runs from the …” Decent description. Others are ecology articles “Goblin Tappers are the engineers and craftsmen of the Noble Goblin tribe.” and on it goes not giving an actual description. 

Out of nowhere, then, is this description “A dozen enormous breeding females are in this room, surrounded by smaller orcs with buckets that are massaging bloated, veiny teats to harvest their thick, fatty orc milk.” Cosmic horror my ass, that’s real horror! No other description reaches this pinnacle, even the cosmic horror descriptions are mundane by comparison. Oh, also, room after room mentions creatures, orcs or goblins usually, in the read-aloud description, in the abstract. But not quantities for the DM. Smaller orcs milking? How many? No. 

And there are problems with the events. There’s supposed to be this faction thing in acts one and three and in act two they team up so everyone can kill the void creatures. There is virtually no guidance in this area. Essentially just that they team up. 

The concept, at a high level, is ok. The designers notes have some inspiration from people cracking open bison skulls to eat brains and petroglyphs and such. Nice. The void people concept is nice. You can KIND of see where things are meant to go. But the implementation here is not great at all.

This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview is two pages. The second page is a room of keys. Can you get a decent idea of what to expect from it. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582885/the-horror-on-goat-hill-an-old-school-cosmic-horror-adventure?1892600

By Shanklimb
Self Published
Domenwood
Levels 2-3

A desperate mother, Brala, approaches the PCs – in a tavern, on the road, etc. When she awoke this morning, her infant was gone. Searching the woods around her cottage, she found tracks of hoof-marks, which she can lead you to. Crookhorns stole her baby, Lilith, and you need to find her before she becomes breakfast! 

This six page adventure uses three pages to describe ten rooms in a small cave lair. Weirdly incomprehensible in places, there’s no lead in so there’s no pay off. 

Hey, get an editor. If it’s not a real editor then have your worst enemy read over your adventure before you push the publish button. You want someone else to see what you’ve put down on paper. You’re too close to it. You already KNOW what you meant so your brain is filling in context that the rest of us fuckwits don’t have. And not your mom. You don’t want someone saying “its great!” You want someone to rip you apart. You don’t have to take every comment they make to heart but you want them making all of those comments.

Case in point. In one of the last rooms of the this adventure, nine or ten I think, there’s this witch buried under the dirt floor. Fuck if I know why. Anyway, if the witch Gwendolyne is with the party then the witch uncoverers herself and helps the party. There is no witch named Gwendolyn in the adventure. The name Gwendolyn doesn’t appear in the adventure anywhere except that sentence. And no, there’s no Gwen or anything like that. Have someone who hates you read the adventure. 

This next point is probably not relevant to anyone except me, who finds it very interesting. How much can you ‘lie’ in an adventure if it serves a purpose? This adventure is using the OSE description style, which some fuckwits overly hate on. But, anyway, in one of the early rooms, an entry tunnel, it read “Narrow (unsupported ceiling)”  I hate this. I hate it because of the hypocrisy it reveals. It is fucking dumb. Of course it’s unsupported. No other ceiling reads as supported. It’s not important to the adventure. It’s like putting (alive) after every creature and NPC description in an adventure in which that doesn’t matter in any special way. It’s fucking bullshit nonsense. Oh, yeah, and also it does accomplish the purpose of writing, which is to communicate a feeling to the reader. Narrow and unsupported certainly lends to a claustrophobic kind of vibe, yeah? I think the unsupported word helps conjure up a certain kind of imagery of the scene in the DMs head in a way that simply “Narrow” doesn’t communicate. So, it’s doing a great job, adding the superfluous Unsupported word, using the language in a way needed to communicate the overall vibe of the encounter. It just FEELS wrong to see it, although it’s just as right if you were to scan this in order to run it. You are allowed to twist and turn and push and pull the language in any way needed in order to communicate the overall impact the description is supposed to have. My ‘padding!’ hat hates it and yet I cannot deny that it is effective.

Looking at that tunnel entry, the description reads “Narrow (unsupported ceiling). Four

dead crookhorns (throats carefully slit, blood still fresh). Two dead women (adolescent, impaled)” I find that some striking imagery. Throats slit. Adolescent impaled women. That’s pretty nice. Vivid. A pretty decent description. And, also, when you imagine impalement, that’s some vlad stuff, right? With the pole in the ground? No, I don’t think so. While the description is quite vivid I THINK that the women were just speared, like in the middle of battle. Later, we find some other witches in the complex and I think its clear from their entries that they attempted a raid and that there was a battle in that tunnel, the witches doing some throat slitting and a couple of them getting stabbed with spears. So, striking imagery, but, perhaps, not quite accurate. 

The set up here is a little confusing. A woman finds you and says her baby was just taken. It’s suggested that this could be in a tavern, but I don’t think that makes sense, from a How a Community Reacts standpoint, the other option being on the road which I think works much better. Anyway, there’s some QUITE confusing text that follows. I think the witches kidnapped the baby, took it to their cave lair (the dungeon) and then it was invaded by the Crookhorns and their leader, let’s call her a hag. They want to kill witches and/or convert them in to their messiah. And, anyway, they don’t care about the baby AND the witches were mistaken, the baby they kidnapped was the wrong one. Actually, I think the witches think the baby is their messiah also. It’s a confusing mess and after several read-throughs I’m still not sure I have things straight.  There’s little lead in here, just the frantic woman and some tracks. This, I suspect, does not bode well for the complex situation that I think the designer is trying to get across across here, with the various goals and the creature factions mistaken identities, the lair invasion, etc. But the ‘thrust in to the middle of it’ thing doesn’t work well without the context needed, or any buy in. Not the greatest fault for a site based adventure, but, also, no real stakes except maybe for the baby, motivating the party to do anything other than just putting everyone to the torch.

Other than this, the adventure is mostly a hack. You can talk to some of the witches, and rescue some/all of them that are left alive, but no mention of rewards for their troubles. I think, maybe, three rooms with encounters, maybe more if you just start stabbing captured/trapped witches. They seem to want to talk a bit, but evasive about answers, which, in Brycelandia means you get to tell your story to Odin.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The preview is three pages, which shows you the overview and the first page of four encounters, so, good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/584721/the-baby-in-the-briar-a-dolmenwood-adventure?1892600

By Ron Meischker
Orange Cat Games
Castles & Crusades
Levels 4-6

An ancient tomb. A fading bard. A new generation of heroes. The venerable adventurer, Targan the Bard, has learned about a long-forgotten ancient tomb and has chosen your adventuring party to explore it. He is only asking one thing in return… Are you ready to make history?

This sixteen page adventure uses six pages to describe nine rooms in a linear tomb dungeon. Long italics second-person read-aloud. Linear. Long DM text. And, ultimately, Just Another Tomb Adventure.

It’s a nine room linear tomb dungeon that turns out to be A Test To See If You’re Worthy, the 1,936,736 Test/Challenge dungeon I’ve reviewed in this blogs short history. Seriously, it feels like there’s more of these things than there are orcs in a hole. At this point it’s all rote: linear dungeon. Some trap rooms. Some guardians. But, we must judge each thing on their own merits, so, how about this iteration of the nine linear room trap/guardian challenge/test dungeon tomb? 

I’m not sure I have much interesting to say. It’s got a lot of read-aloud, which is not good. People don’t pay attention when long sections of read-aloud come trotting out. The read-aloud is in italics, sometimes almost half a column, which is not good. Long sections of italics, or any funky font, are hard to read for the DM. It’s using a second person writing style, with lots of “you”, which is not good. It robs the room of immersion as it ignores the varied style of play that individual parties will engage in. “None of us have eyes you clod!” is hyperbolic but gets the point across. I do, however, admire the ability of the party to all have built-in DeWalt leaser measurement devices so they know from the read-aloud that a ceiling is 18.5” feet high in the first sentence. Whatever. Nothing to see, move along, move along.

The DM text is long and padded out. I think in one room I counter three times that the party will need light to see. Do they need oxygen to breathe? I know, it sounds nit-picky. But it’s pure padding. It’s like saying they need air to breathe or some other obvious statement. Multiple times. This kind of shit gets in the way. It gets in the way of the DM scanning the text to find the information they need and it gets in the way of the designer, who is distracted by this nonsense instead of working the room harder. 

And the DM padding. Oh my. “ENTERING THE TOMB – This is the first challenge the party will face. The party encounters an obstacle immediately upon reaching the tomb: a massive obstruction blocking the entrance. The party will need to find a way to move the slab.” This is all preamble. Then there’s the read-aloud. Then theres the actual DM text of the blockage. There’s no point of the preamble. And it’s like this everywhere. Just repetition for the sake of repetition. 

The flooding chamber trap. The stone crush trap. The mirror of opposition trap. The water weird in the fountain. The required false tomb. The mummy that wears an amulet that makes it immune to turn undead. (Thanks B2!) 

It’s a small linear tomb test dungeon, just like all of the small linear tomb test dungeons that have come before. I am annoyed by how cookie cutter it is.

The one thing that isn’t cookie cutter is the build. It’s packed dirt and peat moss and bog wood. You know, the kind of wood that is sunken and preserved and turns to like iron? The adventure makes a big deal of the lack of stone and how the bog wood is the major construction item. But it’s not to any end. It doesn’t play any part in the dungeon at all. Also, isn’t that wood super expensive, and always has been? Mining the dungeon for the wood would be of great profit. Why base the entire dungeon on this window dressing if you’re not ging to do anything with it?

So, just the standard straight line tomb, with all of the seemingly required parts of that. Nothing special. But, lots of padding and a read-aloud that make it hard to dig through and run.

This is $12 at DriveThru. There is no preview. There needs to be a preview, showing a few encounters, so a potential buyer can get a sense of things before they commit to the spend. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/569173/tomb-of-the-ancient-moor-king-castles-and-crusades?1892600

By Howard Shirley
Parzoval Games
OSR
Level 1

A beautiful bride, a handsome groom, a starlit wedding… and GOBLINS! At least you have a wedding present for the young couple— a promise to rescue the kidnapped groom!

This 26 page adventure uses about six pages to describe ten rooms in a small goblin lair. Lots of read-aloud. Lots of stabbin. Lots of text, in general. Oh, also, your level ones get to save the world. *YAWN*

You’re at a wedding. You’ve haven’t brought your weapons and you’re not wearing you’re armor because you’re at a wedding. I mean, because you’re stooopid. The murder hobo trope wasn’t started by the players. Bad DM’s and bad designers are to blame, when when all you’ve ever cared about has been butchered. Anyway, the designer wants you to grab a smith hammer or the spit the pig is on, or a butcher knife and go chasing after the goblins who crash in and steal the groom. Goblins, a lot of them, wolf riders, shivving the old people. This is all the shitty hook, related over three agonizingly long pages of DM text and read-aloud. Anyway, you stab stab stab but you can’t win since it’s the hook and the groom gerd stolen by them and oh no you’ve got no weapons or armor and have to pick up what you can find and give chase to the goblins. 

Ok, so, second scene, you head in to the woods to give chase and come across two goblin wolf riders. Stab stab stab. Again. You keep going. You come to the goblins lair, a cave with a door in the mouth. You now have ten rooms to explore. You pull aggro if you’re loud at the front door, otherwise you just stab stab stab in every room. In the last stab stab stab room you meet the goblin shaman. The groom is on a throne in a trance and the shaman is doing his ritual thing. It takes him like a full hour to do it, after which The Evil One gets summoned in to the grooms body. Like, a level 36 evil cleric. Anyway, it takes an hour from then the party shows up at the rooms door, so, no hurry. You stab a bunch.

The text is single column and this thing is the poster child for why that’s a bad idea. The whole eye fatigue thing form scanning all the way right an left. Yeah yeah, it sounds like minor shit but it’s a real effect. And then the read-aloud is LONG. Like quarter page long. No one cares. After two or three sentences peoples attention starts to drift. You gotta keep the read-aloud short. And the text is LONG, in general. The goblin raid on the wedding takes like three pages to describe For goblins on wolf back to snag the groom. And then, in the cave section, it starts with like a ¾ page overview of what a captured goblin might know. With no formatting at all so it’s just read the entire fucking thing and hope you stumble across whatever the party is asking about. START THE FUCKING SHOT WITH A BOLDED WORD. Jesus, man. 

Oh, what else, you start with a locate object spell, I guess to find the cave? Although the tracks are easy to follow? You also start with a very high level dispel magic scroll tht can be used to break the ritual. You know, whenever you find a bunch of potions of water breathing laying by the side of the road then its time to head up in to the hills. You GOTTA write an adventure where you don’t need this deus ex shit. Why the fuck does it have to be the end of the world at level one, at the first adventure?! (Although … that’s a fun campaign. EVERY session has the party saving the world. Betty the housekeeper. Frank the night soil dude, EVERYONE is trying to end the world. TO save it you must end them all. Everyone in the world!)  You can fuck around and break the conventions, but do it for a reason. Give them six of every magic item in game one. But on purpose. Because the resulting power struggles are the campaign. But, no, no Staves of Power at level one because you need that to overcome some specific challenge. Write the fucking adventure without needing that shit. 

So, you wade through a lot of poorly formatted and overly long text in a railroad setup, for no reason, in order to just stab a bunch of goblins. I’m not real sure what goes through peoples heads when they write these things. Its easy to say that the vision and implementation didn’t align. But, that should be obvious from looking at it, right? So why not work it harder instead of just pressing publish?

This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages. The last four are the hook and the goblin chase. They are a decent representation of what you’ll find inside. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582262/the-night-of-the-goblin?1892600

Also, you should see Night of the Hunter if you’ve not. It’s no Night of the Goblin, but, you know, what can be?

By M. Allen Hall
Self Published
OSE
Levels 2-3

The disappearance of Old Ilfen has left the wizard’s tower at the center of a power struggle. Lord Cargan wants to tear the tower down and replace it with a lighthouse. Skaarn and his pixie war band want to raid the dungeon below the tower and recover a magic item Ilfen once stole from them. Ilfen wants someone to help him get his body back. And at the bottom of the dungeon, the Green Ooze King wants to be left alone so it can seed other worlds with its spawn. Whether they want to help Cargan, Skaarn, Ilfen, or only themselves, your players’ characters will be drawn into Ilfen’s Halls to face the Green Ooze King and its minions.

This 34 page adventure presents twelve hexes and a small dungeon with twenty rooms in an “abandoned” wizards tower. It does a decent job of setting up a wizardly lair and in presenting several factions working against each other. Faction play follow through could be a bit better, and the hex and room descriptions get long in places, but the weirdo ooze monsters are a highlight.

Lord Rob is a decent dude. He also HATES the local wizard “made all the worse by the fact that the wizard seems oblivious to his hatred”, which makes him hate him even more. Wizard dude disappears so the lord decides to use the site of his island tower to build a lighthouse cause of all the shipwrecks. This in spite of the fact that there are better places on the island to build it. That is an excellent bit of pettiness there, love it. He’s sent a work crew, led by a foreman (who’d rather building in the better spot on the isle) and the work crew is having trouble. Explosions while working on the tower. Monsters coming out of the forest to attack the camp. Sometimes the tower, being unblocked from the top, seems to regrow. There are some pixies hanging about, unknown to anyone, who are trying to get in the tower to recover a magic crown, and they are the cause of the shadow monsters coming out of the forest. The wizard, of course, if not dead. His body is in the Ooze King in the basement and his head is floating around the rest of the dungeon, unable to communicate but REALLY wanting to be reunited with his body once the ooze king is dead. Thus we have the laborers, mercenaries hired to protect the laborers, the fey, and then the wizard head all mucking about the area with different goals. Add to this The Party. I do love a good fireworks show in a gasoline factory. 

The wizard tower in particular, and the rest of the island generally, has a decent amount of stuff to fuck with. Weird machines to repair, stone circles and ley lines to teleport with, places to get your soul sucked out and, of course, a few small missions from the pixies, in particular, to augment the greater goals the factions have. There are some decent little moments as well, such as when mercenary guards question the party, as laborours, if they are allowed to be in the area. Just a sentence and it does a good job prompting the DM in such a way to add life to the game. The monsters, mostly things that can only be hurt by fire, add a nice little puzzle element to the combat as the party tries to figure out how to hurt ooze things.

Hexes are about a page and dungeon keys are about a column, in general. This is where things start to get rough for me. Formatting is decent with bullets and bolding and indents, but there is only so much cognitive space for a DM to have. It’s a tricky problem, rooms with depth add so much to the game, rooms with multiple elements, but then the challenge becomes the ability of the DM to handle all of the information. The hexes, in particular, tend to run a bit long and complicated to run, or, perhaps, to keep all of the elements straight in ones head. 

For all of the potential that the faction play provides it falls down in the execution. While the factions have these major goals there is not a lot, if any, provided for handling the consequences of play. How do the laborers react, or the mercs, or the pixies. Raw violence? How? Surely they are not standing still while the party works against them and they find out. This sort of guidance is just not present. And yet it would add so much to play and the use of the factions in such a small environment. 

The concept here is an old one: making things seem like they are real. Giving the appearance of depth. This allows for a certain kind of immersion, and buy in from the PLAYERS in to the game world situation. This is what an evocative room description does, it helps the DM bring that to life. This is what realistic motivations with NPCs does, the relatability helps. That specificity that I’m always harping on and on about, it enables it. It’s not detail. Detail alone is almost always useless. A DM can make up detail, especially if the designer has done their job well in relating a room and/or situation. But the specificity, that is core to the designer bringing their ideas to life. Looking at the merc situation, above, that I mentioned, the mercs challenging the party. You’re getting hassled man. By the cops. By the mall security guard. By the doorman. Who can’t relate to this, both personally and in the many media depictions? It’s a petty annoyance and it GRATES on you. Fucking POS, how about I just stab you 196 times in the throat and then we’ll see who authorized to be in this area. And that’s in the case where I AM authorized to be in the area. It’s one fucking sentence, but it IMPLIES so much more. That’s good writing. That’s a good situation. That’s exactly the sort of specificity that adventures should put forward. Why the fuck do I care about a dudes eye color or hairstyle, unless its pertinent to the game? No, the fact that he’s a bully, or holds a petty grudge or something, that’s what brings the noise. 

It’s an ok adventure. Which means very little makes it stand out except that it’s not a disaster of an adventure. But it’s also not a good adventure that I get excited about when I think about running it. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. There’s no preview. M. Allen Hall, why do you hate us, and freedom? Why do you think we should not see a couple of encounters before we spend our hard earned cash on this adventure? Stick in a few pages of preview. A hex or two and a room or two. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582152/the-green-ooze-king-for-cairn-and-ose?1892600

By Stadtjaeger
Self Published
Generic/Universal
"Low/Mid Levels"

Something went quiet in Frostholm. The mining outpost stopped sending word weeks ago. Company says it’s the weather. Locals won’t go check. A mother’s paying good money to anyone willing to find her son — a scholar who went up chasing some old civilization and never came back.

This thirty page adventure presents a small village investigation and a dev le in to a mine with about eight rooms, plus a couple of overland events before and after. It’s more of a scene based “Experience” than an adventure, with the designer describing it as no-win. The writing is purple and there is no loot to be gained. 

This has elements of War Against the Chtorr, in that an alien organisms is trying to chtorraform the planet. You head up to a snowy mining camp that no one has heard from and have a few spooky things happen along the way. At the camp you poke around the buildings and find bodies and more eerie stuff. You survive (presumably) a night attack by a swarm of alien insects and head to the mine the next day. There you might get infected with spores in the weird crystal/plant environment and find a dude in an alien pod. If you free him then an unbeatable monster appears. Fleeing from it you fight hordes of crystal block constructs. You’re supposed to figure out to seal the mine shaft with some explosives you find. On the way back down the mountain, with the dude you found, a different unbeatable monster appears, klils the dude, and takes off for the stars. The dude you found has a book and if you perform the ritual in it then a portal opens in which armies of alien life forms come through to finish chtorraforming the planet. 

The vibe here is similar to those killer LotFP adventures. You know, you delve in and try to get loot while avoiding the doomsday scenario that is sure to happen. Maybe mix in a little Call oc Cthulhu where messing with books will fuck you up. Except, there’s not really any loot here. I find this annoying and it makes me want to put this solidly in to the Modern Adventure category where you’re just fucking around together at a table instead of gaming. Yeah yeah, there are different ways to have fun, but I prefer the one where the story is the one the party makes. But, with that in mind …

This is also a generic/universal adventure. Which means a lack of stats. You get some general “there should be twice as many creatures as party members” and other story based mechanics like “the attacks last until dawn” kind of stuff with a few “they should take one hit to kill” sorts of things thrown in. This, again, contributes to the more story based approach that the adventure is taking. 

It DOES do a fairly decent job with the investigation and lead in to the mine. You get a few eerie things happening on the trail to the mining town, dogs nervous, a body frozen in the snow and so on. And the town investigation is also likewise eerie. Strange scratch marks covering all of the buildings, skeletons huddled in corners stripped of their flesh or other clearly holed up and waited to die. The whole “meal still on the table” sort of thing. At one point you can’t get in to tone of the village buildings and have to go in a window to find the door blockaded. Nice.The whole preamble to the ride os decently done, in what is presented if not in its form.

Any by form, I mention that because of the writing style. It’s very much heavy with first this thing happens and then this thing happens and keep the party from doing X and so on. This is then exacerbated by a certain conversational style of writing, HEAVY with purple text. “The walls have stopped pretending to be stone. What covers them now is something else, layered thick like scar tissue over a wound that never closed — glistening, faintly pink where the light catches it, soft enough that you do not want to touch it and cannot stop noticing that you have to.” Or something like “Something is coming, but not in a hurry, It doesnt need to.” That least bit being a read-aloud line. 

While this MIGHT work in in the village/investigation portion, it breaks down in the mine where it tends to continue. The mine is mostly just poking around on a museum trip, looking at the weird plant life that might infect you with something only very high level magic can cure. There are a couple of light problem solving situations, like getting down the central shaft, but you’re not doing much until you find the dude in the alien pod thingy.

At this point all of the stillness disappears. The unbeatable monster appears as well as the hordes of lesser crystal golems. You’re supposed to run away. That’s the point of the entire adventure. Run away, beat off the crystal golems while ascending the shaft and, hopefully, sealing it lest the horrors are loosed upon the world. 

This is all, essentially, a railroad. It’s an experience. Follow the tracks laid down and survive and “win” by escaping with a sealed shaft,. If you don’t guess what the designer wants you you to do then die 

The conversational writing style makes running it difficult, and the purple prose if so bad that I’m not sure I could read it with a straight face. Even when it’s not read-aloud the DM will need to wade through it and try to translate it to something evocative for the party, which is not going to be easy.

The generic/Universal curse strikes again. Just write it traditionally and stat it for B/X and STILL call it generic/universal. Once you get good, as a writer, THEN you can branch out to more experimental styles. But you gotta learn to walk first.

This is $4 at DriveThru.The preview is the first three pages, which are all, essentially, designer notes. A few encounters needed to be included so a potential buyer can get a sense of what they are buying before they do so.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578991/they-come-at-night?1892600

By Close Reader
Oriental Mandarin Legend
OSE
Levels 1-2

In order to thank the PC for killing the monsters in his territory, the Boold[sic] Baron invited the players to come to the bright Red castle he built on the Wild Eagle Mountain.

This 28 page adventure presents seven-ish rooms in a scripted human sacrifice ceremony dungeon/scene/event. It has both EASL issues and is overly scripted. 

Disclaimer: I think this is a difficult review to write. I suspect strongly, based on the chinese characters in the text, that this is an EASL adventure and, further, an asian one. I love seeing non-tolkein fantasy and I don’t want to do anything to discourage EASL adventures, particularly from our chinese friends. But, also, there are EASL issues. The imagery in the writing doesn’t hit at all which is a problem given the subject matter and there are some areas, in the overview in particular, in which the language could be clearer on what is supposed to be going on, plot-wise. I’m not going to mention these things again in the review and encourage the designer to continue writing florid text, and, certainly, to continue writing adventures. 

You’re invited to the barons castle. Except, he didn’t actually invite you. It turns out that a priest, a spy in the castle, issued you the invitation. But, a carriage from the baron shows up to pick you up and you’re let in anyway. There’s a big banquet going down, but, right at the start this priest/spy dude tells you to go to your rooms and pack, and the baron reluctantly agrees. Also, the baron has drugged all of the food and wine and he and his cultists, also present as guests,will be capturing everyone to drag them below to sacrifice to their god. Also, the priest/spy invited you because he wanted a back up plan in case HE failed to stop the cult/sacrifices. Also, something else is going on with the ceremony because if you stop it then the cthulhu monster the worship will be freed and if you DONT stop it then his bonds are strengthened … so both the Blood baron cult leader AND the priest/spy are wrong about what will happen. Got it? Barely? Ok we’re on the same page.

The set up here makes little sense, from the invitation, to the baron excusing the party to their rooms. I’m not saying every setup has to be perfect, but there’s got to be some reasonableness to it for the party to buy in and for the DM to be able to expand upon things and run the situation. 

The hook, the carriage ride, arriving at the castle, the dinner, up to the party going to their rooms is all handled in a “first this and then this” kind of situation. It’s ALL hook. The presentation is not ideal and the “adventure” won’t really begin in a meaningful way until the party is in their room packing. At that point you can go explore the other bedroom on the second floor (and awfully small castle …) or go back to the main room to see the “end” of the feast and people getting hauled away, as well at the priest/spy getting gacked. Oh, and no leaving early, there’s some handwaving about there being “towers” with crossbowmen on them ready to shoot anyone who leaves. And it really is handwaving. This is not presented in any way as a tactical problem or in anyway a raid/sneak kind of thing, There are some minor notes, a sentence or two, to handle “the party eats the food” or “the party doesn’t go back to their rooms.”

The five room dungeon under the banquet hall (no maps of the upper floors/castle are provided) are the only traditional adventuring environment. Basically you fight giant worm things, a kind of body horror environment is attempted to be described, which doesn’t come across very well. I’ve generally pretty forgiving of EASL issues, but in this case the descriptions are critical to bringing about the full vibe of body horror and it’s just not present in a meaningful way. Since this is just a hack, hacking worms and finally the cultsists in their ceremony chamber, this is unfortunate.

I might call the first part just similar to an outline of an adventure and the five room dungeon portion a hack. I’m sure te language issues can be overcome with some more work, but the overall structure and flow of the adventure, getting the party in to it, the under-reliance of the tactical/free will element to the party and lack of exploration elements are just fundamental design issues. I’m excited to see more coming from asia though. And the attempts at formatting here, while not perfect, do show some understanding of layout and orienting the text to the DM who is running it.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $3. The preview is three pages. In chinese. Which is great for our chinese audience, I guess? 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/455035/blood-castle?1892600