Written by Peter McDevitt. B/X, For “cautious low-levels” Huge mound in a forest. A notable sage or occultist has uncovered an ancient map showing the location of an ancient temple. Go forth and bring back any interesting scrolls or ritual objects! OR It’s in the hex the PCs just entered. Who can’t resist opening a door in the earth with a dead bird nailed to the front? You’re darned right, module. Screw hooks, there’s a burial mound with a crucified raven in front of the PCs, if the players don’t immediately move to explore that I think the dungeon master is required by law to rip up their character sheets and flip the table. Ideally follow that up with noogies all around. Once the players heed the call to adventure and enter the mythic underworld they’re immediately confronted with a vast echoing chamber, its only feature a looming dark monolith with gleaming amber eyes surrounded by bones. It’s a demon of corruption and disease, of course. What follows, involving gnolls and giant spiders and a few missed opportunities, perhaps won’t fulfill the great promise of that beginning, but holy cow is that an intro. The module is neither mussed nor fussed about format; single-column, Times New Roman, above intro, brief blurb on the setting, then into the keys. Monsters are statted (and hp rolled) when first encountered in the key sequence. It’s a pretty simple area, but the author does a great job sprinkling in little details in the descriptions. The guy alive in the spider’s cave? He’s wily but treacherous. First of all, good show having a prisoner to rescue, but secondly great description, I can run that interaction in my sleep (and he also offers the location of his hideout, hooray hooks). Everything has that little extra umph, like the careful order of battle for the gnolls’ ambush. Not a ton going on but I can clearly run everything that’s on the map from memory now. The map itself is…somewhat anatomical. The mound is largely vertical, which is not exactly the same thing as being 3D, the central shaft of the spiders provides some back-and-forth but the rest of it is pretty simple, just walk downwards bonking gnolls. That still massively improves things from a horizontal dungeon, dangling up and down shafts is objectively exciting. At the beginning there’s going to be a frantic, interesting encounter that points for sure to one of the ways downward, and probably to both paths, the dungeon will flow in a fairly simple circle after that most likely. Very nice initial encounter, at least as outlined…the gnolls wait until that cool spooky monolith has drawn the players forward, then boil out of trapdoors in attack, trying to push the invaders back to the pit trap that leads to the spider-hole below. There’s a morale point for the gnolls breaking and retreating, there’s a reaction of the spider if someone falls into her webs, all very nice. Giant black widows are a very nasty threat so it’s nice she gets thrown as the fail state. And hey, there’s a bone-pile beneath ragged cobwebs, you can’t say that’s not been telegraphed. It’s a small site, but with a spider-victim to rescue, pit traps, trapped chests, layered fights…a lot of good content here. The only thing that’s a little sad are a few missed opportunities. Cutting out of the webs? You fall into the spikes further down the shaft. I’d personally run it with sharp shards of bone down below, and coins among those remains, but sadly, it’s just spikes. The place could use a few more opportunities for loot like that. What’s there is good, hidden or trapped, respectively, plus the monolith’s gleaming eyes being valuable chunks of amber with scorpions trapped inside…now that’s a nice treasure. A lack of magic on the loot ledger is defensible for the low level aimed at, I’d just have a couple other spots for cash money. What I do like is that some of the loot, the aforementioned ritual tablets, are not only fragile and valuable to an occultist, but they also “hint to a second unholy fane deeper in the wilderness”. Now that is a valuable find, like a treasure map with a price tag. Heck yeah. Why on Oerth is this site not already in your game world? It’s a secret ancient shrine in the middle of a forest, of course you can place this somewhere. And you really, really should.
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Written by Giant Goose. AD&D, Mid-high level? Forested hill hex. The Fenevian Forest, of which this is but a small cut of, was once the seat of an Elven empire. The elves turned inwards, focused on fell magics, and were cut down by ascendant men four centuries past. Some claim the Elven cities were built atop older, stranger races. Their baleful influence and that of vengeful Elven magi has left these woods chaos-weft. What is better than an adventure site to place in a hex? How about a whole hex to place in your hexcrawl. That’s the theory put forth by Giant Goose with the Glen of Shrikes, which details not just one adventure site but instead breaks out seven sites within a 6-mile hex, with a lot of backstory suggested by the keys and setup…there are fallen evil elven psionic sages, seductive werewolves, magic-item-using deer men, psionic lolwut-meme pears, a vast ancient obelisk surrounded by evil moth-sized corvids entombing precursor giants who necrophagically grant psi powers, and of course giant shrikes. It’s…a lot, needless to say, genuinely impressive to have it all fit within two pages. Makes for a hard evaluation, though. Despite the density, the adventure looks neither scrunched nor splinched, its clean two-column text organized into the reasonable sequence of overview-> random encounters-> faction motivations-> visibility-> hex key-> obelisk key-> bestiary. I’m fond of the bold monsters and italic treasures style found within the keys, makes things extremely clear. Prose is about as economical as possible, but it doesn’t flatly avoid adjectives and sensory language, there’s some decent depth here. It’s a surprisingly textured reading experience. …which unfortunately is not a compliment that can be given to the maps. You knew there had to be a catch somewhere, right? The big hex is subdivided into smaller 1-mile hexes where the seven main features are called out (plus, amusingly, a star that says “place monster lair here”). Geography within the hilly hex is not particularly complex, annoyingly the feature most likely to be missed by parties is probably the titular glen of that giant shrike. The two hex features that get sub-maps are the aforementioned obelisk and a ruined thorp, but the maps are so simple as to be unneeded; I believe I can picture three linear levels in an obelisk or four houses next to each other without the map. That’s not a problem for a hex exploration, just noting that they don’t add much. That hex exploration though? Potentially a great time. Although also a highly, highly weird time…I don’t know how to best convey the encounters without just quoting every one, but I think the druid guy is probably a good example. Near the northeastern edge of the hex there’s a sod house with a thirty-foot pear tree next to it; 50% of the time the hermit here (who’s a druid 7/sage multiclass) is wildshaped into a porcupine up in the pear tree. Giant psionic pears with laughing mouths orbit said trees, very cheerful, dangerous to attack but not hostile. The filthy druid guy wants to kill the hex’s elf population and to end the chaos taint to the area (kill a precursor giant in the bottom of the obelisk). He’s also decently loaded with magic items and is a complete coward. What do you do with that? Well, it’s organic, none of that is explicitly a quest, but there’s definitely stuff to reward players with if they feel like it, or on the other hand if they want to have a toked-up weirdo acid trip of a fight they can just kill the guy and take his stuff (and the teeth of the pears, it’s a long story). Hope you don’t mind quickly figuring out the prepared spells of a level 7 druid, because those aren’t in the text. Everything is like this, very interesting, ripe with gameplay potential, but very slightly underbaked. Rewards are all over the place but tend to be nicely commensurate with risks; treasures run the gamut from coins in a purse for a skewered shrike victim, to magical weapons from werewolf victims inside of a tainted fountain, to the combat gear of enemies in straight-up brawls. Nontraditional rewards are excellent, from purified water out of the fountain granting +1 hp and WIS to the preserved bodies of the precursor beings able to be eaten for massive psionic power and sudden alignment shift. A king’s ransom in magical booty is available in this hex, with just a few murders in the way of it all being the players’ very own. This is not going to be easy to place in a map willy-nilly. Sure, forested hill hexes are a dime a dozen but there’s a very specific geography to match. More than that, there’s a crapton of settings assumptions being made by module that might make it hard to fit…elves being chaotic and a little evil actually fits a lot, and many settings have precursor races, but psi-pears? Dire shrikes? Calygraunts? (Stags with man-hands that can activate magic stuff remotely) It’s a lot of baggage to bring to the table, requiring either seeding or adaption. What’s here is good enough to be worth the effort, I deem, but it’s definitely going to be an effort. Other reviews: EOTB Owen E An entire dang sandbox campaign by Nameless Designer, levels 1-10 Written for Heroes of Adventure SKENRITH KEEP STANDS AS A SOLITARY BULWARK OF CIVILISATION AGAINST THE VAST AND UNTAMED WILDERNESS THAT SURROUNDS IT. THE SOLDIERS AND RANGERS STATIONED THERE ARE TIRELESS AND VIGILANT IN THEIR EFFORTS TO SAFEGUARD THE KEEP AND THE LANDS FROM THE MYRIAD OF THREATS THAT LURK BEYOND ITS WALLS. AS A HEROIC ADVENTURER SEEKING TO MAKE YOUR MARK IN THE REGION, YOU WILL UNDOUBTEDLY FACE A RANGE OF CHALLENGES AND DANGERS IN THIS VOLATILE AND UNPREDICTABLE LANDSCAPE. I don’t know how to even begin this review; the scope and scale of Crapshoot Monday is all about dinky little artsy adventure modules, put out for free by a random assortment hoping to get the occasional PWYW dollar and high fives from the close little itch.io community. This…this is something different. Fortress on the Wild Frontier bucks the clear B2 reference to present not just a keep on the borderlands, but an entire sandbox designed for campaign(s) of either aimless exploration or involved plots. This thing is sixty-four pages but it is DENSE, holding not just a hexmap with procedural content generation but also multiple factions and sites; something like ten dungeons, multiple villages and adventure sites, and a whole portal to the Shadowlands, another plane of existence between life and death. It assumes you’ll want to adventure in all of these but doesn’t presume anything about the PC actions aside. It’s a Nameless Designer product, so it’s colorful with AI art and nice layouts, everything is clean and clear. Dagum. I guess to describe the plot I’d really look at the “adventure seeds”, which were diffidently offered as optional but you and I both know the way to make this campaign really pop is to have all four seeds active at once. Each one these is neatly set up in a half page that details the antagonist(s) goals, the heroes’ objective, and possible ally and enemy factions, then it lists five milestones, and then neatly summarizes the outcome(s) if the antagonist(s) succeeds. The four ongoing plots are that a marauding tribe of beastmen (orcs) are invading the region, deathly shadowriders from the Shadowlands are emerging from a portal trying to link the two planes, a secretive cult is trying to resurrect a plague god, and finally the guy in charge of the keep wants to mount and expedition to the nearby barrier peaks. Turn on every one of these (they have similar time-scales), add PCs, and you’re cooking with gas. Beyond the presentation and ambition what I liked were most of the adventure sites. Megadungeons they ain’t, but nor are we talking about five-room-dungeons here either. The main hexcrawl’s random encounter table has a clever idea, where every encounter has description->discoverable->secret, fleshing out something that can be just a fight into something that’s a memorable encounter or even a significant quest. The system, lacking as it does simple +1 bonuses, has here encountered varied and interesting magic items ever time they get discovered. NPC personalities are brief but well-sketched, with basically every named NPC (and there are dozens) having enough to run for multiple sessions with motives and moods made very clear. Sites are interlinked, so even a “let’s just go thataway” hexcrawl will rapidly generate objectives and PC-motivated quests. Or also not…the choice is theirs. I know I touched on it above, but I also loved the Shadowlands…it’s not just a hand-wavey “death zone” but an extraplanar location that has multiple points of interest and its own planar rules. There’s a ton to like here. What can be improved is, of course, a lot with this much content. All the interesting things happening are at times a bit difficult to picture; a page-sized timeline of expected events would be helpful in coordinating…obviously the players’ actions will change it but knowing what was baked in at the beginning helps to judge their actions’ impact. A relationship map of factions/prominent NPCs would also be a notable improvement, not just for the reader’s understanding but also so that the author himself thinks about how everyone interacts; this is the homeland of the wildfolk (elves), surely they have opinions about the Shadowlands portal, right? Given the clear aim to keep the module to 64 pages, the page space for these improvements could probably be taken from some of the villages and little outposts that adhere to a strict number/key format unnecessarily. With this many dungeons obviously map quality is going to vary somewhat but a general pass looking for a little more connectivity and verticality wouldn’t go amiss in most cases. As an aside, this is where some reviewers might complain about the vanilla nature of the content overall. It’s a keep on the borderlands with an orc invasion and a dark cult and an expedition to some barrier peaks and a portal to the deathlands, we’ve heard all these adventure seeds before. Sometimes, though, the palate calls for vanilla, it’s a wonderful flavor. This is high-grade genuine pure vanilla extract, not the crappy beaver butt-squeezings that we’ve become accustomed to as “vanilla”. It is what it is, and I think reviewers look too hard for novelty where the real spark in a TTRPG comes from the freeform emergent gameplay at the table…and this module gives all the ingredients for an epic and memorable campaign. The best use case for Fortress on the Wild Frontier is to play it as a great sandbox campaign. While it’s written for the niche Heroes of Adventure system, converting this to either modern-style D&D (5E), tradgames (3.P), or old-school systems shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s so much content that the “mine for bits” use case is well-stocked too, there are well-made adventure sites, neat magic items, and fun monsters (with wonky AI-art) to salt into our own games. This would be worth paying money for, but it's Don’t Pay I Don’t Want (Your Money). Astonishing value. Final rating? *****/***** I waffled back and forth between four and five stars on this one, feeling a little bit of ennui on the more generic elements here. In the end, though, that’s a symptom of Pompous Reviewer Syndrome, or maybe Module Reader but Not Player Syndrome…screw that, this is released to be played and I think in play it’s a top-flight adventure module even in normal competition, let alone in the dire dreck mines of itch.io. Written by Vance Atkins. B/X, Low-level parties Cave shrine in the foothills. As your party rides into town, Père Nicolas runs up to you from where he has been waiting at the temple door. “Friends! Brother Eustice went to investigate an old shrine in the hills, and hasn't returned!” You are acquainted with Eustice, a somewhat innocent but well-meaning young acolyte, just arrived to your border town from seminary in the city. Nicolas reports that Eustice hired a few idle caravan guards as companions, and set off to explore a cave where a shrine to an out-of-favor god was said to reside. That was yesterday, and there has been no word from the party, who intended to be gone only a few hours. Hey, it’s a Vance Atkins joint…we’ve seen him here on the blog before. At his blog he regularly reports his game sessions, where he plays a classic “wander around and bump into adventures” campaign with pick-up groups at his local bar. This is exactly the kind of game I advocate, a game that uses these kinds of adventure sites weekly, so it’s great to see him bringing in his own contribution. In What Happened to Brother Eustice? We have an old classic, the rumored ancient shrine in the nearby hills…this one having apparently eaten a local curious acolyte, the titular Eustice. Order loaded nachos and have Mike pick up the first pitcher for the table, we’re playing D&D tonight. Module looks nice. My second review of the author and I’m already familiar with his house style…we have clean, large-font presentation, with single column introduction, switching to double-column key, then ending with a bestiary complete with a nice little illustration. There’s nothing flashy about the writing but everything is described well, adjectives including not just sights but sounds and smells. It’s not something that bothers me, but I will note it’s written in second person…I know that provokes a violent allergic reaction to some. What I do mildly dislike is that the opening givens the background and assumes the hook has been taken, rather than rumors and hooks as is traditional. The map being inline with the key really is a nice formatting choice, it’s preferred if at all possible. The map itself is a simple Dyson Logos affair, as with every other time a Dyson map is used it neither adds nor detracts…it’s just okay. Linear-with-branches, so not ideal in terms of exploration, but that’s more understandable given the small scope (nine rooms). Water feature on the bottom is nice, a little bit of a linkage would theoretically be possible but alas, it’s not there. There’s a fun night of D&D to be had here with the cave exploration. The random encounter table is for the trip to the site, very standard, but I guess that also gives potential hazards if the party withdraws to camp out. My own personal bugaboo raises its ugly head in the monsters encountered within the cave, with 1d2 being present…no, you tell me, is it one or is it two? The crab spiders aren’t a big deal but the other monster is a custom from Trilemma Adventures Compendium Bestiary, the 6 HD “Chitin Drake”…a very neat creature, basically an oil-spitting flying centipede, but the difference between 1 and 2 of them drastically changes the entire site’s threat level. The other challenges are bog standard but it’s a nice bog, hidden stuff, trapped stuff, and poor Brother Eustice to talk to/accidentally murder. I could wish for a little more interaction with some of the set dressing, like polished basalt statues that should set most experienced PCs hair on-edge. Nope, they’re just atmospheric. Those statues and the missed opportunity that they represent are also a good segue to talk about the treasure. Huge statues are wonderful loot, particularly for low-level parties…there’s nothing like having extremely valuable loot that weighs a literal ton and throwing that in front of lowbies. No GP given for those two big statues, alas. Only 700gp in toto is available along with a potion of healing, a low-but-defensible total for a level 1 side cave, but if you rolled a 2 on that chitin drake number you’re going to be sorry. What I do like is how the treasure is all concealed, nothing is available without searching and that is how it should be. The adventure site is a lost shrine in a cave, so of course it’s workable in any campaign anywhere. I would make some changes personally to the treasures a bit, but that’s not really a stop. Some might object to the chitin drake being custom but it’s a cool creature and less absurd than an owlbear, so I like it. In the end, I guess the answer to What Happened to Brother Eustice is…my players. My players are going to happen to him. Written by Scott Marcley. AD&D/OSRIC, Levels 3-5 Ettercap lair in a forest. Three oak trees stand at the forest’s verge, overlooking a fork in the narrow footpath. Their leafy boughs are thick with webs, which take the form of a delicate, three-story cottage interwoven among the branches. The cottage features shingled roofs, shuttered windows, flowerboxes, cornices, etc. made entirely of silvery webs. An area at the base of the trees is shrouded in heavy webs, except for a cave-like opening between two trunks. An old hag sits in an open window of the second floor. Only her wrinkled ugly face and long silken silver hair are visible. She beckons travelers to come closer, for her eyes are not what they once were. Aw yeah, take me down to fairy-tale country. Look at that intro. Just lookit. Enchanted old-growth forests, lofty cottages made of non-OSHA-compliant material, and deeply untrustworthy senior citizens…it’s the trifecta. Of course precisely no-one is going to be falling for initial ruse, but a summoned mass of big spiders forces the issue immediately and if (when) the PCs defeat the initial ambush she withdraws behind her curtains shrieking to “go away and leave me be!” Just as exactly nobody is going to be tricked by the beckoning, there are no D&D groups anywhere ever who will not immediately decide to mess with the cottage when told to go away like that. The adventure is written after that banger of an introduction in a much more traditional manner, going from the initial setup to some notes about the location’s web architecture (it’s fireproof because OF COURSE that’s the first thing players will try) to a room-by-room key of the airy four-level “cottage”. Creative flourishes don’t get the in ways of describing a very functional little mini-dungeoncrawl, filled with manful efforts to vary up encounters with “hostile spiders” and “more hostile spiders”. The author pulls a Grützi and shuffles the random encounter table (contents: more spiders) onto the map page, earning one official frowny face of mild disapproval. The map itself is…complicated to evaluate. Looks great, combining the art with a solid legend to make navigating this very 3D environment a breeze. Unfortunately, this very pretty storybook affair is also rather linear in the main, with only one way up on the inside. The scenario of standing off and lobbing arrows at the cottage is considered and shut down, and fair (atter)cop, but I’d have liked to see a bit more addressing the likely scenario of the PCs just trying to climb the outside and slashing their way in…anywhere. Outdoor/open air dungeons always have this tricky element to them, but the map isn’t helping. Very well marked though. Wandering monsters added to the map page, mild ding there. The image of carefully picking our way through a cottage made of thick webs is a very good one, creepy and difficult. Adjoining rooms aren’t visible really, but shadowy creepy spider outlines can be made out to traumatize the section of players for whom Krull was a formative experience. Hacking at the walls is viable but takes time, made worse by tiny Earth-sized spiders repairing the things at the rate of 1hp per round. Meanwhile, defending spiders creepily emerge from walls without damaging them, only costing half their movement speed. Thank goodness there’s no order of battle or the PCs would probably be toast…the final fight is geared to be a very rough pitched battle, multi-story, against Ms. Capp and her minions. Wonderful bossfight to get to the treasures in her bedchamber at the end. Beyond the boss loot hoard at the very end, treasure is on the sparse side. Of course there’s a corpse in a cocoon with loot on his belt pouch, we’re not going to be barbaric and neglect that trope, but beyond that there’s just a tea set in the team room and scroll in the library…except, thank goodness, there are also spider-silk curtains in front of every window and between some of the interior rooms. That’s the good stuff right there, not only worth 50gp per yard but also usable to make non-magical robes or padded armor with extra AC, very nice. Etta Capp’s personal gear and bedchamber fortune are a respectable haul, over 6k in shinies plus good magic items. A custom magic item, Etta’s Fairy Darts, are nice…single-use +1 darts that cast Sleep upon a hit, so a bonus point there. I don’t see many regions where Etta Cap’s Cottage couldn’t be placed. Big ole’ oaks in a spider-infest forest hex, gee, I wonder…frankly, the only objection I could see if less one of location and more one of tone, but if your D&D game doesn’t have room in it for an evil spider-cottage in the spooky woods, that frankly seems more like a you problem. Written by Jonathan Becker. AD&D, Levels 3-5 Hidden tomb at an oasis. Some 50 yards from the waterline, partially obscured by vegetation, stands a time-worn statue of what appears to be a prancing centaur (closer inspection reveals it to have been a horsed rider, but the horse’s head has been lost, and erosion has removed most of the rider’s legs). The stone statue is about 3’ tall and stands upon a stone pedestal; it holds a curious black iron spear (easily removed) pointing away from the water towards the featureless desert. Anyone following the direction the rider points will find themselves dropping through a large sinkhole some 60 yards away from the tree line of the oasis, landing them in area #1... We’re back to the deserts, children, this time with a site from Jonathan Becker of the great B/X Blackrazor blog. In a remote oasis plagued by aggressive centaurs, we have another “point to where the tomb is” introduction, in this case a stone statue with a black iron spear as noted above. The touch that it’s an old horse-and-rider statue that’s weathered down to be centaur-looking, thus the reason for the centaurs holding the area to be sacred, is nice. In any case, following the spear gets the party dumped into a sinkhole holding the titular Lost Vault, now let’s go loot it silly. The adventure is formatted in the by-now standard two-column, not wasting much time with backstory, rumors, or hooks beyond the oasis context. Muscular and direct prose, technically in bullet points but really just paragraphs…there’s an occasional wry interjection here and there but the writing is here to convey the site with precision, and that’s what it does. The site’s actual content is nicely imagined, so ignoring the sizzle we have quite a nice steak. The map, produced by one Sophia Becker (one suspects nepotism in the hiring of this cartographer), is fine for the scale of the site, hand drawn but very clean and clear, good line work. The place is almost completely linear, which is logical for the vault setup, except the great weight of time has begun to wear down the walls in some places, meaning a patient group could actually dig their way in to the main vault goodies, bypassing some of the defenses. …and those defenses are pretty gnarly. The initial tumble into the sinkhole dumps the PCs into the pincers of a quartet of large scorpions, with excessive noise and light summoning blood hawks from their roost high in the walls of the entrance cavern to swoop in and try to eat the PCs and the bugs. After that frantic encounter there’s a nice bit where you need the black iron spear from earlier to open the vault’s huge doors, introducing the idea of keys, and tricks to open the doors to the next portion of the vault. There’s next a flame puzzle, then a trick with polymorphed huecuva, then an antimagic room and a library where the loot starts to trickle in. No !egyptian tomb would be complete without a secret door of course, leading to a throne room with the titular Kadish, who bears the bulk of the loot to be found in the area. No mummy fight, actually, but the “final boss” of the place will most likely be the dune stalker that gets summoned when the party attempts to remove the two most prominent bits of loot from the vault. Said loot (a turban-gem and a nice ring) is accompanied by some very sweet consumables, like a wand of lightning and potion of longevity. The library has some useful magic scrolls, which is logical, and then there’s the much-appreciated inclusion of valuable ancient books that require gentle handling to retrieve. A side-room gives the opportunity to free an efreeti from his bottle but unless groveled to the efreeti will just attack, freeing him does grant XP as if the treasure was “retained”. At an average of about 7,090 gp, it’s a worthwhile day at the office for level 4’s, particularly with all the magic consumables also available. Any desert “pyramids and tombs and mummies” location can easily have the Lost Vault of Kadish placed. A little work with either hooks and/or rumors would have been appreciated, but as a classical desert adventure site the place has a lot to recommend. Written by Grützi. AD&D, Levels 2-4 One (1) hobbity tavern, lightly orc-infested. Fifty years ago the renowned halfling adventurer Trim Lipply decided to settle down and open a tavern. Build into a small hill near a busy trade route the tavern soon became a mainstay of the local merchant scene. All was well for another two decades, until a fire claimed the building. While his wife and children managed to escape, Trim and much of his treasure was lost in the flames. Long has the tavern sat abandoned in the wilderness, but a few months back a group of orc marauders made the old Inn their lair. Trim’s eldest son Gav meanwhile gathered some trusted friends and ventured forth to reclaim his legacy. Mines of Moria are a dime a dozen. Every tasteful campaign has a Lonely Mountain, ideally with a Mirkwood in the way. Any wizard’s tower is grasping toward Orthanc, while a city under siege must recall Minas Tirith. But what if the dungeon we must delve is…Bag End? It’s a question I’d never thought to ask, but since Grützi submitted Lipply’s Tavern I’m now wondering why ever not. Hobbit-hole crawls are a tragically underutilized niche, but here’s to changing that. The setup is great, old burnt halfling inn filled with treasure and a marauding band of orcs, plus a section filled with giant spiders. The late halfing proprietor’s son is set up outside with halfling buddies, working up the courage to go a’delvin, while a final plot point of a trapped devil, an ancient bargain and curse, and the ghost of the proprietor provides a final twist. The adventure is generally well-written, focusing on usability first but filled with evocative little touches, like the charred entrance still having a chalkboard out front proclaiming “We are open!”. There are a lot of nice bits of writing like that all over the text. The format is a standard two-column, no distasteful bullets present but with plenty of bolding for a highlight. While there’s no random encounter table in the main text of the adventure, but there is a keyword “Ruckus”, highlighting where making a loud noise draws the nearby rooms’ inhabitants in 1d3 rounds. Monsters and treasures aren’t bolded, underlined, or in italics, which is a defensible decision but does slow the speed of parsing somewhat. The organization of history-> current setup-> bestiary-> key is pretty standard, with the notable omission of explicit rumor/hooks table, and the aforementioned lack of random encounter table…because that’s over in the map. All of this is to say that the adventure site might be slightly overstuffed, just a little bit ambitious for the page count. Content is great, but that scope creep is why it had to slop over to the map page. The map itself is great. Color-coded by zone, well-marked for doors, chimneys, windows, and up/down points, it’s information-dense without making it hard to understand the content and flow. And that flow is great, there are a dozen ways into the top level of the inn with varying levels of risk and detection, plus three methods up/down into the cellar. A big chunk of the upper map is webbed, cleanly shown, which means with my players a big chunk of the upper map is a flaming mass of webs and screaming spiders after about ten minutes of interaction, an eventuality (inevitability) which is in fact acknowledged. There are going to be issues running the map with a mapper, the arcing/curved hallways imply that Mr. DM will be drawing the lines. If that’s the worst that can be said for your map, that’s pretty good. Just a mild frowny-face penalty on the extra written content being shuffled to the map page. I can clearly see how this thing runs, and it’s a blast (literally in the web area, of course). The spiders are at détente with the orcs, allowing anyone wearing a red armband into their area, which is a nice reward for diplomacy (interrogation) with the orcs. The halfling’s kid and his band of four halflings (making up a single doubling) are a fun complicating factor, the kid doesn’t want to cut in a group of murderhobos but he’ll be willing to play ball with proper diplomatic finesse. His pops secretly made a deal with a devil who he later trapped in the cellar, unfortunately of course a trapped devil led to madness and the original burning…which the kid knows nothing about. If you get to talk with pop’s ghost then all this comes out, otherwise it’ll be a straightforward crawl, albeit one with lots of clever traps and artfully placed treasure. The treasure is wonderful, a wide mixture of simple coins, hidden neat things (a rot-filled bathtub with a skeleton who has platinum teeth), heavy loot (wine barrels, silk, fine quality pickles, etc), and nice magic items here and there (ring of feather fall in a boot, etc). I am a sucker for ancient cheese as a treasure and it’s great to see Grützi is a fellow man of culture as well. The tavern is loaded, easily a level-up for a group of level 2’s that survive, and still a good pile for level 4’s…and getting all the big stuff out is its own adventure. Again, scope is enormous for the scale. I’d be hard pressed to not find a place to stick Lipply’s Tavern in my game. Retired halfling adventurers should not be difficult to find in any standard fantasy world, and the whole place is getting seeded into my map even now, let me tell you. I’ll be astonished if the players manage to deal with it in a single session, though…even after they set half the place on fire. Again. A dungeon by Atanamar, level nill. Written for Troika I think my theory that a Dyson map can generally save things is not up to the challenge of Troika. In the Elegy of The Sapphire Adept the author manages to splay ten rooms across thirty-two pages. Troika, ladies and gentlemen. Now it’s single-column with huge text, but even so…whew. The map has the usual itch.io problem of the weird impulse to scribble all over the nice clean Dyson initial sketch, of course, but there are other organizational sins…the map is also 20 pages in, after plot, massive page after massive page of the weird and whacky monsters, and the two(!) random encounter tables for the tiny little dungeon. This thing needs 40-50 rooms at minimum, but here we are. Plot is pretty convoluted for ten rooms. Blue vines with delicious fruit that causes painful farts (yes, this is in the adventure) are erupting throughout the city, wrecking All the Stuff, so “you are hired for 100 silver each” to go into the dungeon to fix things. The dungeon is an extraplanar laboratory of a sorcerer who loved to “flesh shape” who died to his creations and has recently been breached by the Sapphire Adept, a blue android who is very nice and sweet and kind, who tried to escape and dissolved herself in a blue pool and if now oozing vines out into the main world and all the creations are insane and angry and kind of gross and there’s nobody to rescue and the PCs are trapped in the lab by DM-fiat and it makes me sad and angry and kind of pukey. Bleh. What I like is that the personalities of all the inhabitants are fully fleshed out* and their motivations and rivalries are present to encourage interaction**. The map, scribbles aside, is fine for its size*** and has some geometry to it. Right. What can be improved first in the asterisks; you didn’t need to take ten pages to flesh out personalities* of these monsters that have apparently been in perfect balance for a decade ** in a <200ft wide complex***, widening the zone or drastically narrowing the timescale would have fixed this issue. The thick random encounter tables are mostly non-interactive, with the non-interactive encounters not even signposting much. More thought on rumors and hooks would help, as would not locking the PCs into the dungeon. These hacks aren’t just offensive from a “player agency” point of view, they also show a clumsy lack of thought into integrating the adventure into anything remotely like a wider campaign world. Playtesting would probably help in this case. Best use case for this is thus unfortunately as a spiteful punishment to inflict upon a table of players, probably because they lobbied to play Troika. Which, fair. There’s not much that can be harvested in terms of content here, so all we really have is a miserable slump of a dungeon to be shocked by (it’s not very shocking). Final rating? */***** because there’s nothing doing saving this one. Written by Ethan B. AD&D, Levels 8-10 Monastery in the perilous mountains. The monastery is in a perilous mountain range with high rocky cliffs, 500 feet above the bottom of the valley. 30 normal human anchorites live in the monastery and will be wandering around in packs of 2-12. They do not usually fight. All followers of the cult have odd face tattoos. I don’t think this is necessarily a serious entry. Set in a fallen and corrupted monastery up in the mountains, the author’s quite pretty map is inhabited by puns and anachronism, staffed by a monster zoo and “evil yuppie cultists”, its primary treasures a matched pair of chainswords guarded by a type IV demon named PORK’D. I was excited by the map and the highish level range, then I was mildly miffed to be trolled, but then I realized this can also be used to troll players, so that’s something at least. Maybe I should have looked more closely at the cover image. Format is standard, by now we all know the sequence that has evolved, crab-like, time and time again in these adventure sites…history-> rumors-> hooks-> key, all two-column. It’s a good format, and the writing is clean and straightforward despite the wry puns peppered throughout. No gothic majesty, nor whispering corruptions, nor a bright and deceptive mien is presented here, just very functional writing in service of references. But let’s get Mary Todd’s mind off things by looking at the substance of the play. The map is quite nice-looking, another case where the author probably does wish we were grading on artistic merit. It’s sadly also rather simple, just a simple curtain wall around a garden leading to a chapel. Levels 8-10 probably don’t have too much need to approach the very formidable gate, which is nicely set up for defense. I like the random side-bridge to the cave of minotaurs, that has to be an attractive alternate entryway. It’s mid-high level and an outdoor location, so just assume the players arrive wherever they want to arrive. Still, looks nice. Assuming the most gormless group of level 9’s ever bumbles up the ramp, there are some quite substantial challenges to face. It starts out promising, with a hollow statue full of molten gold and a “ring of sets you on fire”. The gatehouse with a pair of leucrota, skeleton archers, and a bugbear squad all as defenders is a tough fight potentially, followed by a garden full of horned werewolves, random undead in a closet, a vampire with monk minions (aforementioned yuppie cultists, sigh), an ogre magus cook, animated armor, and of course a cherub statue that pees green slime, classy. The clear focus of the site is on a demon pit 666ft beneath the chapel, where a pair of chain swords beckon and PORK’D, the titular Nalfeshnee, as well as 665 manes all wait to the released. I don’t think it’ll play out nearly as metal as that sounds, but at least it’s an idea for a set-piece. Negotiation is vaguely hinted at but never given much serious thought. Treasure is frankly piddling. Little dribs and drabs here and there, not enough gold to pay for most parties this level to even get out of bed. That statue of molten gold? When it all cools off, you’re looking at 800gp. Magic is also pretty restrained, with a pair of +1 plate suits and the chainswords just about it…and before you get excited, the chainswords are just +1 bastard swords with a free single-target cleave. Be still my beating heart. A few vague notions of hiding “treasure” are seen here and there but the amounts are so tiny it’s barely worth it. Tragically, an actual demon monastery in the mountains would be very easy to place on just about any world. If you dislike your players and want to annoy them at high level without actually threatening them much, well, Nalfeshnee’s Monastery is easy to place like an artful middle finger wherever you want to go. Written by Stooshie & Stramash Labyrinth Lord, Levels 3-5 (or is it 4-7, unclear) Ancient cult fountain in the hills. Once the monastery of the Sisters of Bec sat in the Carraig Mountains in the Glen of Winnoch. For over two hundred years the sisters brought learning, healing and benevolence to all inhabitants of the glen through application of the annals of Bec, mother goddess of cultivation and horticulture. You guys did it, Stooshie & Stramash, that thing I said to do. Take a Dyson ruins map, roll a dungeon map from a generator, and then roll a monster…trolls, in this case…to inhabit your place. Keep it simple, don’t be stupid. In the case of The Fountain of Bec the ruins are of a long-lost monastery of a gardening goddess, with a magical healing fountain in the basement. A two-headed troll and his buddies have set up in the old ruin and are raiding the locals, but they have not found the secret treasure cache of the monastery. There’s a slightly confusing formula for where the trolls are in any particular visit, and it could be used to approximate a patrol path…danger and hinted rewards, married together, boom, now go enjoy your afternoon’s D&D. Nothing flashy is done with the writing or format here, just the standard of site history-> hooks -> rumors -> creature positions -> room keys all done in a clean two-column format. The authors are on the ball enough to know “adjectives good” as a Lynchian review standard and there is some decently evocative description, never in danger of veering into purple prose or obscuring location details. It’s a well-imagined site, constrained by realism but not unimaginative for all that. Maps are okay. Not too much to do with the very open ruins but mind those angles of approach for getting scoped…once down within the dungeon proper everything is very tight with only 10 rooms, the barest hint of a loop, and some water to add interest. While exploratory play is very constrained given the scale, between the few alternate routes and the secret chamber there’s enough interest for a little bit of poking and prodding. Decent size too, the choice to go with 10f squares means trolls have room to maneuver but there’s also tactical options. Well-chosen maps. The random placement of the trolls means exploration of the site can be quite different depending on all those d6s. Gnarly frontal assault with the level 5 party mashing it against 6 trolls? Ow. Or it could be a quiet infiltration, imaginably just killing off one troll at a time cleanly. There’s plenty of D&D stuff to do, a fountain to mess with, a skull hiding a key, secret treasure hidden behind a curtain, the works. I don’t see anything obvious to permit much in the negotiation/diplomacy interaction axis, but there’s a funny bit where in the main room trolls argue loudly about the best way to roast a person…even if it’s just one troll. That’s good. The only pause I had was the custom(ish) monster, an extraplanar shadow octopus, which is just an octopus with shadow strength-drain abilities, I have no objection to it as a monster but a little telegraphing might help. Bonus points for the different hooks radically changing how the site gets approached, although players might be grumpy about the Sisters of Bec hook that grants them easy access to the fountain (2,000xp per PC for messing with it) but demands the sacred relic upon retrieval. The treasure is good, slightly low for the level but well-distributed and nicely hidden in some cases. The largest monetary hoard is the troll’s stolen stuff, while the “shrine side” has neat ideas like scrolls sewn into a curtain and the jawbone of a saint as the main magical loot, I’m not sure if it’s worth the nasty layers of defense (invisible stalker and paralytic gas) but that’s a flavorful relic right there. All of the loot is pretty flavorful, in fact, a +1 short sword isn’t “short sword”, it’s a “fine falchion with a keen, bright blade decorated with a rose bush pattern”. Very good, it’s also hidden behind a skull stack. The authors also realize that things like keys and puzzle-hints are treasure, too. The Fountain of Bec is flavorful but can be placed darn near anywhere. Ruined monasteries are the salt of any D&D hexmap, and even the hills part isn’t strictly necessary…wherever you are, there’s a plausible spot for The Fountain of Bec. I know I’m putting it somewhere in mine. |
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