It's time. By the stroke of midnight (somewhere, I'm not judging where you are on any time zones), send on in your adventure sites...don't worry about the final polish, don't work about fixing that scan, if you win and are chosen for publication, you'll be given another editing pass. But now?
There comes a time on every project where you shoot the engineers and ship. Now is that time.
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A pirate dungeon by Adrian Daine, no level listed. Written for Pirate Borg (A Mörk Börg hack) Yar. Marstar Daine, lovar of buried treasurar and giant crabs, herein uses roughly ten pages to describe a gorgeous twenty-room isometric seaside cave map drawn by Kyle Latino (released under creative commons). The title is great, love the pun…but I’m going to have to take a while to emotionally process the fact that there’s an ecosystem of “Börglikes” out here now. Okay, life is pain, accept this, now on to our review of the play Our American Cousin. Very standard goth-metal pirate hack story. Evil pirate captain, who is basically Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, found an evil ancient artifact linked to Bog Standard Lovecraft Entity #4,281, took it back to his lair, Deep Ones erupted from the depths and slaughtered all his crew, so now you have aforementioned piece-of-art/map explained as random sea stuff taking over. Davy Jones is in his crab-lair with a key, nasty object is in random room, send in the clowns. Alright, what I liked is that there’s at least an attempt at making this place more than a hack…Deep Ones are kind of just bros unless the PCs are carrying the Evil Thingy, there’s a sad scared pirate named Tubbs, and even Davy Jones is willing to talk in some circumstances. Good. Multiple means of egress to the dungeon, which is important. Starved of rigorous random encounter procedures, some rooms nevertheless understand that encounters need to happen if players are faffing about too much. One of the pictures also inspired a fun bit of interaction, an undead turtle with a nice sword buried in it; take out the sword, turtle reanimates. Tiny bit of fun. It pains me to say it, but the first of what can be improved? Ditch the map. It’s a great piece of pretty artwork but it’s a trash exploratory design, just being a tree with branches, and not particularly clearly indicated branches either. There are also far far too many question marks and politely-worded suggestions. You’re the adventure, you tell me that there’s an encounter here, don’t lightly hem and haw that perhaps d4 Deep Ones should show up if the referee should feel like it on a day ending with “Y”. My earlier nice talk aside, most of the (very dense) encounters in here are also just “they attack” which is disappointing. Telegraphing that the random treasure room contains a sanity-destroying evil artifact would also be a good improvement. So the best use case for this thing is as a lair within your long-running (heh) campaign (heh heh) of Pirate Borg (gak). There are no innovative bits or pieces to take, really, so I guess you just put down the Kyle Latino art piece map and wait for the applause to roll in from the players? Final Rating? */***** but that might make it the single great Pirate Borg adventure ever written, I don’t know. A crossword adventure by Templar’s Tabletop, levels are for posers. Written system-agnostic. Do you have a Fantasy Metropolis? Is it cosmopolitan, urbane, and somehow culturally 2024? Do you also have nostalgia for malls and pet shops? Well then here’s the anachronism for you, Harold Black’s Magic Creature Emporium, a “dungeon” built from a crossword puzzle that takes twelve landscape-format (!) pages to describe a nine-room magical animal shop. It’s…weird. So there’s a classic type of mini-dungeon, the Wizard’s Tower. It’s a trope for a reason, mysterious magical old guys need their lairs, and having the excuse “a wizard did it” means the designer can put in all manner of silly magical traps or puzzles, with the justification that “hey, he’s a weird dude”. The Wizard’s Tower has two primary modes, one where the wizard is absent, in which case it’s a funhouse dungeon, or one where the wizard is present, in which case it’s a tight, focused heist working around a dangerous “busted” case that can mean utter disaster for a party. This module is a subset of the Wizard’s Tower, Ye Olde Magical Shoppe…all around this fellow Harold Black who is secretly siphoning magical critter essence while selling pets at his shop. Motivation for a player character B&E is left as an exercise to the reader, despite hooks being pretty easy with the premise. Which makes this product disturbingly onanismistic, but this is itch.io baby, so nothing new… I guess what I liked was that there were a couple of abused minions to talk to as well as a captured tiger who hates Harold as the win button. The obvious path to burglars, the shop’s window display, has a nasty trap so that’s good. Vague as they are, the adventure does offer hooks to further adventure in the form of a mystical magical otter giving a psychic treasure map or a journal of fantastic beasts and where to find them. Map layout is fine. Oh but what can be improved is that aforementioned vagueness…eliminate it. No system is given, no stats, which means that I for instance has zero idea how Harold is supposed to be run…you could stat him in OSE, in Cairn, in Pathfinder, in 5E, or heck, even in Werewolf the Apocalypse and I know how I could convert him to use in my preferred system. As it is, you’ve given us the idea of an animal-power-grabbing man but there’s nothing given for how it works in any game system…and then to double-down on this sin, there’s no procedure or thought given to where the wizard is in his shop at any given time of day. A Wizard’s Tower is a heist if he’s at home, so location is critical. I could do so much more critique, but this is such an overweening sin that it’s hard to focus on anything else. In Harold’s Quarters (8): “…the party finds gold here.” What’s the use, then? The best use case is as a tiny little bit-stealing mine, maybe taking the magic animal-power-stealing pool, maybe using the trap? If you have a cosmopolitan metropolis fantasy anachronism city, first of all shame on you, but secondly I guess that means you can put this in the city-crawl. Final Rating? */***** This isn’t an adventure; this is somebody telling you vaguely of their adventure outline. A dungeon site by Bear Wizard, no level listed (but dangerous below level 3) Written for “classic editions” (AD&D stats) Adventure Site Entry detected. The author might have mildly missed the page count (three pages for the elevenish rooms), but it’s definitely intended to be a little adventure-in-a-bottle bumped into in the course of wandering the badlands looking for treasure. Does your game’s cosmology include That Which Hungers Below, god of all ghouls? Well it better, sucker, because here’s his temple. A strange artifact here, this module. The “story” is just simply “there’s a ghoul god, this is his temple, go loot it”. A few pieces of genuinely charming art and the fact that the first content page is the bestiary makes me think that this is something artpunkish, with a genuine enthusiasm for creating bits and bobs and sharing them, the best part of the artpunk movement. Map is present but a little bland and only half the rooms are keyed (rest are random rolls) …but there’s still obviously some desire to make a thing actually played. The author missed the memo about needing pretentious unplayability, then, and included stats for his monsters. Its heart is in the right place. I’ll grant what I liked here is a little unmoored from the map, but there’s some creative bits. For example, the “final boss”, a ghoul priest, has a nifty new custom spell (and reskinned Vampiric Touch) and the charming weapon of a staff with a bell on it…every time he bonks someone with his staff, the ringing bell has a chance to summon reinforcements. Neat. Having a room of sarcophagi where the final sarcophagus opens up into a black void that leads to the Ghoul Roads is great. Art is cute (and multiple styles, so I suspect stolen). The odd choice to have a d20 table of encounters for the 6 unkeyed rooms is noted, but the encounters hit more often than they miss, being nice little scenarios. Treasures are rolled from a d12 table, very well and good, but… WHAT CAN BE IMPROVED IS TO GIVE US ACTUAL TREASURE VALUES. Don’t give the DM homework, give us something solid. Don’t worry, we feel very empowered to change things as needed. What could also be improved is the map (drink), a cleanly scanned but very linear affair. The only real meaningful exploratory bit is the one loop, where a secret door (no hint) bypasses a classic “hall of darkness filled with ghosts” main entrance. Despite all the creativity on display, there’s also a lack of specificity (drink) in terms of names and/or personalities. One of the main advantages of using ghouls over other types of undead is that they tend to be sentient, often enjoy talking with their food. Use that. Despite the author’s intent the best use case here is to mine it for ideas. Nothing here is earth-shaking and many variations of things like “a bag of gold teeth” have been written before, but why not give your bad guy a staff with a bell? Playing this as an adventure site is fine, maybe not best use but sure it’s a use case. Final Rating? */***** At least the author was trying but that doesn’t make it worthwhile for most users. You still have three more weeks to submit your adventure site, you still have time...it's only two pages, you can definitely do it. There are entrants making wilderness sites, there are entrants making city sites, there's even a clever entry that can be used as either an independent tomb location or as a smaller section in a bigger pyramid, great stuff. Even if you don't have a brilliant idea, why not take a premade map and just key the thing? You might be surprised about what emerges, this is the whole body of work of Vance Atkins. There's a style of play that suggests the best version of TTRPG play is just take a map and roll on tables for the inhabitants...this is the Heroes of Adventure model, basically. Well, there's something about that for stocking a dungeon, too, just grab your favorite tables and see what story emerges in the dungeon as you roll. The trouble is that these results need to be filtered to make sense, and also that rolling the encounters and pulling them together takes too long to do it at the table. So the value of the adventure sites is that we have something prebuilt for play. So if nothing has occurred to you so far, why not start with some inspiration? Look for a map. I'll explain using a great site-map that Dyson Logos just dropped, Gath-Am's Beacon. It's worth looking at the map with an eye toward adventure design and most importantly gameplay. Remember, pretty as it is, what we're looking for is interesting things to do when 3-7 violent treasure-hungry homeless people stumble upon it. First of all, it's got verticality; five levels up-and-down, with both outdoor ways up and indoor stairs. The assumed gameplay with an outdoor tower is usually "how do we get to the crunchy nougaty center where the treasure is?" Well, here there's the stairs, a rope ladder, and a secret back door. Every level there's also the option to free-climb of course, and if you're writing for higher levels you can assume flight options. I'd dismiss this spot as a good high-level site because flying does obviate a lot of the neat exploratory bits. So, good gameplay just in the "how do we get up", and varying the challenges based on the approach gives those all-too-essential choices to the PCs. Now unfortunately the size and the visually exposed nature of this map means that there's not a lot of finding the path. That's not fatal, but what it does mean is that if I were stocking this thing for an adventure (and I might if none of you do), I'd want to make it clear early on what the multiple paths' guardians or challenges are, at least telegraphing things with hints. An immobile but sentient door guardian is a good initial block, something formidable but that can be bypassed via talking/trickery or sneaking/walking around. After that, I'd almost use the classic 5-room-dungeon formula, just consciously trying to mix puzzles/fights/traps. The difference between a classic 5-roomer and this map's scenario is that the map geometry does allow the party to say "nah, let's try the ladder instead". Take something like this (or heck, this one, I'm not your dad) and roll up three encounters on the outdoor random encounter chart. Figure out why these three adversaries would be here working together...or even better, all here at cross-purposes. You might be surprised at the emerging story that is born even as you just noodle on why the orcs have a bear and are sharing the space with a gryphon. Don't feel like you have come up with something out of nothing...find a map, find a picture, heck, go outdoors to the nearest woodland and find a place with interesting rocks. It's fun to fill in things with your imagination from there. A dungeon adventure by Emiel Boven, “low-level”.
Written for DURF. Holidays are over, it’s back to the grindstone, so how better to convey the feeling of eating slightly stale candy canes than to look at this red/white two-pager, tastefully accented by yellow text giving the whole affair a mildly stained look. Dungeon of the Rusting Throne is another example of the inexplicable itch.io impulse to gussy up Dyson maps by color-reversing them, which destroys the one advantage that using a Dyson actually conveys, namely that his maps are extremely easy to read. The adventure itself is a very standard dungeon crawl, written for a heartbreaker system (DURF) that I gather exists somewhere on the light-rules spectrum, just title/map front page and (landscape-formatted) key and random encounter d3 “table”. Fair enough. Nobody is going to be shocked by the story of this place. It’s a tomb, watched over by a slightly insane Caretaker, who wants to kill an interloping giant spider. The eponymous rusting throne is a magical cursed chair over a rusting bridge that hates all gear (damaging all non-precious metals with a worn status). There are the expected skeletons, golem, spider, and wandering cave slugs to hack at along with animated tapestries and a clear ooze to also hack at. Some “mess with stuff” does exist but outside of the Caretaker nobody’s talking. Now what I liked were some of the non-hacky details scattered here and there. The treasure is interesting, urns and prayer tablets and goblets and offering-gems and a giant pearl, generally requiring some gameplay to acquire (e.g., the tablets are stuck in skeletons that animate when looted, urns have a chance to break in combat, etc). Magic sword is +1 and “can cut through wood like butter”, magic boots walk on water, nice. While not exactly loaded with exploratory content, the stream running through the map gives some nice alternate routing. Recognizable D&D can be played here. I’ve got to say it, the first of what can be improved is give us a black-and-white map. Goodness, this shouldn’t be hard, it's about readability. If you’re bound and determined to continue with the two-pager format, that’s fine, but the smaller font on one key shows me that you can expand more with those little details, having a few traps and a little more meta-puzzling, like with the half-rusted bridge and the portcullis on the river between 7 and 9, would go a long way. The general critique is that this is just a “hack monster to death” adventure, when it really didn’t have to be…make that giant spider sentient and talk as well, then you have a rivalry between two factions, each with resources to help with, each with goals, as there’s a whole new dimension of play available. Another sentence of thinking on the eponymous rusting throne wouldn’t go amiss, either. As is, best use case for this is probably as a tomb or crypt, albeit a hacky and simple one. Not a lot of individual bits here to steal are particularly innovative, alas. Final Rating? */***** because it hurt my eyes and didn’t make it up with anything better than random table generated encounters. I’ve been having the fascinating experience lately of watching a mild edition war where I have precisely no dog in the fight. The gist of it, perhaps reduced overmuch, is that there is a growing reaction within the amorphous tribal slurry broadly designated “the OSR” against a long-running trend towards Basic rulesets, exemplified in the well-presented Old-School Essentials and the Kickstarter record-breaking Shadowdark. The reaction’s arguments, well-articulated by B/X Blackrazor here, are that B/X-chassis games don’t have the legs to sustain true long-term campaign play, AKA, “Classic Adventure Gaming” like the original campaigns run out of Lake Geneva at the hobby’s outset. The arguments presented advocating for AD&D are excellent, and doubtlessly correct. They also leave me unmoved, even though I find myself broadly in the CAG camp, because…I’ve already been running a Classic Adventure Campaign for years now in my own system*.
*Also I’ve recently wrapped up a longish high-level playtest in ACKS for the Cairn of Night’s final levels. ACKS is kind of a weird “its own thing”, built on Rules Cyclopedia originally but grown into unique form with regards to domain play and mass combat. More B/X lineage than not, but I think it’s been allowed as Now For Something Completely Different in the ongoing grand campaign discussion. Now Pathfinding Light’s suitability for a long-term sweeping campaign (West Marches + Kilodungeon, in this case) is in many ways kind of a cheat…I took the old-school spine of the single crunchiest D&D edition ever designed and ripped it out, plus added 1gp=1XP. Even so, there’s a still a vast corpus of crunch available for any expansion or modifications available to me, spineless and twitching, and I can harvest chunks as desired. Now obviously a superheroes game like Pathfinder would be weird for a long-term sprawling campaign (unless modified with E6, respect), but the thing I like the most about Pathfinding Light is that I can hand the ‘zine-sized 20-page booklet to new players and I have a reasonable expectation that if they’re interested, they’re going to read the whole thing and definitely be able to grok it. What’s the most suitable system to a long campaign? The one where everyone plays by the rules. There’s some important lessons I’ve learned running a big sprawling West March, but while I’m about to be doctrinaire about some things, system ain’t one of them. What is actually the most important for a long campaign: *Strict Time Scheduling Is Absolutely Required. Yeah, you heard me, SCHEDULING. If you want a long-term campaign, you need to make it YOUR HOBBY. Not a secondary to video games, not something you do in between band gigs…if someone asks you what you do for fun, you say “TTRPGs”. That’s not saying it must take a ton of time…I love writing up for publication, but it’s only 3-4 sessions a month, call it 12-15 hours of table time plus a couple hours prep. Just slap a hexmap down and roll encounters, that barely matters. But the campaign has to be a priority. That’s essential. *The Table Must Be Open, and Physical. Now this is going to create controversy, but I think if you’re not looking at everyone else’s face in a real physical space, then at best you’re indulging in some form of simulacra of the actual classic campaign experience. Engagement levels, commitment levels, the whole experience of play…it’s amusing to see people arguing about what edition of the game leads to a more authentic play experience, and then neglect the essential element of physical environment (I don’t DM behind a filing cabinet, though). At a house, at a bar, in the work cafeteria…a campaign works best when all the players and the game master break bread together and share drink. Anyone complaining about the flakey experience of online open tables, well of course, this stuff is primal. Eat and drink at your table. If you’re hosting, provide beer, soda, and/or coffee along with at least a few bags of chips. Feel free to doubt me but I’m right, this is something fundamental to the human experience. As a note, I have played online quite a bit as well, in a weekly game right now, and I quite enjoy it…I’m no luddite. I don’t think the shift in style from 2E to 3E was entirely due to game systems, however. A focused Adventure Path with a committed online group can be a blast, but I don’t pretend it’s the same kind of experience as what the OSR has been chasing in an ephemeral haze of nostalgia. THAC0 isn’t the solution to this phenomenon. Second note, what I’m not saying in “open” is that there should be no gatekeeping. If you’re hosting at a home, PLEASE be picky about who you invite. Those human mores and primal social contracts? There’s also a reason we have legends about not inviting in vampires. Even in a public venue like a bar or a game store, guest-host dynamics still apply to the DM and players, so care is warranted. Despite saying that, the very act of playing in a physical space at all will helpfully weed the very worst troglodytes out. *Always Be Inviting. After responding with “TTRPGs”, if I get a response even vaguely interested and I know the individual well enough/he’s vouched-for enough to allow within my home, my follow-up is “…and so we play this campaign, have you ever heard of the West Marches?” I talk up the lack of commitment, because most adults know they can’t commit to something regular (the schedule priority is you oh game-runner, not on them). When someone new comes along, I work to introduce them to the group, I strive to facilitate pregame conversations and jokes…the game itself is pretty easy. This is a social activity, and if you’re running a campaign, you’ve taken on the sacred role of “host”. This isn’t me suggesting some lame tips like “yes, and” or “no, but” during the act of play, I embrace the flat “no” in response to the in-game question of “can I do X?” But you have to say it with a smile, you have to encourage camaraderie, you want those players united. They’ve made the trip to a physical space for this and they’re sitting with fellow human beings, trust me, you can be as strict as you want with the game rules, there’s no log-out button. But you do need to make darn sure you say yes to the first player who tries to found his own village. There are no hobbyist experiences I know of that remotely match the enjoyment of a long-term sprawling free-form D&D campaign. There are TTRPG systems that work better for those campaigns, and others that struggle, requiring more work. Storygames don’t hold the faintest candle to the stories that emerge from a terrible random encounter roll that nukes one poor PC before he’s even aware he’s in danger. All of those system considerations pale next to the human stuff, though…after all, that’s what will really be producing the best memories. Now stop reading blog posts and schedule your next game session. A sneaky adventure by Operant Game Lab, lowish levels.
Written for “most fantasy adventure TTRPGs”. Happy New Year everyone, should I be nervous? Another holiday adventure, this time a one-pager, statless, systemless…It’s Simple, We Kill the Sandy Claws is an infiltration/social adventure the keys the twelve rooms of a manor where a psychopathic magical tween ruler is hosting a party and intends to capture and kill Santa Claus because of coal in the previous year’s stocking. It’s short, punchy, to the point, and assumes that adventurers are there to actually play the game, so it’s a million times better than the last one. This makes it maybe slightly okay. Plot is charmingly conveyed, tiny hamlet is being ruled by one Greta Fernsby, who can transmute people into objects at will. She hosts a “mandatory Christmas Eve party”, which is a great phrase that tells us everything we need to know about her character in four words. The manor, nicely shown in this solid 3D map, has secret areas and a wandering monster (Greta being the monster) table that enables the party-going PCs to “party crawl” through the area, discovering interesting things and ideally discovering a method of thwarting the capture, caging, and death by exposure of Santa Claus. Or, hijinks that ensue for looting the single big piece of loot in the manor, a huge and unwieldy golden statue. Open-ended, interesting, and very active location. What I liked in this little OPD was the language first and foremost…every character mentioned has a single adjective organically sprinkled into the description the perfectly tells the DM how to run the interaction. Every word is chosen carefully, and the details are great…every item has a 1-in-6 chance to be a transmuted victim, faintly psychically screaming. Despite the small size, the scenario has a lot of possible directions and playstyles supported, and the map has multiple methods of ingress and egress, plus the all-important loops, despite it being portrayed in more of a diagram style than at literal floorplan. Surprisingly one thing that I won’t list under what can be improved is the adventure’s scale. For a one-shot, the OPD size is precisely correct in this case. It’s a simple, goofy scenario, let it ride. What could be improved would be slightly better railroad tracks, some offered idea(s) on how to resolve the intractable problem of an all-powerful nightmare brat attempting to murder Santa Claus…this can be ignored of course, but in a one-shot some objectives aren’t unwise. Santa Claus is also a little under-characterized, ironically. This might also shock some of you, but honestly this could be also improved by making this a more storygame system, rather than “general OSR”. In case it isn’t clear, the best use case for It’s Simple, We Kill the Sandy Claws is as a Christmas-themed one-shot. It’s madcap and strange, so not much to mine from it and of course you don’t stick it into your sprawling campaign. It knows what it is. Final Rating? **/***** because it’s limited, but it’s as good as a wacky holiday one-shot can be. |
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