A dungeon by Guilherme Gontijo, levels unlisted. Written for Bronze Hack Oh boy, a dungeon crawl for an unrecognized heartbreaker? And it’s a lavishly colored trifold? What joy. The only way to make this a classic Itch Trifecta is a completely unsatisfying node-diagram “map” pasted over a landscape. And no…we rather have a new, fresh, abomination before us, a blocky greyscale ascii-art map that somehow manages to ape the stylings of Rogue or Dwarf Fortress with none of the charm. A scale is given so it’s usable, but this is one very unique method of conveying information here, let’s see if it works for him, Cotton. The whole thing is written in an oddly chatty style, with many “lots of X” and “there’s a Y” turns of phrase, it’s a little strange and nonspecific. The plot of the crawl is pretty standard. Rich guy has exotic garden. Rich guy’s son dies. Rich guy makes pact with dark powers and returns son to life as monster. Monster eats stuff and takes over garden. Rich guy asks to clear garden to reclaim it. Son in human form mysteriously helps PCs. PCs accept quest or we don’t play D&…er, Bronze Hack, tonight. The challenges to overcome on the way to the titular Beast are all what we expect from that premise, whenever there’s anything specific (traps are just marked “trap” on the map, not detailed). Vine “walls” are presumably impassible, as are water squares? There’s pools that turn bathers to gold and back again, there’s random bugs and leopards to fight, there’s a backstory that the adventure is pretty optimistic players will find…and the Final Bossfight can be solved with a lute playing a song? What I liked about the adventure was the art, sorta, which being uncredited means I assume is AI-generated. The map isn’t completely hopeless in terms of layout, that’s good. I’m not sure if the backstory gets conveyed successfully but I do like the idea of the history of the site mattering in the final confrontation. Pools that turn people into gold are a fun thing to mess with, although the Inevitable Player Monetization Schemes are left unaddressed. That all seems negative but looking at what can be improved yields quite a bit that’s hopeful. A lot of things that are unclear, like the traps, could be settled with just a little bit more explanation. Things like “d100 bugs” or “d4 leopards” or “d100 coins” could be standardized into definite numbers, which helps. As with any mystery with clues at a TTRPG, multiple chances to gain access to the useful backstory bits would be wise. Couple those improvements with a little more thought on things like the infinite gold-making ponds and you have a nice little minidungeon. We live in this reality, however, so the best use case here today is to take the communicated vibe and/or the backstory-puzzle-situation to a better map and ignore what’s presented. Running this straight out would be a little dull but wouldn’t be torture. Final Rating? */***** as a less than inspiring first impression for Bronze Hack. Better luck next time.
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A set of dungeonlets by Brent Edwards, levels are for the unenlightened. …because yup, written for Cairn I’m used to experiencing familiar emotions when reading a Cairn adventure. Annoyance. Boredom. Ennui. Contempt. Bafflement. In The Barrows Hunger, Brent Edwards takes nineteen laborious pages over nine 1-5 room Dyson maps to induce in me an unusual emotion for the system…disappointment. Right, so we got nine little barrows, easily one of the least inspiring of the free Dyson maps…useful enough for your VTT if you’ve rolled a random lair result overland, but nothing that encourages exploratory play in each individual site. All nine are reimagined here as a set of fake burial mounds that are actually the nine heads of a vast buried hydra, six of which are dead, three of which are still semi-alive and are looking for meat, using their malleable claylike saliva to generate facsimiles of loot to entice tomb-robbers. A cultist worshipping the hydra runs a sad ramshackle “museum” of a fake fallen empire, telling stories about the nine rulers presumably interred with the barrows (surprisingly detailed) and encouraging the adventurous to get themselves et. This flash of admittedly complicated creativity is followed up by page after page of fake treasure and explosive spit monsters. As should be obvious what I liked are the bizarre flashes of creativity…most of the time. There’s something neat about adventuring within portions of a slumbering/dying/quiescent gargantuan giga-monster, that’s a good idea. The only two pieces of magical loot in the adventure are nifty, a linked pair of black glass daggers that attack together and especially the calcified lens of one of the hydra’s eyes that can be used as a shield, it grants views a split second into the future, imposing disadvantage on attackers. Now that is a magic item, whew. I kinda liked the museum curator/cultist guy…it’s kind of touching that he really does care for the hydra, desperately trying to help one of the dying heads by tending to it every night. The brief summary of the nine fictional rulers purported to be buried in the barrows isn’t just worldbuilding fluff, but clearly gameable as smart players will definitely ask about that. Good bits. There is, however, a long list of what can be improved that’s mostly the unpleasant stuff, and the underbaked stuff. I know it’s Cairn, where the levels are made up and the loot don’t matter, but the whole area is essentially a cruel bait-and-switch designed to inflict nothing but pain and disappointment on the characters. The adaptive hydra spit engulfs and hardens, and then explodes if cracked, all presented as just pure anti-player mechanics. Loot is terrible mostly, the only valuable bits really beyond the aforementioned calcified lens are from previously tricked adventurers. Feels bad, very choked. There’s a real lack of incident in the encounters, the bad loot is coupled with “screw-you” traps…trap-heavy dungeons can be good, but more telegraphing would improve the play a lot. Finally, that previously mentioned gameable background being better integrated in the barrows would be a huge improvement. Awkward to find a best use case here. The highly flavorful premise means the barrows are useless as independent lairs/sites, but the whole thing is a little uninspiring to play. Might be that the best takeaway is that “buried and dying kaiju as a dungeon” initial seed and then go write something with interesting cartography and better interaction. Final Rating? */***** makes it about average for Cairn but that’s about all that can be said. It’s been over eight months diving amidst the dire dreck deep in bowels of the itch.io TTRPG publication space. While I’ve found the occasional gem amidst the turds, the general quality has wavered from “uninspiring” to “insultingly abysmal”…although often the result is entertaining to review, if not to attempt to actually use at the table. While I’ve hardly covered everything, as time has gone on I’ve noticed some systems that spike intense feelings of nausea and dread, where you just know an adventure for the given system is going to be terrible. Meanwhile, there are other systems that give the struggling reviewer…if not hope, then at least mild interest that what’s been written isn’t guaranteed to be awful. For the occasional hopeful module-grabber that isn’t on a machoistic dream-quest to purify his psyche through agony, I figured I’d give a quick guide: “System Agnostic” Do not walk, RUN. This is a clear indicator of a passionless brainfart, released to make a quick PWYW buck, never playtested, never intended to be actually used. These are almost always spawned from a jam or a writing prompt, not a passionate idea. MARK OF TERRIBLE QUALITY. “For B/X” This is the Basic Mark of OSRness, sorry AD&D bros but most people playing, are playing B/X. It’s a fine system* for what it’s being used for, typically adventure sites that can be used in a casual ongoing campaign. It’s a mark of probable quality. *Actually have read/played this one of course, it’s good. “For OSE” Very common, typically going to be more regimented in its bullet-point formatting but of course being just B/X it’s a fine system*, there’s an outside chance of being playtested, although its often a cash-grab too. Designed for one-shots rather than campaign play. Mark of possible quality. *Actually have read/played this one, it’s good. “For Shadowdark” There must be a style guide for this one, because all Shadowdark adventures are alike in scope and scale (one single session, dungeon-based, loops in map mandatory). Exclusively one-shot scope. The cash-grab chances are decently high, but the style guide means there’s at least some chance of a decent little dungeonlet. Mark of possible quality. “For Heartseeker” This is a mysterious system to me, but multiple adventures written for it means it does have at least a dozen audience members. This is a fairly typical heartbreaker system in that it has very stylish, but very unimaginative, content. One-shots only, despite nods at assumed ongoing campaigns. Mark of low quality. “For Mausritter” Cute art will happen, as will incredibly generic adventures. I hope you like the thought of little mouse-guys having adventures, because the content itself holds absolutely nothing novel. Mark of low quality. “For the Vanilla Game” At least we can’t claim this is false advertising. Not idea what the system is like, but it seems to spawn very vanilla adventures. Nothing offensive, and with an idea of ongoing campaign play, but bland. Mark of boring quality. “For Heroes of Adventure” The most high-gloss “trad” adventures of these amateur efforts, these feel like classic efforts from the era of D&D 3.5…which, given the system*, makes sense. Scope and scale will be big, fine with multiple sessions, even happy to release a yearlong campaign. Written very long, always. Designed to be actually played, which is inspiring. Mark of possible quality. *Read and reviewed the system, it’s got some selling points. “For Vaults of Vaarn” Gamma World by way of ugly colors for its garish pages, Vaults of Vaarn has no sign to me that it was ever in fact played. The one-shot “idea” adventures produced here show a really rough style guide being worked from. Mark of bad quality. “For Into the Odd” Attractive to the worst sorts of artsy creators, there’s an unpleasant set of formatting and vaguely steampunkish art choices inevitably being made. Mark of bad quality. “For Cairn” Oh man, there are so many adventures for this, it’s a very active little cult. All the adventures are long and have a woodsy/wilderness theme, which is normally my jam, but there’s so much pretense dripping from every product, the “adventures” are self-important beyond belief even as they typically have the most bog-standard content imaginable. One-shots always because there’s no leveling setup. Mark of terrible quality, but not the worst because… “For Mork Borg” Oh man. The colors are going to upset my tummy, the font will be barely readable, and the formatting will be random…but the content will be even worse. Sure, it’s going to be edgy, but it’s also guaranteed to be a “14-year-old in a Hot Topic shirt”-level of edgy. Mark of terrible quality. “For Troika” Immediate nightmare. To see this is to know pain. This little symbol means the most nauseating, annoying, overwritten, underbaked, never-played product you’ve ever seen in your life. MARK OF SATAN HIMSELF. A quest by William Greve, levels unlisted. Written for 5E What? Itch.io actually has 5E content? Well, it’s 5E, but “content” is debatable I suppose. Thieves’ Quests: The Early Bird is nine pages, plus two map pages, taken to describe a simple quest given by a thieves’ guild to raid a secret agent’s apartment for information she’s been gathering on a valuable alchemist and I can’t keep describing this my eyes are bleeding. Cute and anachronistic MS-paint illustrations certainly make it a colorful product, and the formatting is inoffensive, but it is over-written beyond belief, hammering away at things shown by those illustrations and the very detailed maps. It’s all very wearying. What we have here is basically a heist, breaking into the apartment (!) of the secret police agent (!!) above a restaurant (!!!). The main gimmick is that the agent lady has a magic desk that with a drawer that uses different mechanical bird-heads of all the apartment’s many clockwork birds (!!!!) to open into different contents. Wandering around the apartment contains no real risks outside of a single trapped crow-head, and the pressure is “if the DM feels like it, maybe the agent returns early”. The main solution to the drawer-puzzle is a brass cuckoo in a clock, plus the hint of a headless goose meandering upstairs. That’s more or less it. I’m having an issue saying what I liked without qualifiers, unfortunately. The illustrations, as I mentioned, are cute…the maps are at least well-drawn, very filled-in with details. There’s some merit to the basic idea of a magical drawer that has different contents based on different opening knobs…I wouldn’t have gone exactly the way the author did with it, but it’s a decent idea. Alas, what can be improved won’t be as much as you might think, probably as an artifact of how thin the premise is. You might expect me to scream about the cosmopolitanism of the setting, but along with the restauranter being a stylish and friendly half-orc (!!!!!) these are just 5E-isms, there’s no more point in complaining about them or encouraging their abandonment than in trying to prevent the sunrise. What can be done is of course adding more *incident*, not just in terms of more traps, but in terms of possible physical threats to overcome, wandering guard/cook/policeman to be evaded, a confrontation with the secret agent…let this quest have *adventure*. That can be done to improve this product even within the nightmarish postmodern anachronism stew that is its context. Best use case then is to steal and adapt the one okay idea in the magical drawer I guess? Even with the most banal 5E group I can’t see playing this as it is to be enjoyable. Thus your “parts” use case, but that’s not worth the hassle of unzipping the highly compressed file stack this sucker came in. Final Rating? */***** at the very kindest, even by the dismal standards of 5E dreck. I’m not just going to do classic modules on this occasional feature, I’m also looking at popular/famous other works…and so why not Indie Darling/award-winning Deep Carbon Observatory, a fundamental LotFP module so coated by reviewer slobber that it is barely discernable as an original shape anymore. I’m not going to weary anyone with the thousandth review of the adventure itself, suffice it to say it’s a good idea that labors to make something playable. This is about the maps, dear boy, the maps. I’ll cover the overland map a little at the end, but if you’re new to DCO, it’s basically a situation-as-adventure, this dam just broke and flooded a valley, so adventurers get to revel in suffering and misery of the victims in the lower valley, then hit a mini-dungeon at the dam itself, then get to explore the now-uncovered lake bed above. The titular observatory is a complex built by Your Own Favorite Ancient Evil Precursor Race to examine the Legally Distinct Dark Under. The dangly final observatory is built to be the reward for the suffering party’s long and soggy trek, so it’s a map well worth study. Gross. Alright, first off, it’s correctly in isometric, which is something you need for such a vertical environment, albeit with a slightly wonky perspective that means I wouldn’t want to transmit this to a mapper, or even uncover bits on a VTT with dynamic lighting. Carefully working through the illustration does allow for parsing all the connections, but a flowing order of battle would be difficult to describe, and random encounters aren’t exactly easy to conjure out of the geography. No scale is provided, nor is there much of a key, so squint carefully at the pictures, dear suffering DM, and hope that the vivid and well-written content sticks with the incidental details well enough. It’s an effective piece of art unlike a lot of the other module illustrations, conveying the mood brilliantly…that’s certainly worth something. C+ for presentation. Lest I get accused of being overly dour, this is a great concept. Speaking as a physicist it of course has nothing to do with any real-world scientific observing, but the idea of a deep underground observatory for magical “under darkness” is great. Ancient, decaying structures are D&D’s bread and butter, but there’s a brilliant reason for this place to be exotic and for this spot to have never before been uncovered. Every part of the setup primes us for a weird, alien, and maddening underworld location that any sensible player group worth their salt would be thrilled to explore. And having the dungeon shaped as a pair of hollowed-out stalactites? A for concept. Sadly, the very first thing we hit when it comes to execution is “site is very small”. Fifteen keys does not a triumphal Final Dungeon make, even allowing for another dozen “spurs” that lack for any unique keying there’s not a lot to explore. A squishy mutated giant should have vast cavernous halls, a veritable maze to chase hapless adventurers down, not this tight little one-access loop. The concept calls, nay begs, for a huge complex filled with laboratories and barracks. Instead, a PC at one end of the place can quite reasonably expect to shout and be heard all the way over at the other end. Unfortunately this also means everything is pretty overstuffed too. Isometrics always make maps look more geometrically complex than they are, and this one is no exception. Single entry, only one main loop, barely even any branching…the exploration isn’t, most of the time. The only thing really saving the map is how vertical the whole thing is; long and dangly shafts to climb up and down make a lot of potential difference, once the third dimension opens up, players will start seeing the world as more real. That bridge between the two stalactites in particular is nice and terrifying, non-OSHA-compliant pass ways over an effectively infinite blackness are thrilling. Pity that and the long dangle-chain are the only bits of environment that really take full advantage of that. Powerful isometric art-piece maps are wonderful at conveying mood when the reader is sitting there and imagining dungeon-like gaming…but it’s what I’m going to call the Trilemma Problem, after the genuinely beautiful Trilemma Adventures (http://blog.trilemma.com/), a huge set of pretty one-shot maps that completely fall apart (or need a ton of work) whenever someone attempts to actually play them. Your players aren’t going to be able to see that isometric map, so who is it really for? It’s not made for a dungeon master; it’s made for a consumer. A passive reader, a reviewer with a Youtube channel, a Kickstarter backer. The comrades trying to play a game? That’s a much smaller audience, so wise call not optimizing for them. D+ for execution. Having said all that, I do need to highlight an isometric map that works a good deal better as a play aid, the valley map. Please note that it’s not strictly necessary to present the flooded valley/emptied lakebed as an isometric map, but it’s a charming touch for the regional map, and in no way detracts from the linear slog up-river. Coupled with the dry boxes-and-arrows event sequencer, a DM is absolutely equipped to run the most miserable Tragedy Crawl he could ever dream up. The key difference? Nobody needs to break out graph paper (or Christmas wrapping paper) to actually figure out what a 30’ move speed gets you. Don’t let this convince you one way or another on actually getting Deep Carbon Observatory. It’s putting the product to its secondary use, but a good adventure can definitely be had using it. You’re just going to be struggling against the map a bit, which is the real tragedy. An “adventure” by Brett Sullivan & Fern Cliff Studio, levels unlisted. Written for any system One pager alert. The Spoiled Hollow is a charmingly illustrated little adventure…er…set of adventure ideas set in an isolated little valley with a lake in the middle. I recognized the charming art style of Fern Cliff Studio, which I had quite liked in At the River’s Edge. The style of multiple possibilities for each doohicky present on the map, though, works better in a mini-campaign-scale sandbox region as opposed to this tiny little vale, which would at most be a single hex. I’m capable of solving this, but the author gave me homework, and I resent that. I shall have to spend time staring at the cute little waterfall drawings to soothe my troubled spirit. Okay, so there is a story here, a situation that can be sussed out. Formerly peaceful little hollow, now massive thorny vines are erupting, local wildlife gets blighted, lord of the tower in the lake has disappeared. The details are very shiftable based on these little d4 or d6 tables…I say, the real interest happens if you see the fork in the road and take it. The Abby of…The Maiden of Sorrow, aka Sister of the Peaceful Tenders, aka mother of the Marked Ones, aka she of the Knowing Eyes. Don’t roll, just have all of them true, and enjoy the contradictions. The village? Why not have it be overgrown, inhabited by blighted humanoids, full of happy and healthy people oblivious to the blight, and also be the lair of a huge monster? That is a place to have adventures in. With that modification you have a fun, if distressingly vague about stats/details, adventure here. The home containing an angry/sad/monstrous/lonely/shy/helpful hermit murderer farmer orphan lycanthrope scholar might require D&D 3.5 with full splatbooks to stat out, though. As the author is the cartographer, I’m happy to say what I liked is the map. Slap that puppy down on the table without markings and it’s going to lead to all manner of “I want to go to there” gameplay. As usual the table content is a mixed back of quality, but I liked more than I didn’t here. Particular points for wingless warped blight-gryphons as a monster threat, mourning their sacrificed eggs. You know what I’m going to be saying, but what can be improved is to collapse the tables into singular descriptions. Particularly with a 1-pager, this is a single hex’s contents, and potentially a very good hex at that with some direction given. This wild creativity is impressive in its way but pruned and tended by the gardener’s hand it could have produced even more fruit. That would have also given room for STATISTICS or SPECIFIC NUMBERS, which greatly reduce the burden placed upon the longsuffering man at the table trying to actually turn your vision into a solid gameplay experience for 3-5 hours. Yeah, best use case for the Spoiled Hollow is as a hex’s adventure site, particularly with that lovely illustration/map. There’s a lot of effort implied in turning the tables into a usable adventure, so I might just eschew them in favor of my favorite random encounter generator(s), but there’s definitely a good time if you take all the options as true at once. Not a lot of stripping for parts, sadly. Final Rating? **/***** because of the awkward fit. I like so much here, but it’s a heck of a lot of work to bring to the table. Five stars for the map as object d’art, however. Whew boy. Out of the simple little B2 complex, into the Great Grandaddy of Dungeons, a husky four-level complex (with generous sublevels) sprawling over complex pages and pages of eye-hurting Judges’ Guild cheap ink. The community term “Jacquaying” comes out of a cargo cult built around these wonderfully interlinked and looping maps, often perhaps not understanding what really makes them good. The original maps are a bit rough to even parse, but even redrawn they’re very complex: Daggum. There’s a lot of ambiguity in the image here. The first thing that screams for attention are those huge tears; structural damage makes everything about the map going forward look weathered, ancient, falling (literally) into ruin. It’s a welcome naturalistic touch for an environment that actually does struggle with appearing somewhat artificial…something about the room layout does give a vague impression of “this is a game first” rather than the flow I would first expect to see in a living architectural space. Lower down, the palace and crypt complex for levels 3-4 are more naturalistic, with the resultant drop in exploration complexity. Most of the difficulty groking the maps comes less from their artistry and more from their design, however…so A- for presentation. Conceptually, what we have here is the ur-dungeon. A winding, echoing environment with most straight stone halls broken up by occasional natural rock features, cleanly separated into “zones” with plenty of cross-connection. There are really two dungeons here, the first that upper pair of fallen halls with all the crevasses, the second the weirdo minotaur palace/trees/undercrypts…both concepts are solid, of course. The incorporation of each section together feels a little artificial (and actually makes me wonder if the author had two different dungeons being combined). B+ for concept, only because of the disjoint really. All of these quibbles rapidly fade away, however, when we get down to the actual pen and paper. Look at the design shown even in the very first room…there are two options presented immediately, but there’s also a blocked third that indicates the complex is big, and yet also fallen. Then you have the obvious draw of #2 as the next spot, but the way that it interacts with the hallway in #6 also tips off the players that they need to be looking for secret doors, setting up for a jaunt to #9 after an otherwise simple little side-loop. It’s actually doing a good job of making a very limited first section that teaches the explorers the methods to Thracia’s madness. And then, we go all over the place. A sloping hallway going down a level…secret passages leading to hidden rooms…more secret passages giving shortcuts…chasms allowing rope-using PCs up and down access…subsections that going up and down and all around…it’s a crazy exercise in exploration and discovering, rewarding careful mappers with geometry juuust symmetrical enough to hint at the unnumerable secret passages. As a pure exercise of just mapping, the upper half of Caverns of Thracia is a delight. Then we go down the elevator to Level 3 and we’re in a whole different module. Bereft of all the interesting atmospheric descriptions, the “outdoor” area is dismayingly simplistic. Wander around a bunch of flora, then assault a pretty “flat” palace that’s rather symmetrical and linear (judging by the standards of what came before), and if you are even so-so at looking at geometry then you’re not having any issue at all in making your way down to the final level. The fourth level is fine as a module adventure section but it’s a lot simpler as a map. One branchy loop, then two more big branches with their own little sub-branches…I’m not mad about it, but there are far fewer choices in exploratory gameplay. After all the early training to look for hidden passages and secret loops, the players are going to find them only rarely, a notable shift for a bunch of explorers hardened in the fires of the first few maps. After the front-loaded brilliance, the later maps are merely…okay. Still, A for execution overall. I wonder if there’s some hidden wisdom here, in the end. As the PCs level up, the initial cautious exploratory gameplay can be dispensed with more often for frontal assaults of plate-wearing supersoldiers backed by high-level magic. As nice as brilliant maps with chasms and crevasses are, those gaping maws are a lot less scary when someone in the party can fall light feathers, or tame flying monsters, or teleport…just as new gameplay opens up with leveling, I think Caverns of Thracia also shows that there are old aspects of gameplay that start to take a back seat as high level demigods stride the lands. Cartographic design principles do in fact need to change as high-level powers come online, shown starkly in this adventure as the “decent into the underworld” leads to maps that are simpler, not more complex. That’s not really a critique, but it is definitely something to keep in mind lest we descend into cargo-cult worship of “The Loops” without seeing that even one of the most influential cartographers in the hobby dispenses with them as the adventurers grow in power and options. A dungeon by Scott Malthouse, level 3 Written for Heartseeker I find myself wondering about the process here for coming up with an adventure’s name. Are we to contemplate a dread bishop’s own ruined remains, or are we instead being called to explore ruins once belonging to this dread bishop? Idle musings, really, but when a four-page product uses half its meager count to detail a mere seven locations outlined in yet another dreaded node map…well, the mind begins to wander. Heartseeker once more, because it was how my Google drive sorted my itch.io downloading spree. I wonder if this, with double the page count, will be a better representative adventure than last time? Basic setup is that the Dre…er, the Veiled Bishop, one Mr. [404 name not found], was once a very greedy fellow who was very bad and took too many tithes while being directly worshipped by his bishopric. If his people didn’t pay cash money he took the difference in souls and anyway now he’s dead but his soul is in a reliquary and it’s all very standard. Gorgeous piece of art being used for the cover image/node diagram background, I don’t recognize the work exactly, but it has a STRONG Hudson River School feel, wonderous and moody. It’s doing a lot of work. Now what I liked isn’t complex, but simple isn’t bad…there’s a move made to attempt a little bit of interaction, with a crazy bird lady wanting her favorite dagger/ogre’s pet goblin whole stole it/clear water where ogre threw the dagger also showing skeletons, that’s a solid triangle right there. I don’t hate the stab at puzzle-encounter design with undead crusaders in the main sanctuary standing on black squares in a checker pattern. Shyly hinted-at alternate means of vanquishing the bishop’s ghost, namely ringing the ancient church bell, is a cool idea with a decent complication of needing to rehang said bell… …but what can be improved is actually allowing any of those good ideas to be implemented. The bell thing? As written, you might have SEVEN undead whaling on the party while they take multiple rounds to do it (also note variable amounts of adds again, grump). That little drama with the dagger? The bird lady attacks by default, the ogre and goblin attack by default, and the skeletons rise to attack by default. There was potentially something decent here, but then you turned it into a boring hackfest. It almost doesn’t need to be said, but I need to say it…GIVE US A REAL MAP. I understand cartography is scary, but the adventure is set in a ruined church, there are millions of church schematics available, so many that even 2023’s Google could find them. Physical geography always improves an adventure. I’m going to regretfully say that the best use case for Ruins of the Dread Bishop is to look up what whoever that artist was for the inspiration artwork and adventure from that instead. The hackfest is okay but nothing new, the few flashes of good content aren’t anything so novel that you’d want to steal them. Maybe the undead-dispersing church bell? But I feel like I’ve seen that before… Final Rating? */***** not with hate or annoyance, just with mild disappointment. Check it out today. Excited to hear about your own reactions, and above all...PLAY THEM.
Okay, you knew this one had to be first. Possibly the most-played, and probably the least-completed, dungeon complex in the entire history of the hobby…monster zoo, multi-level, famous and controversial, we have the Caves of Chaos: First of all, let’s talk about the presentation…it’s not great. The original TSR blue photocopy-resistant color can be a little uncomfortable even in a fairly traditional dungeon, but with an environment this complicated and layered, the overall effect is very overwhelming, busy and layered and all over the place. The cave entryways’ interaction with “trees” is less than clear, as are the slope setups. All this is given thought in the module itself, but it is a whiff on the information presentation side. The complex er…complex is perfectly runnable, but it’s a hard to parse from the direct view. “Stairs up” vs. “Stairs down” particularly wins an award for least helpful legend ever. C- for presentation. The design concept, though, is great. A narrow slot valley with multiple openings makes everything seem incredibly open to the approaching party, while also giving the subconscious message that “higher levels = higher level” in a wonderfully literal sense. People who unironically use the word “verisimilitude” will object to the monster zoo aspect of each species being a hundred feet away from the others but looking at the conceptual design of the space itself…great idea. Verticality is important in general, but there’s something particularly nice about being able to hit various bits of the map just by scrambling up the slopes. Really the biggest objection is that they don’t all have back-line interconnection, but that’s not the point of the adventure. A+ for concept. All that being said, in the actual execution…eh. The reason for this adventure’s classic status is more the setup and the room details, rather than the map’s direct flow. Branching little complexes like A or G have very fun encounter potential based on the writing, but in terms of exploration there’s just not a lot to them. The better early complex is south with the goblins managing to link D-E-F, there’s a lot of flow those secret doors allow, with extra props to the whole secret wing of rooms 28-31. B-C is okay. Complex H is particularly annoying in how it staunchly refuses to link to C or G. As a finale goes, the J-K complex doesn’t bug me, I like how J’s link to K is in the most counterintuitive direction, while the final rubble-strewn passage out in the southwest is something that more module designers of today should consider. There overall use of secret doors is interesting to me with the Caves of Chaos. You like loops? Well they’re your reward for bringing along the elf. After you find the first one (probably between E-D), you’re keyed up to look carefully for hidden links between caves, with canny parties probably monitoring what height they’ve ascended or descended to so they can be on the lookout for a secret door leading to another evident cave mouth. I’m mixed in the intermittent reward aspect of the secret doors being only in some locations…I can imagine a clever mapper bashing his head into the wall for multiple torches in room 33 seeking passage to 40, for example. In room 45 that intuition might be rewarded in a surprising way. It’s easy to fetishize looping dungeon designs at the expense of actual play. Just because it’s all on the same page, every single point doesn’t have to link to every other in multiple ways…it’s okay that the caves are actually six dungeons, not a single one. In a very dense, slightly silly way, the module is teaching about how to implement multiple dungeons on a single map, with just enough travel between them to provoke a random encounter check. It’s a miniaturized campaign, which is very cool and why the module’s had so much staying power. Now within those aforementioned six dungeons I am more distressed at the level of linearity. Something with only six keyed rooms like A or G make sense to be branches-not-circles, but there are a lot of branches that suffer in the larger complexes too. I could also do with the verticality mattering more, very often its just a slope or a stair for tactical, not geographic, purposes. While trying not to be overly fastidious, there is more that could have been done with the map(s) to encourage exploratory play. I’d say it was avoided out of a sense of compassion to the player mapping, but complex I exists, so that’s out the window. B- for overall map execution. None of this is me saying that Keep on the Borderland isn’t an awesome module. The Caves of Chaos are well made for the module’s purposes…mostly. Unfortunately, B2 is “often begun, rarely finished” in part because of the disconnected nature of the various cave complexes. Couple that with a restock suggestion that can be a little demoralizing (you cleared the kobolds, yay, now enjoy the same complex but with goblins), and I think it’s evident why the upper caves don’t get explored that often despite the massive number of people starting with those dang kobolds. Some of that is the nature of the game, some of that is because of the module’s massive popularity leading to uncommitted groups, but a little of that does come from the lack of interconnection between upper and lower cave complexes. I’m not going to argue that B2 is anything other than completely successful, but I do wonder if with a little more map interconnection it could have been even better… |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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