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…
1 Comment
Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Melting Skulls of the Conquering Dunes4/8/2024 A dungeon by Mathew Morris, levels 2-3 Written for Heartseeker You thought “any OSR ultralite niche levelless fantasy system” was part of the April Fool’s japery, didn’t you? Naw, here’s something for Heartseeker, which is basically that but with levels. A self-declared one-page dungeon that clearly takes two pages to describe eleven…uh…”locations”, the Melting Skulls of the Conquering Dunes is about retrieving some crystal skulls from a !egyptian tomb in the eponymous Conquering Dunes. A new horrifying trend is herein noted; the map is a very evocative ancient tomb image with an 11-node diagram being called a map. Never change, itch.io…because every time you change, you discover a new terrible innovation. Plot is fine. Patron wants elongated crystal skulls from tomb to melt, tomb map location was bought from a local bedowin [sic], gives cash for retrieval, tomb has revelation that aliens once visited, hidden chamber has crystal skulls with chrome flooring, alien monster summoned as final boss fight after looting. We’re now in 2024, so adventure writers can actually have Indiana Jones PART FOUR as a formative experience, heaven help us. Okay combo of genres, even if the desert is very lightly flavored. What I liked here is the light flavoring stuff…nice to see dead earlier adventurers showing danger nearby, nice to forecast threats with a jackal-headed god statue, and nice to have at least the idea of hidden treasure with a pair of golden keys needed to clear a door found in a side-path. Nice hint about looking down rather than up to encourage basement-wandering. A mild false tomb has a glass skull in a sarcophagus if you want to fool a playerbase made of infants and toddlers. It has its heart in the right place (so tip to those aforementioned seekers). There’s a whole lot of what can be improved on this one. Clearly I’d rather have an actual map, even if it’s scribbled in crayon on a napkin, but even more fundamentally the diagram-map shown is horribly linear…even worse than it looks, actually, because all the branches shown are written to be mandatory. My dearest bugaboo once more rears its ugly head at the entrance, with “d2” guardians blocking the way, make up your mind and give us 1 or 2, adventure. The random encounters are fine in some cases, like a d4 of tomb guardians, but there’s also…a mummy-filled sarcophagus? Randomly encountered? If that thing is literally hopping nosily up and down the hallway I’d love it, but no, it seems like we’re talking about bumbling into a room. Treasure should be given values if the “and other OSR games” part of the booklet’s selling copy is legit. It’d also be nice if a summoned super-advanced alien monster final boss had a little more pizzazz that “claw, claw, regenerate d4 HP per round”. Give him tech, or spells, or at least a diplomatic agenda... Meh, I don’t really have a best use case that comes to mind here. The dungeon is dull, the pieces aren’t compelling, and the premise is a mixture of one of Roland Emmerich’s best movies with one of Steven Spielberg’s worst. I guess I’d use the nice art in the back-map-thing and the front cover. Final rating? */***** sorry, you meant well but this is a linear hack. I’ll be doing a new series here covering maps; I’m going to start reviewing adventure maps, starting with classics like Keep on the Borderlands and Caves of Thracia, but moving on to newer adventures as well. As a bridge, I think I’m going to talk a little about the Adventure Site Contest maps. Cartography is something I really love about this hobby, and a quality map is what I focus on first in almost any product…but it’s easy to over-focus on it, just like it’s possible to focus on things like art, formatting, or even prose quality over the value of the adventure content itself. The Adventure Site Contest results are a prime example of this.
First of all, look at the maps of first and second place…there’s a mostly linear tomb, or a r-r-r-random procedurally generated “branch-style” map with only one loop. That’s completely fine for an adventure site. A map isn’t the be-all, end-all, but rather exists to serve the adventure being played, and in the top two adventure sites the maps were properly scaled and designed for the adventures written. In Lost Vault of Kadish it would have been strange and nonsensical to have looping corridors for a lost king’s vault. In Fountain of Bec, the main treasure room should be off on its own little branch, otherwise the trolls who’ve taken over the dungeon would have smashed and looted it. The top two adventures weren’t really helped by their maps, but neither were they hindered. Other finalist adventures like Glen of Shrikes and Etta Capp’s Cottage were similar, with relatively simple maps that didn’t provide much of an exploratory gameplay experience. That’s fine, they were good adventures. Now I don’t want to minimize the importance of maps either. An adventure like Legacy of the Black Mark didn’t live and die on its very solid map but having multiple directions to explore undeniably helped the adventure it was trying to foster, an exploratory delve. Likewise, Barrow Shrine of Corruption was a very simple and direct site much like Lost Vault or Fountain, but unlike those two its entire flow depended on the main loop, which incorporated a lot of verticality in a vital way. There’s some great atmosphere in both of those entries, but I really think their more complex geography was essential. Probably the two very best maps in the contest did make themselves seen in the other two finalists, of course. The large orphanage/reformatory of St. Durham’s Home for Wayward Youth elevated it masterfully, giving an extremely detailed location with lots of exploration for heist adventures, lots of defensive features for a siege scenario, as well as logical and functional day-to-day flow which is needed for verisimilitude in a site just visited to investigate to negotiate in. Similarly, Lipply’s Tavern as a complex mutli-faction dungeon delve had to have a good map, with verticality, multiple routes of ingress/egress, and secret passages detectable with good mapping. A bad map would have made the site completely fail, while it managed to get up to finalist despite one judge being unable to score it largely because of the quality of the dungeon. So, good map is good. It’s increasingly clear as I go through this exercise that maps are something that must fit the adventure, both in scope and in theme. Starting with a map can be fine, but the map must then be centrally integrated into the themes and scale of the adventure (see half a dozen of my saddest Crapshoot Monday reviews). Starting instead with the concept, plot, or theme and then making a map custom fit to the adventure is probably the best bet…although I recognize that’s a lot more effort to many. Again, the second place adventure site used a random dungeon generator. As an aside, an example of the mismatch situation is Frostfire’s Durance Vile, which had a fantastic set of maps for a module 300% longer. If Stripe does release it as a full module of 8 pages, I’ll snap it up in a heartbeat and the maps are a big reason for that…but maps have to fit. So going forward in this new series, I’m going to be looking at maps, not just as they are by themselves, but also in how they support the module, adventure, Dungeon issue, etc as well. I’m not going to ignore the presentation, because that is an important part of what is first and foremost a method to convey information to the struggling DM…nor will I ignore artistry, because that’s an important part of getting the DM excited about actually running the game. But more than anything else, I want Maps That Work. How do 3-8 buzzed and/or caffeinated players negotiate these things? Because that’s how we put the Dungeons in Dungeons & Dragons. An adventure by Thomas Lopez, no levels because... Written for Cairn Do you like fairy tales, poetry, and whimsy? Do you love abstracted maps, vague physical design, and “but thou must” quest designs? Are you fond of thirteen artistically laborious pages being used for a point-by-point twenty-key railroad? Boy howdy, you know I am! Once Upon a Giant is a clear labor of love and not at all pretentious, a staggering tour-de-force that leaves the reader breathless and applauding from the beginning lavish praise of Yochai Gal and land acknowledgement of the author’s settler homestead to the “…Land Lived Happily Ever After” coda at the end. Let’s dive right into this lush artistic masterpiece! I don’t even know if I should talk about the intricate plot of this work, it is so creative, but to put it only in the most delicate of brush-strokes, this adventure is about a mean giant who has been doing unkind things to the local people but who retreats after his raids to his fortress…which is on top of a giant mushroom! It’s amazing! Naughty players might ask to climb the outside of this mushroom but the adventure wisely declares that’s impossible for anyone but the giant and then provides a helpful rumor about a path through the inside. A fiendish map, elegantly outlain as a node diagram, details how the players are supposed to go up the mushroom and then another details the way through a mushroom forest found on top. That’s right! TWO types of giant fungus. Anyway, then the players go to a town and invade the castle and there’s no maps because those are supposed to be overcome by a friendly bard with a sleep-lute. Man, how can I list what I liked without listing just about everything in this whole module. Is it how the maps shut down annoying explorer-type players by being so abstract and simple? Is it how the town and the castle are both portrayed by beautiful public-domain art with simple labels? Is it how the cloud-bestriding giant, spoken up as the single scourge of the whole region, is also statted to be overcome by lucky players even wisely unblessed by such clumsy ideas as “higher levels”? Well shucks, those are all great but what I probably liked the most was the goblin in the middle of the mushroom named “Fun Gus”…after my sides stopped splitting and I finally climbed back on top of the toilet to keep reading, I was amazed to find that this NPC is a wealth of clues if the players “give him something nice”. The clues are very helpful and not at all either too vague or too explicit! My goodness, it would be insulting to pretend what can be improved is anything other than: MORE! Give us more of this fairytale delight! But certainly not more outlining the giant’s castle that is the focus of the whole adventure, that certainly doesn’t need details like guard rotations, sleep schedules, or entrances/exits. So best use case for Once Upon a Giant is obviously to PLAY IT. Obviously it’s best played in Cairn, but any OSR ultralite niche levelless fantasy system can embrace this module as their own. The author wisely dispenses with any tools, encounters, items, or ideas that would be able to be ripped out of the adventure and used in something else…every bespoke element is perfect where it is. Final Rating? */***** and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their April. An adventure setting by Brett Sullivan & Fern Cliff Studio, levels unlisted. Written for “your favorite OSR system” The very first thing I noticed about At the River’s Edge was its size. No, not its page count, a modest eight pages. Nor the somewhat odd choice to do it in big A3 landscape pages. No, what staggered me is the fact that the download tipped the scales at a zaftig 142 MB. That’s practically Brobdingnagian. How? Why? Well, I believe the answer lies within its beautiful but completely uncompressed layers, relentlessly working over beautiful maps and dense tables to deliver a bucolic overgrown river valley full of adventure…at least, that’s the plan. This thing is gorgeous. Don’t see a specific artist credited so of course now that means we have to assume AI art, but the maps and evocative illustrations are all very cohesive and genuinely wonderful to see. The region map is colorful and flavorful but also admirably ease to parse…the hex version should be used as an example for how best to map a little region. But. There’s a single line of text on the page with the hexed map, and that’s “1 hex = _____”. There’s no scale given, instead, that’s something you’re supposed to fill in for yourself, no matter how radically different one-mile hexes are vs. six-miles hexes. This is how everything is done…the ruins? Abstracted, roll on tables. The one dungeon, an actually mapped elemental location known as the Ice Cavern? Loot is random from table, encounters are random from a table, source of the magical ice is random (yes, d6 table). Settlements are the same way except for the central hub, a little river trading hub…led by a genderless (you choose) leader who is nefarious or good (roll on table for secret motives). As you can tell, what I liked is basically everything that the author(s) put down firmly. The docks settlement I talked about? It’s well-designed for actually adventuring in, a rarity for TTRPG settlement maps…not only does it have buildings, but it also has secret cellar beneath the inn, with a smuggling passage that leads out to the nearby forest, a watchtower that is designed to be snuck around, an ice house that points to the nearby dungeon, and a political situation rife with opportunities. There’s a potential here for the very highest type of D&D, hexcrawling in the wilderness, I like way some of these tables would shape the campaign. Individual table entries can be very creative too, like the ruin treasures of Ogre tusk(?) daggers, stone tablets to appease the nature faction, giant otter-skin cloak allowing swimming, and a pebble with a sigil that casts a tiny blue light, very fun. The settlement creation tools are nice too, prone to make Places With Problems as you would expect and hope for. I like the regional backstory, too, basically being the site of the centuries-past battle that ended the ogre threat to the Old Empire, now both are withdrawn. Ergo, what can be improved is to give more solidity. I don’t think having settlement generators or ruin generators are a bad idea at all, and I’ll even say these are pretty good ones, but having the settlement half-finished and the ice cavern dungeon half-finished lost a lot in their value. You have beautiful maps and beautiful tables, but in the practical moments while everyone is crunching chips and chugging Mt. Dew while the game goes on…there’s a usability gap. The maps, while pretty, are also very DM-centric and not quite designed to be handouts, maybe the hexmap as a gray area. Basically, expending a little more effort, like two more pages (an extra gigabyte, I know), you could have this as something to run well out the gate as well as having those solid tools. This would also relieve the pressure on those big random tables, allowing the meh entries to get cut in favor of smaller tables with the gold retained. There’s also the issue of the OSR tag with miserable amounts of treasure…this is an easy fix, ye writers, just give more sources of XP. The best use case of this thing is probably to run a sandbox campaign, even with all those above caveats. Homework assignment is a lot more onerous than I’d usually recommend, but there’s the nucleus of a very fun little campaign in this, particularly with a canny user who knows to throw out the chaff rolls and keep the wheat. Stripping out the settlement and ruin generators would also be a lot of value for the theoretical user, quite a high quality for the scope. Final Rating? ****/*****, while not perfect, there’s a heck of a lot here for the discerning DM to use. Great value to be found here. After weeks of reviews and days of intense deliberation, the judges have decided the top eight entries to the Adventure Site Contest, who be all be included in Adventure Sites I. The top two will also receive an adventure of their choice from the Merciless Merchants catalog, and number one is King of the Adventure Sites, and is contractually obligated to so introduce himself at all formal and professional gatherings.
To start with, thank you to all who submitted. All the entries had elements we all enjoyed, and I can see using all of them. If the contest has inspired anyone to write more, to release adventure sites on their own to earn tens, nay dozens of dollars, then I hope you do…the first motivation for this contest is to give feedback to writers, and I hope everyone who submits gets a lot out of it. This was a wonderful privilege to judge and run, and I’m excited to see all of you submitting again next time, plus a few dozen more. The last few reviews from Grutzi and Shocktohp are still to come, but both are committed to reviewing all the entries. That said, the 8th to 3rd ranked entries chosen for the honor of inclusion in Adventure Sites I are (in order of receipt): Legacy of the Black Mark, By DangerIsReal The very first entry received, and only a couple points from winning outright, Legacy of the Black Mark is a chilling site that positively oozes with flavor, all laser-focused on making a brutal little dungeon with vast wealth and so, so many ways of dying. A solid map, a wonderful mixture of dangers and boons, a story to be discovered, not told…the bar was set very high indeed with this adventure site as the first submission. St. Durham’s Home for Wayward Youth, By Trent Smith A Greyhawk adventure through and through, St. Durham’s Home for Wayward Youth is an orphanage, a temple, a slaver’s den, and a cult site all at once, eschewing the simple “here’s an evil hole in the ground” formula for a complex site that can be approached on multiple levels, from a direct assault to being used as a simple drop-off-point for the Problem Orc Babies. While the Greyhawk assumptions of the location won’t apply to every campaign, the craftsmanship that went into this site is undeniable, clearly written by one of the game’s greats. Lipply’s Tavern, By Grützi Every judge who submitted an adventure site came in at a known disadvantage; we do not rank (and thus score) our own sites. So when you see Lipply’s Tavern on the list here you should be rightfully impressed, as it means it has one of the highest average rankings by all the rest of us. The wonderful mixture of charm, intrigue, variety, and just pure solid game design shines through even in the teeniest of fonts. If this doesn’t spawn at least half a dozen Hobbit-Hole Crawls in the next six months, I’ll be shocked. Etta Capp’s Cottage, By Scott Marcley Arachnophobia delivered by way of the Brothers Grimm, Etta Capp’s Cottage would sweep first, second, and third place by itself if we were ranking on consistency of fairytale flavor. Personally, I cannot imagine running an Ettercap the same way ever again…of course they’re terrifying storybook spider-widows with houses made of webs. The fairytale tone might clash with some campaigns but for any game with even the slightest toleration for the things of the fey that random encounter roll of “Spiders, Giant” will never be the same again. The Glen of Shrikes, By GiantGoose Without a doubt the most controversial submission on the list, The Glen of Shrikes is an imaginative, creative, and frankly unprecedented submission that is less “site” more “sites”, being a whole darned hex. As it is written I suspect it is frankly impossible to import whole cloth without running in the very specific hexcrawl game (the Ebony Coast). Which, don’t get me wrong, seems like a fun campaign to play in. But just judging in on the internal sub-sites, I can see several that are great to run without their original context. In the end, the creativity and skill displayed got it into the top eight, but if it had been focused on a single site it might have swept into the very top. The Barrow Shrine of Corruption, By Peter McDevitt A quiet, understated entry at first only mentioned for the anatomical map, The Barrow Shrine of Corruption grows ever more impressive upon deeper reading. Very probably the closest to the platonic ideal of the “site for adventure” brief, the site’s very simplicity is itself an achievement; no words are wasted, every encounter, every scene is focused on making a wonderful, memorable adventure in the deep woods. And then it generously has the two open hooks pointing to more adventure sites. …but I know what you want to know. You want to know not just who’s the best, but who are the best of the best, the cream of the cream, the penultimate and the ultimate. Well, those two need to get with me and Malrex for their adventure prizes, because… Runner-Up: The Fountain of Bec, by Stooshie & Stramash A wonderful encapsulation of everything we like about the game, in the Fountain of Bec Stooshie took a random ruin map from online, dumped a randomly-generated dungeon layout underneath, and then did the work to make these simple maps into a living, breathing adventure site full of trolls, double-headed dogs, and an extraplanar octopus. They are traps, there are challenges, there’s an order of battle…and there are treasures, not just monetary but also cleverly hidden magic, a beautifully imagined sword, and the wonderful oft-neglected trope of a saint’s relic. It hits on all marks, and that’s why Fountain of Bec is the only submission that managed to be in the top eight for every single judge. Well done. …and the winner is… Lost Vault of Kadish, by Jonathan Becker Buried beneath the desert sands in a lonely centaur-haunted oasis, the Lost Vault of Kadish just…works. From the well-imagined initial invitation to the underworld with the worn spear-holding statue, to the frantic initial trap/fight at the entrance, to the set-pieces built into every room, I cannot imagine a session in the vault not being a fondly remembered session for all parties involved. Becker in the Vault shows that puzzles, tricks, and traps don’t have to be mundane, while the mostly-linear map has just enough nonlinearity with the difficult bypass route designed as much to trap as to exploit. It’s D&D, of course we should be climbing around in a sandy, gritty tomb doing exactly what the Vault of Kadish wants us to do. Now Jonathan Becker is both legally and morally required to dispense with his B/X Blackrazor online handle to be known forevermore as KING OF THE ADVENTURE SITES. If you would like a crown, I will need your home address to mail you your Burger King coupon of choice. Long live the king. …at least until next year. Once again, thank you to all participants, to the judges, and to everyone who boosted the signal for this site. To the eight writers selected, please let me know any edits/writeups/modifications you will want to make before publication. Watch this space for a final analysis, and the announcement of the release of Adventure Sites I, coming free to an itch/drivethru near you. And thanks for reading…I hope this was a great experience for you, too. Now go play some D&D. A sandbox by Michael Shorten, levels moot... BECAUSE IT’S WRITTEN FOR CLASSIC TRAVELLER, DUDES And now for something completely different. TRAVELLER? Heck yeah. This thing is an adventure in the classic spacegame sense of being a hexmap with sandbox content scattered around in the hopes of making an adventure out of what results…and then adds a plot pressure by making it a Battlestar Galactica (!) setting. The author is assuming a battlestar-led refugee fleet heading into the eponymous veil, a nebula region that helps them hide from the Cylons. This is actually not a bad idea for a sci-fi space campaign, with not only Battlestar Galactica using that as a plot driver but also great games like Homeworld or Faster Than Light embracing the “explore with a swarm behind us” premise. So, you have a sandbox with a lot of freedom, but also pressure of hostile chase fleets and hungry refugees giving direction and motivation. I won’t hate on it. The module is long, using twenty-five pages to detail the sector with a dozen of the hexes containing systems of interest. Appendixes for fleet crisis rolls, a timeline of threats, and random encounters while setting foot on the planets all add a lot more “adventure” to the sandbox, while the setting-specific stuff is helpful for anyone else using Classic Traveler to play Battlestar Galactica fanfiction campaigns. I think the author’s game is probably a blast. One aside, the author notes that “some” of the content has been generated and then heavily adapted from ChatGPT. He doesn’t outline what, but I’m pretty familiar with how AI likes to generate alien exoplanet biospheres, so I suspect that’s what it was used on. LMMs love speculative and generally boring exobiology, weird huh? Well, what I liked has to be more than just “finally something for Traveler”, right? Well, beyond liking the setting, the premise, and the high-level design, I’m going to laud the ambition here. The module’s size is actually pretty reasonable given that it is a ~6-12 session mini-campaign by itself. There’s a good understanding of how a player-run campaign ebbs and flows, with a good mix of sticks and carrots prompting action. The dice-rolled (ChatGPT) alien worlds are sometimes kind of nifty. The alert reader will notice some of what can be improved from the review so far…give us more specifics, dear module. Proper names are omitted for most of the content, which also encourages some very high abstraction for the random encounters and events. A lot of homework is needed to turn d6=4 and d6=1, “EVENT TYPE: TERRAIN/NATURAL, Terrain is especially (difficult/easy) to navigate at this time” into something resembling actually gameplay. There’s a lot like that, where you can clearly see the potential, but time, ever fleeting, is required to make the game happen. The one mapped feature in the module, a simple Dyson being used as an alien spire, is just five room descriptions…I guess actual encounters are to be rolled? Finally, I have no objection to using language model prompts for seeds, but a there are definitely places where more interconnectivities should have been added between systems. It’s when I examine the best use case that the module stumbles a bit. It’s a great zone for a very specific Battlestar Galactica-inspired campaign, but I don’t know if the region will really pop for the more traditional trade-and-exploration motivated Traveler game. It all hangs together pretty well, but if bits are extracted you start to see how generic it is. Final Rating? **/***** because while it’s a good overview, and the game played can certainly be fun, it’s going to make the user invest so much time that he maybe would rather make something tailored to his game instead. Sad, because a lot of potential was here. An “adventure site” by David Harvison, levels 3-5. Written for OSE Oh goody. OSE, actual level range given, Dyson map without weirdo colors, spiel calls it an adventure site…in the dreck-mines of itch.io, there are all great signs. My ardor cools somewhat when I see that it’s a fifteen-page document for a dungeon with seven keys (I think it’s officially a 5-room dungeon map), but at least the author has used that generous page space on clear wide fonts, nice cute little art bits, and sidebars that are actually helpful. Rather than the desperate arthaus style, this is just something that looks…nice. Worthwhile goal. This thing is almost like an Adventure Site Contest entry, just flabby and uncut. The eponymous monastery doesn’t actually appear in this adventure, but rather the monks’ mellification (turning corpses into honey) cave is the focus, a spot where they embalm devotees in their honey to make magical healing corpse-honey (whew), a nasty swarm of “vulture-bees” have invested the cave and killed a lot of the monks, which leads to place’s current situation. A nice set of hooks and rumors lead the players to the cave with variable levels of clued-in-ness, and thus begins tonight’s D&D adventure. Hope you like weapon-immune swarms, because they sure like you. Man, what I liked is a lot in here…the premise is creative but grounded, and your reward being extremely valuable honey made of long-dead monks is great stuff. Face-masks and torch-based fumigators as the “special items” picked up early works nicely, although I’m not sure how well fumigation will work in combat. No proper traps exist, but there’s a combination of natural hazards (rickety bridges) with nasty gotchas (zombie-honey-monks in crypts) that fulfils the trap place in everybody’s heart. The custom monsters are a mixed bag, but the bee-breathing bear corpse is a fun one (and very deadly potentially). Bonus half-point for an alternate exit in the water feature, albeit abstracted to “miles away”. Really what can be improved mostly comes down to editing. It’s not quite right for scale…there are a few too many hacky fights, and not enough other interactions, for what’s essentially a 5-room dungeon. There’s actually the faintest whiff of the “Five Room Formula”: Guardian Challenge-> Puzzle or Roleplaying-> Trick/Setback-> Climax/Bossfight->Reward/Revelation. That’s not a terrible formula, and notice how the ratio of fights vs. other interaction goes. The weaker elements like the honey-zombies and “yet another swarm of bees” would be better if they weren’t automatic hackfests. Alternately, if the author wanted this many fights, a bigger map would have helped. A third option, if the map was a must, would be to add a little wandering movement to the place, which as a loop with a lower water feature definitely would support that dynamism. All that said, best use case is to plop this adventure site into your hexmap or to run this as an independent one-shot, despite the shortfalls this will be a fun, flavorful time. The ideas and mechanics of mellification, corpse-honey, bee-bears, etc are all good ideas for raiding too. Final Rating? ***/***** for a simple but slightly above-average adventure…which of course makes this one of the pinnacles of itch.io module design. Throughout the month of February, I reviewed every one of the Adventure Site Contestants (save my own). I went in order of submission, so the complete set:
-Legacy of the Black Mark -Tomb of Rassanotep -Oglias’ Folley -The Tower of the Elephant/The Tower of the Malphyr -St. Durham’s Home for Wayward Youth -Lair of the Grim Gasher Orcs -Death Talon Lair -Red Tower -Fountain of Bec -Nalfeshnee Monastery -Lipply’s Tavern -Lost Vault of Kadish -Etta Capp’s Cottage -Whatever Happened to Brother Eustice? -The Glen of Shrikes -The Barrow Shrine of Corruption -Frostfire’s Durance Vile Each submission has a link for what I thought in my reviews; the ranking in the end will be a mixture of ranked-choice judgements from not just me, but from the four other judges as well. They weren’t required to give reviews, but each judge is indeed reviewing every submission, from Owen Edward’s YouTube reviews to the blogs of Grützi, Shockthop, and EOTB. Once everyone is done with all reviews, I plan on cross-linking to each one of mine…there’s a nice difference of opinion in a lot of cases, which shows how valuable multiple judges are for a contest like this. Be sure to leave comments anywhere you have an opinion, feedback is valuable both for the reviewer and the reviewed. Special shout-out to the Fountain of Bec author Stooshie & Stramash, who’s weighed in on almost every entry so far. Just speaking for myself, this whole experience has been a delight. I’ve enjoyed reviewing every single submission, and found something of value in every single adventure sent in. Within the bounds of the initial spec there’s been a wide variety of submissions, from simple 5-room lairs to full-up multisession adventures…aimed at level 1’s all the way up to named heroes of level 9+…written for all the TSR lineages of B/X, OD&D, and AD&D. The adventure sites are designed to be place in environments like scorching deserts, snow-covered hills, and debauched cities…although the majority are for hilly woodlands, which makes sense for the baseline assumptions of D&D. Even within the tight confines of only two pages, the creativity, hard work, and enthusiasm displayed by everyone submitting something have blown me away. Going forward, once all the other judges wrap up their own review efforts, we’re going to vote on the top eight entries and publish them as Adventure Sites I, a free compilation for publication on both DriveThru and itch.io…something for the community as a whole to use and enjoy, with all credits given to the authors (who will also have a chance to edit a bit before broad release). The top-rated adventure writer gets crowned King of the Adventure Sites and receives his choice of a Merciless Merchants adventure, plus all due glory and adulation from the guaranteed billions of adoring fans. Every author is of course more than welcome to publish independently as well and I’ll shout out to anyone who does…I’d love for every one of these to hit the world. Looking into the future, the sharp-eyed reader will note that I called the publication “Adventure Sites I”. I won’t be committing the entire judges panel to a return, but I know that I myself will definitely be making this contest a regular feature, probably yearly. The Coldlight Press Adventure Site Contest has been an honor to judge and I’m already looking forward to what we see next. In the meanwhile, thanks to all who’ve submitted, and watch this space for the final results. Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Hollowed Priests of the Forgotten God3/4/2024 An “adventure” by Thomas and Madeleine Keene, level ???.
Written for Vaults of Vaarn In these delves within the dark reaches of itch.io, I am not a member of any community, rather a Jane Goodall-esque outside observer of these strange hominids, learning of them only from their artifacts…there are the aggressive and dimwitted Mork Borglings, the self-important and artsy Troikites, the sweet and naive Shadowdarkans, the deranged Into the Odders, and the ubiquitous OSEnai. The sweltering dark gene-forges have bred members of new systems native to the itch.io ecosystem, like the zealous Cairnies and the gentle Heroes of Adventure, but there are a thousand tiny systems, unremarked by the wider world outside of the occasional hurled adventure at zoo-visitors. One such system is Vaults of Vaarn, an acid trip dream set in a fantasy high-tech post-apocalypse. It’s much less cool than that sounds, but it does spawn adventures, or at least pdfs pretending to be adventures. This is one of those. What then is the thing itself? Hollowed Priests is mostly about a god dying, when it did its name disappeared from reality entirely, leaving black voids in books and scrolls that contained its name, and also in the priests dedicated to it, tearing voids in their bodies and souls. The adventure part comes in when the PC(s) take one of the d20(!) hooks leading to the main library of this forgotten god, retrieving [thing] while risking [danger] and also encountering [scene]…I’m not exaggerating, all those brackets and random d20 items. There’s no map, no geography, no flow, no plot, just a bunch of d20 rolls claiming to be an adventure. What I liked about this non-adventure is that genuinely interesting flash of creativity about the dead god’s blotted-out name, which is a cool idea with some fascinating worldbuilding implications. The tables have some neat ideas too, although the rigorous adherence to filling every list with twenty entries means the quality is a little uneven. Props for that initial premise, though. You know what I’m going to say about what can be improved…GIVE ME A MAP, A DIAGRAM, SOME KIND OF ANCHOR TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD. While not strictly necessary to map it, even just having a physical location in mind while writing your adventure does wonders for grounding the action. Riffing on that more broadly, imagine how your putative adventure is will flow in play…having creative ideas is great, but there a point at which you have four people sitting down with beer and chips looking for 2-4 hours’ entertainment, how do those creative sparks actually work when the rubber meets the road? This is why playtesting is always an improvement. The best use case for Hollowed Priests of the Forgotten God, one might say unfortunately the ONLY use case for it, is as an idea-generator for worldbuilding. There’s a nifty seed in here, one that I could see growing in several directions of varying quality. Weird item chart is also neat. Final Rating? */***** because it’s not an adventure, it’s somebody excitedly (if slightly pompously) telling you about his nifty idea. |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|