​Written by Thanateros777
B/X, mid-level (whatever that means)
Funhouse wizard retreat
  Beneath a ruined resort is an underground complex created by a bygone sage for his personal amusement and examination, accessible only by a small outbuilding long overgrown and ruined. Deep inside may be fortunes and perils alike, as the Great Sage was an eccentric, if not abnormal man. What mysteries and riches may the eccentric wizard’s sanctum hold?
  So it took a long time, but here in the penultimate adventure site we’ve finally hit it…font so weird and cramped and scribbly that I have to go up to 100% zoom. Then 125% zoom. Then 150% zoom. Then just copy-paste into a word document with all formatting removed. It was rough. Single column, all bolded, highlighting done via color…whew. It’s not going to be fatal, but it was definitely something that triggered me even more than the introductory text using the word “funhouse”.
  The plot, thin as it is, is complete bog standard for a funhouse dungeon…weirdo powerful wizard makes his strange lair “up in the hills”, abandons it, now its ripe for the looting. The hook does a clever thing, in a hoard of loot or by other happenstance the party comes into possession of a coin-sized silver talisman that grants them access to said funhouse, a cult wants this and sends an illusionist hit-squad to take it. Once you get in, it’s the usual room-by-room succession of challenges and interesting things to play with.
  The map almost doesn’t matter in a funhouse like this, there’s very little rhyme or reason here so as loopy-doopy as it is, there’s not a lot of exploratory gameplay. You’re going from room to room without linkages or the order mattering much, and the secret doors aren’t something that mapping really tells much. I do like how there are dangly bits that can be tied into different content, this is almost a “site” to be added to a megadungeon and there are connections for that. Good mapping software used, looks really nice and clean. Having a little side-spur with a “add more dungeon here” is a decent move.

  These kinds of funhouse adventures live or die based on the quality of the individual rooms/encounters, and these are mostly…fine. The initial ambush with a six-illusionist hit squad (each one has a single first-level spell and a book with said spell) is a fun idea, there’s some real personality to it and I can see it being memorable, with decent loot in the form of those books. Some individual fights will be a bit challenging, like a spiral maze with displacer beasts, a water room filled with swimming shocker lizards, a gelantinous cube with an acid-resistance ring inside it, just about as interesting a bunch of set-pieces as you can get in B/X. There’s also stuff like a leprechaun in a BDSM dungeon and starving trolls in a closet, nasty and not particularly interesting. Not a lot of talking to critters here.
  Also, a bunch of those critters aren't in B/X. I speak D&D 3rd Edition, I see your assassin vines and shocker lizards.
  Traps, as expected, will be mostly silly and forget verisimilitude but they’re fine in isolation. What is a dead end with two levers labeled “Fame” and “Fortune”, one giving an appearance curse and the other giving gold coins that hurt…is that a trap, or a treasure? What it is, however, is definitely not a thing that fits in most campaigns. A lot of decent risk/reward tradeoff encounters that are fine in isolation, just kind of exhausting all in a row.
  Treasure is, as expected by now, kind of all over the place. Hefty furniture, neat stacks of platinum pieces, “random jewelry” worth 8k…total rewards aren’t bad for a level 3 dungeon, terrible for a level 6, and we don’t know what the actual range is. So that’s hard to judge. Magic items are weirdo and some are genuinely fun, I’m fond of the bone monocle that shows humanoids below a certain INT threshold, that’s useful for certain spells’ targeting.
  I could never see myself using this thing as an adventure site, whole. That being said, like the apocryphal buffalo, most parts are very usable in isolation. I can see taking a room here, an item there, an encounter here, a trap there, and sprinkling them around in other dungeons or sites that have a bit more preexistence within an organic world. Although please consult your eye doctor before attempting to parse the content.

Written by Zed
B/X (+silver standard), levels 4-6
City Arena.
  Such notices hang in ever town of the region, and every 15th of the month plebeians and nobles alike from all over the frontier province flock to the amphitheater, for some well-earned distraction from the toils of imperial expansion. The arena has been around for some years now, and the novel directorial style of Titus, a decorated war veteran of the northern expansion, has proven to be exactly what the colonists needed.
  Cities are always best for adventure at their most decedent, and there’s not much more decadent than late-empire Rome. Or late-empire New Rome (Constantinople). And if you’re going all in on Rome…why not Coliseum? Zed’s answer is “sure, why not?” and he delivers a private arena/theatre in a Not-Rome, a popular place where gladiatorial fights take logical advantage of D&D healing rates and turn the fights into a WWE-esque storyline spectacle, complete with comedy and drama beats. This arena/manor also has shops out front, a training yard, Coliseum-esque below-arena elevators, ladies of the night-rooms with attendant rich barroom…it’s a compact location with a lot going on in it, probably a little too compact…
   …because there’s not a direct motivation given for a party of thieves, rogues, and magicians. The whole area is loaded with verisimilitude, but there’s not a direct reason to be there. It’s a very realistic-seeming (more important than realism) location that a lot of parties would have less reason to approach as a crawl target or an objective-heist by default than the titular Keep on the borderlands in B2. “Insert motivation here” is going to annoy some judges, it matters less to me than some others.
  The map is tight, those 10ft squares packing a realistic amount of content into each area, but it’s going to feel small to D&D players. As I’ve mentioned before, for a site built more for heists than dungeon exploration, having logically discernable layout is important for planning and this one is set up pretty well for reconnoiter shenanigans. I’d have personally gone a little busier with the map key highlighting things like a roof trapdoor, possible windows, etc, the clear and clean map could easily get a little more information added without hurting. There’s also an issue with the stairs going to 27 but the map says “to 28” but that’s easy enough to fix. Nice site map.

​  And now in NPCs we reach the part where I’m going to really want more from the module. Or maybe, information conveyed in a different way. A lot of page space is devoted to the personalities of the arena-owner, his servants, affiliated merchants, and semi-slave gladiators, but tracking where they live and move day-to-day is going to be a nightmare for any infiltration and/or social ruse, a lot of notes needed. Assuming a heist, alarm, or crawl, you’d also want an order of battle for when the whole place is turned out to fight or flee from a homicidal pack of unhoused people like the PCs.
  Going down to the actual monsters I do love how book monsters are used but reskinned. Household lares (Roman petty hearth gods) are pixies, the obese old gladiator trainer is an ogress, the exotic captured outsider slave is a neanderthal…this is good, everything has its own flavor and that flavor is extremely Roman. Most are humanoids, although there are a nice collection of large beasts in the lower basement (crocodiles, wolves, pythons, white apes) and summonable skeletons, some elementals…two of the household are magic-users, so there’s a light magic sheen on a couple fights, gives some magic traps a reason for existing too.
  Silver standard keeps tripping me up, but even multiplying the treasure take x10 there’s a pretty sad amount for a 4-6 group, except for a bank note worth 15k which only has a 1-in-6 chance of being found searching for a turn in the office. I love the flavor here, it’s dripping with Roman/Classic vibes like valuable tiles, olive oil amphorae, marble busts, a written comedy manuscript…love the flavor, and easy enough to fix amount, but still and issue. Magic loot is arms and armor in a few cases plus potions and scrolls, but also numen statuettes that give healing or other curative effects. It’s a low-magic “realistic” setting by default, so everything’s pretty subtle for the B/X baseline.
  This site frustrates me in the way only something with real potential can; it’s a great site, but to turn it into an adventure site there’s a lot of work needed. The flavor is wonderful and very distinctive, but any campaign that has Sword & Sorcery roots won’t find the highly-focused Roman flavor hard to integrate. I think it’s worth the effort, just keep seeing more ways to punch it up…probably the best approach would be to design an adventure with a specific goal to be pursued within the site, running through what would be needed for that particular goal would lead to outlining the information that’s needed for any goal pursued in the site. 

​Written by ShockTohp
ACKS, levels 4-6
Waterlogged clockpunk grave tower.
  In the salt district of the city, an old moldering water clock sits rusting. This marvel of hydraulic engineering, a gift from the local dwarf vault, was created as a heroic burial site of a human general of great renown, who once saved the dwarfs from a horde of lizardmen. The hero was interned with his spoils in a crystal dome, located in the basement of the tower (and surrounded by its reservoir) but in such a way as to allow admirers to look down on the interred from the ground level viewing gallery. However, its glory days are long gone, and the clock has been abandoned by its keepers. Now its ancient waterwheel creaks and groans, the machinery inside screeches like a tormented beast.
  The [blank]punk aesthetic is what we (meaning the internet, hi, I am The Internet) started to call any form of technology appearing in a premodern setting. First we have Steampunk, with its Victorian England stylings mixed with zeppelins and steam engines being used all over the place. Famously, the Eberron setting in D&D 3rd Edition era took the “DungeonPunk” art comment about early manual illustrations and leaned in on that hard, making a world with all the magic taken to a technological extreme. “Clockpunk” is the slightly sillier even earlier cousin to Steampunk, where instead of steam being used at absurd power/weight ratios it is gears that provide all your handwavy power needs, wound up either by hand or by magic. Dwarves and gnomes are frequent perpetrators of clockpunk, and it is no different here in the Wailing Tower, which is a giant enchanted water clock. Some may run away screaming from this; Warhammer Fantasy fans are licking their chops right now.
  The site’s story is pretty simple outside of the aesthetic…human general helps dwarves in a famous battle, then much later dies. Dwarves make ridiculous water clock tower tomb for general, complete with animated terra cotta statue guards and a crystal display case (as we all learned from Snow White, dwarves make see-through coffins for their human friends). General’s neglected peasant girlfriend haunts the tomb as a banshee. Tower falls to disrepair, now it’s lootin’ time. Sic transit gloria mundi.
  The map is a somewhat scribbly pair of phone pictures, which would normally be okay but given that the main thrust of the adventure is about disabling the mechanisms holding the tomb bubble underneath the water, which means we’re going to have to grade this as a diagram in a way…and it’s a little bit confusing as a diagram. With key access it’s workable, but I’m a little worried about how an exploring group of PCs organically grok the mechanism in the course of exploring it. 

​  By default, while the players stand around gormlessly discussing things, the dungeon solves itself violently. There’s a dungeon clock that goes on, with gear doors shifting, giant hawks roosting on the tower’s top come back from a hunt, a rust monster inside eats a spindle and locks the door into one configuration, and then finally on Turn 10, a rival thieving party breaks dirt within a proscribed radius and half the statues animate for a royal row. I don’t object to clocks. I like clocks. But I hate sites that are held in perfect stasis until the players hit the encounter button and start the clock…if you want a set-piece that’s great, and the timeline works fine for a racing exploration/looting of a tower, but more effort going in to how the players poking the site starts the clock would be appreciated. Potential energy, good, but something about how knocking on the door (or whatever) kicks of the sequence would be good, because that kind of sequence thinking also helps when player zig instead of zag.
  Monster roster is light, just said rival thieves, rust monster, yellow mold, animated statues, and of course, the banshee. She’s not the classic elfin Bane Sidhe here, more of a much gentler ghost with a temporary level drain and a fear effect. Pretty sure the author is channeling childhood fears of the library ghost in Ghostbusters there, but custom monsters are welcome here and she’s a good NPC/threat. As is only right and proper, the players #1 threat is the players themselves; they can very easily screw things up and wash away a ton of treasure in their enthusiastic attempts to get at it.
  Treasure feels just about right for level 4, although level 6’s might feel a touch underpaid. The whole of the site’s cash loot (no value given for all this dressed stone, ACKS-fail) rests on with the general in his crystal tomb, so players walk in and see it first thing…if the players go in the front door, which no players ever do. Good idea, though, and it’s a nice hoard, including an unlisted-at-first Sword +3 Frost Brand, that’s something huge at this level. Just getting to it is the difficulty.
  This is a very ACKS adventure, going into the precise volumes of water needing to be lowered, all kinds of Roman history, clockwork craftsdwarves…but none of that is in direct conflict with baseline D&D. The banshee, being called a banshee, might really mess up some genre-savvy players, but it’s a fine level 4 boss monster as it is, and the % chance of human PCs being the general’s offspring is really a solid idea. Would go up to 6 with it, but some 4’s would have a good night here.

​Written by Sneedler Chuckworth
OD&D, levels 5-7
Earth Dragon lair.
  The dread wizard Zothblimzo promises the party’s arcane casters both free training for 3 levels and to
them any spells from levels 1-3 (max 99% chance to know) if they find a treatise written by their enemy,
Forxximon, on the mating habits of Fire Elementals. Such a treatise is of immense import to Zothblimzo.
Zothblimzo has used Contact Other Plane to determine Forxximon has “died in a ditch” – the wording
exactly! - and said treatise was on the very person of Forxximon at the time of his death.
  There are some bits of internetism that I’m just not up on. As a 39-year-old I’ve got all the older millennial humor down pat, but there are plenty of jokes that are basically “after my time”, particularly in the splintering of subcultures that has happened in the last decade and a half. I see them, vaguely recognize that there is an inside joke there, but just have to shrug and move on. This adventure is submitted by one “Sneedler Chucksworth”, so I’m expecting this to be less than serious even though I’m not up on whatever this reference is. I know better than to ask.
  The names are a little silly, the writeup is wry and jokey, and the stocking is a bit random, but what we have here is actually a pretty normal “dragon lair with some stuff” site. A pair of earth dragons hang out in a cave with some elemental fire temple theming nearby, a mix of firetoads, naked giant crazy cultists, and the usual semi-random dungeon oddities (Fiend Folio heavily used) salted in. Not a lot of story here beyond the #1 hook seen above with a fire-elemental loving wizard getting himself scrunched. Wander around playing OD&D, very normal.
  The map would be dismayingly linear if there wasn’t a little vertical portion that consists of three shafts connected by a tunnel; that makes section-to-section able to be bypassed with care (although B and C are swapped from how they should be, going by key clues). Fifteen keyed rooms is a fine size for exploration, and you can go overboard with loops sometimes. I’d have liked a little bit of either explanation or mapping of the area above the caves, given the odd mix of stairs down vs. flyable chimney for the two ingress points. I’m not sure if I’d have displayed the vertical sub-tunnel bit like that, but it works great for an exploration zone.

  The monsters here are weird, as befits a Fiend Folio raid. Obviously, earth dragons are a FF standby in the far too common trend of “even more dragon types”, but there are also firetoads, a sheet phantom, quallans, caryatid columns, a freaking flail snail…you stare in shock at the giant spiders when they come up, standard creatures are that rare. Dangerous creatures are also typically telegraphed. Every dead body within the speak with dead timeframe has some knowledge noted, while even the rats and spiders can be spoken with. The firetoads being chatty is a particular surprise, while the dragon does not have much patience despite being described as “personable”…
  There’s a ton of interaction with not just monsters, too. There’s a statue looking like “the guy on the cover of the DMG” who demands blood sacrifice in return for fire powers, there are nasty traps around chests, there’s a dead-end trap room with a fake door and a dead end treasure hall with a fire-rat semi-cursed wishing well that defaults to granting a rat in a pocket. The traps are not telegraphed typically, nor are most secret doors, but hating thieves is an OD&D staple.
  As I’d hope from a dragon adventure, there’s some treasure in here. The main hoard at 144k will be the vast majority of the treasure here but magic items are all over the place, with items like boots of variable tracks and a lyre of interruption adding welcome interest. The cursed sword picked up early is very nice, and the biggest-for-a-campaign items are probably the trio arrows of fighter-slaying hidden in a well (with a bonus treasure map hinting at it). The crushed lost wizard is loaded out with a fire elemental seduction spell loadout, which, again, is kind of a weird joke but also makes for a valuable treasure result.
  There’s enough legit D&D here to make this a fun site, and despite the lolrandom elements a little shoving should be able to get this into a campaign. In a way it’s a pity there’s the humor element to the writeup because it would make for a satisfying night of D&D.

​A village adventure by Pointless Monument Games, level diagetic
Written for Cairn
  In honor of this stupid pointless game system, I’m going to write a small deathtrap dungeon called “Diagenes’ Cairn”, where everything is a pale and sad simulacrum of reality and if the player characters do survive the gold they plunder turns to ash in their hands. So needless to say I’m a touch ill-disposed towards Cairn adventures, this little one-pager is thus starting off on the back foot. It’s an outdoor woodsy adventure, which is the Cairn motif I do in fact enjoy, so maybe it’ll be decent.
  The story is told somewhat randomly in the single big landscape-layout page…there’s an old abandoned church, its being used as a roost by a gigantic crow, bucolic local rubes find the big bird’s predations objectionable, players go on a quest to solve this because that’s what we have to do or else we don’t play tonight. Oh, and I guess a local wizard wants giant bird eyes, so that’s your quest item if you’re in the “gather 10 bristle boar spleens” RPG quest design mindset. Unobjectionable. The whole thing is less set up as a key-and-location, more of a situation to deal with as the players see fit.
  So sure, what I liked is that there’s not a massive railroad setup here, just a set of clues, rumors, events, and then a consequence list, that’s decent design with its heart in the right place. I like that fighting the big bird in the church has a couple of quest-friendly results, notably eggs in the nest leading to possible flying-mount-training, and that the church needs to be re-consecrated due to bloodshed but the last priest of that particular god died two centuries ago, that have some potential. The author knows that ringing the ancient church bell is inevitable for a set-piece bossfight, good instinct. “What if we demolish the dungeon while it’s out hunting?” is also answered, so good thought. Map is pretty.
  What can be improved, though, is to playtest and think through what happens with your light railroad-free investigation when the players don’t put 2-and-2 together. Very tenuous clues mean that the DM will be going full GUMSHOE and just saying “so you put this together and go here” by the end of it. The non-consecration “potential consequences” things are also barely hooks, not particularly quest-spawning or even all that interesting. Basically, this needs to either be bigger to be fleshed out into a full-fledged investigatory adventure or condensed down into a two-line hex key entry. This is a Wilderland hex, basically. Said pretty map is sadly not very useful.
  So, tragically, we have an awkward best use case in either making this a little hex quest in a sprawling proper campaign, or else a rather thin 90-minute mystery one-shot. Nothing original is here worth stealing as a creative bit, alas.
  Final Rating? */***** but not a particularly angry one, its sins are more in scope of imagination than in any active issues. 

​Written by Alex Edwards
OSRIC, levels 1-9 (hee hee hee NO)
Roc nest full of bandits.
  A Roc nests in the ruin of a temple set on a 250ft stone pillar overlooking a desolate hex. Brigand Horde & other Creatures of Chaos use the caverns beneath the temple as a base from which to raid local settlements.
  If you enjoy striking prominences, this contest has got you covered. Obviously we started with a ridiculously tall monadnock, and recently a pair of desert spires menaced and confused us…now we have a rocky tor, less enormous than the others but still extremely prominent. Add all the towers we’re reviewing (and of yes, more to come), and we might even call this one the Year of the Spire.
  Imma get us to the content, but first I’m going to talk about this one’s format a bit. It’s…a little strange. First page is single-column, starting with a tiny blurb, a line of hooks in italics, then the bestiary, which is personality notes along with order of battle notes along with faction breakdown. Then you have two-column keys, with monsters highlighted in yellow and treasure highlighted in blue (which, by the way, is pretty unreadable if printed out), with a bit of referee notage in the back. Each paragraph is separated by grey vs white background, which is probably what the author had to do because of his hatred of whitespace. Then we get to the map, which, while clear, has a nearly random sequence of rooms keyed to the alphabet. None of it is fatal, but it’s a little weird.
  Our story is pretty simple, there’s a high tor that used to house a temple to Nike, now being used as a nest by a roc. A warlord with special Potions of Roc Control has set up camp in the caves and allied with harpies and vulchlings, enslaved some mongrelmen, tamed some hippogryphons, and now Plots Vague Villainy while his lieutenants squabble. Of and also one lieutenant is lawful good and trying to spy on the warlord’s band and has friends in the nearby woodlands. The adventure suggests level 1’s be introduced to the location by being swept up and dumped into the nest, their adventure then an escape, to return later to rescue a princess (who’s actually evil and shacked up with a minotaur lieutenant) or overthrow the warlord. It’s an idea, but one rather…fraught with risk.
  First impression of the map gave me flashbacks to EE 101, but it’s clear enough upon studying. My biggest question is how I’d convey the somewhat sketchy diagram style to my mapper (also there’s an error in the passage to the right T/S, need stairs there). It’s a neat environment, a ton of movement possible on the X, Y, and Z axis, and there’s a lot to explore in a lot of different directions. Secret doors are all in logical, realistic places, pity they’re mostly just nasty nightmare fights. Also bonus points for a well in the middle there, a fortress that might be besieged needs a good water supply. Very unique style but I think I dig it. 

  If you send level 1’s up against this one I hope you’re planning on making this a funnel, because there are a lot of instadeaths for them. Although technically the hit dice are enough to be a threat (120 brigands total, for example), I would also expect a level 9 group to butcher this fortress in moments. All the monsters and NPCs have a real personality to them and friendly reaction rolls, interrogation, and/or trickery should yield some fun interactions. Nice side note, there’s an “insert NPC prisoner(s) here” jail location that’s a great spot to add friendly captives for campaign integration. Nobody in this joint is particularly fond of the warlord, in addition to the spy and her waiting allies the mongrelmen aren’t particularly loyal, there’s twenty orc ladies in the harem that are getting bored with him, the Regulation Bandit Band Wizard is uncaring about anything other than demonology, the minotaur lazy but being encouraged to usurp the warlord…it’s a powderkeg, you love to see it. The roc herself (named “Vengeance of the Azure Abyss” and boy that’s a great title) has her own egg-related goals, and she ignores humanoids normally as not big enough to bother. There’s a good set of orders of battle for various rooms. The only thing I’m not fond of are the three secret rooms that are each filled with four mummies wielding +1 battle axes, that’s a pretty crummy reward for discovering a secret.
  This adventure is sure to blue-highlight those +1 battle axes. The fact that the author is counting the magic weapons for XP means that we’re thinking hard about the budget, and there’s adequate if not generous amounts here for the middle of the level range given (once again, this isn’t really 1-9). Pleasing mix of coins, jewelry, and a few bulky items (mundane equipment is in the budget). Magic items are going to be pretty mundane, +1 arms and armor mostly with potions, but the amounts are plentiful at least. +1 silk robes are a nice side for the poor wizards. A good spellbook in the warband’s wizard’s hands will make your own MU happy.
  Hard to imagine this one not working in most campaigns. I’d disagree with the suggested early inclusion and it’s not going to be much of a threat at the top of the level range, but midrange this is a very solid ultra-prominence to include in your game. As a lover of rocs, I think this is a roc done right.

Written by Peter McDevitt
OSE, levels not listed (HD 8+3 monster present)
Fish in a lake near a lair neath a bridge o’r a gorge in a hill in a land on a log in the bottom of the sea.
  The party may find themselves hexcrawling across mountains. The only way to transverse a particular hex is by crossing a narrow bridge above a gorge with a long, narrow lake at the bottom. The bridge is flat and thin, 80’ long and 10' wide. It appears to have been molded from a single piece of stone, as if it was a natural extension of the cliffs.
  One of my earliest posts here is on dungeon scale, where I talk about the simplest and most humble of the dungeon family, the lair. Not something as big or impressive as a lofty dungeon, nor even a single-session adventure site, there’s nevertheless a very real use case for tiny locations with 5-ish rooms, stuff where a little sleuth of owlbears hang out, where a roc is nesting, or, in this case, where a giant catfish lurks to eat bits of victims from a lurking rhagodessa. A good lair is golden, worth an hour’s enchanting diversion in the midst of a hexcrawl or urban investigation. Mr. McDevitt, a contributor to last year’s compilation, goes smaller than an adventure site here with a little lair offering, just a single page plus map.
  There’s not much to this beyond the opening blurb. It’s a bridge where a rhagodessa ambushes people. Try to get past it. There are ancient petroglyphs and a shrine too, but no deep story interacting with the rest of the content.
  Just because they’re tiny doesn’t mean lair mapping isn’t also important. Good environment for an ambush, nice verticality, good flow, charming monster catfish illustration. My critique in general is going to be on scope for this submission, and that’s clear here, where we could have used this general layout expanded to a full-fledged adventure site…but evaluating just as an ambush location/lair? Perfect, 10/10, no notes.
  For the location’s threats, you’ll see the second verse, same as the first. Neat monster in the giant rhagodessa (whip scorpion, camel spider), which is a wall-crawler designed to snatch the luckless last man over the bridge and take him back to the cave to get et. The big catfish is hanging out at the bottom to attack those who fall in. It’s a good pitched battle, but that’s about it. There’s a nice jumpscare with an apparent second rhagodessa that’s actually a molted exoskeleton, but that’s a potential trap. Nuthin. Nor is there anything in the lower cave by the lake, traps or tricks here would add interest.
  Treasure is also very paltry, which isn’t the worst thing but it’s a little sad given danger level for the rewards to be victim-treasure, including a very valuable gold belt in the catfish’s belly. The eggs might be worth something, the glyphs might point to something…nope, that’s all too much, and would in fact be scope creep if we’re just using this as a lair.
  I hope you can tell my difficulty in judging this one, because I’m delighted with this as a little ambush site. Put in on your map if you have the geography, it’s a fun encounter. I’m just tantalized at the shadow of the full adventure site that could be here instead. 

​Written by Nicholas Alexander
AD&D (but actually LotFP), levels 5-7
Fire giant tower/forge
  On a blasted hill, squats a foundry of blackened brick & iron, belching acrid fumes day & night. Wise men call it cursed.
  What is the appeal of edge? In the year 2025, every conceivable boundary has been violated up, down, and sideways. The degenerate Mork Borg gleefully embraces a black metal aesthetic while its subject matter barely merits a raised eyebrow, everyone buying it can be comforted that nothing genuinely transgressive will appear. Lamentation of the Flame Princess adventures are often genuinely gross and stomach-churningly distasteful, but, again, it’s 2025, even when you manage to be off-putting, decades of internet means that at best you’ve added just one more goatse.jpg to the pile. If you’re playing this at the table it seems to be vaguely…sad, it means aging Millennials or Gen X chortle about norm violations that a zoomer yawns over and calls “cringe” at best. Trust me, the kids have seen it.
  Foundry Ovens is a dungeon built around a bitter and confused fire giant rapist. It’s not backstory, it’s not subtle, the fire giant is all about kidnapping local women, raping them, then melting them into iron statues while enduring erotic dreams of his mother. There’s a Cairn-esque table of kidnapping/rape victims and their personalities. Also there’s a subtheme of a leprechaun torturer who castrates prisoners and keeps one around in a gimp mask. Apply grease, heat, and a layer of soot and grime and you have your document. It’s just one trip to Hot Topic away from being sent in to LotFP. I can hear James Raggi smacking his wet tongue deep within his jowly cheeks in anticipation. The DIY MS Paint artwork would appeal to the Mork Borg crew but I suspect the subject matter would have them too uncomfortable.

  The map conveys everything well. The foundry is a lonely brick town with an iron fence and guard-hellhounds, accessed very explicitly on multiple levels with ladders and gantries (guard patrols on some of them), accessed on the roof (wyverns nearby summonable), and not accessed hardly at all by a big front door. It’s fine, nobody uses the front door. Inside the fairly complex multi-level forge is set up with a network of gantries and torture devices on the first three floors before the jail and bedroom up top. All makes sense for a fantasy layout.
  As you’d expect for the structure, the biggest risk for moving around is gravity. Fall sections outside and in couple with risky hooks where treasure or captives dangle, offering a tense thieving scene. What surprised me is that there aren’t any big damage/hazard bit relating to the intense heat in the foundry, the center has a portal to the para-elemental plane of magma, for pity’s sake (okay, actually running in the rim of the portal can make a PC pass out). I know at this level they should have resist heat options, but it’s not every party that packs enough for everyone. Vision is blurry in all the steam, that’s something at least. Damaging vent pipes can make gas explosions, which is good, while capping the magma well will explode the foundry with a 1-in-4 chance of mercifully killing every benighted soul inside. 

  Giantkin (verbeeg), hobgoblins (extra abused), and hellhounds are the “common” fight, while there’s a salting up sub-bosses in a flesh golem, a doppelganger, a ghost, an efreeti, a leprechaun…the titular Paramore himself is a reasonably tough fire giant fire, at least won’t see level 7’s fall asleep. New monster in the form of the Brides of Chlimbia, iron statues with burnt corpses inside, hard to use but also a nicely horrific threat. Your basic NPCs to talk with are victims, like Dog the castrated and lobotomized paladin who wears his own severed genitals around his neck and is completely insane. Enjoyable image, eh?
  Big chunks of treasure are carried on the bosses’ own persons (metaphor detected), the overall environment is rather parsimonious, and runs to things like a gold and pearl encrusted chastity belt or amateur paintings done on flayed human skin. There is a good “treasure” in rescuing a mad tortured merchant gives the party his family’s gratitude, that’s a good hook/reward to sprinkle into an adventure. A few of the kidnapped rape victims might help out as henchwomen if the Cairn table gets rolled on the right way. Big miss on valuation is a huge brass bell on top of the tower, being used to summon wyverns. That sucker needs a gp price tag that inspires party shenanigans for how to steal a ton of brass way the hell up in the air of a tower’s roof.
  There’s no shortage of hooks available if you’d enjoy putting this into your campaign. There’s not much way to censor or remove themes, so that’s going to be a careful choice there very much dependent on your own table’s desire for edgy content. 

Written by Matthew Lake
B/X, levels 3-5
Sunken wizard tower
  From the surface it’s just a crumbling ruin. But beneath the waves lies the arcane lair of the great wizard Thassalius. Can you unlock the wizard’s fabled library? Dare you plunder his flooded treasure vault? Will you prove yourself against his mutated creations? There’s only one way to find out...
  Wizard towers crop up often enough to feel trite, as discussed before. While I’ll defend the use of tropes to my dying day, there’s also something nice about shaking them up, varying things a bit. How about a wizard tower…underwater? Mr. Lake here embraces nominative determinism and places this tower in a lake, introducing with a lovely old painting on the cover page, sprinkled with illustrations from one of his players. As always this is not an art contest but Tommi Mason (@thefaunaartist) does an excellent job here with the marginalia. I don’t often comment about writing style but I dig the occasional wry observation sprinkled throughout in this one.
  In the end this is a love story. Wizard falls in love with a mermaid. Sinks his tower and obsessively dedicates his entire life to being able to be with her. Eventually figures out how to turn himself into a merdude, leaves it all behind, and we are hopeful that it ends happily ever after. His tower is left behind and now you get to loot it with three to six of your very best friends. Why has it been unmolested for the past three decades? No idea, but hey, its starting to flood now…
  As a note this has rules for swimming, wading, and underwater combat. I’m not a Basic expert, so I have no idea how these stack up against the 3,210,563,558 other Underwater Combat Rules made for B/X and its many degenerate clones. Seem reasonable though.
  The map is excellent. Not only do we have the “tackle this by climbing outside” solution to the Tower Problem, complicated by swimming, but there’s also a main set of stairs, a shaft, a whirlpool, and a pit trap for up/down, meaning this place has a lot of exploratory options. A dizzying amount of options, thank goodness for the side view cutaway and good clean linework to make it all clear. Not a lot is secret, but good mapping will at least hint on a few key ones. For the scale (which with 22 keys is about top for the ideal size), it’s darned near perfect. 

  All of that feeds into the environmental effects and challenge. A lower water spell, failing, keeps the tower mostly dry but of course that’s something that can be broken by enterprising players. I’m a little unclear how the airlock is supposed to work but everything else is just great. A magic gizmo can lower the water level for a few turns, or else be removed to flood the whole tower. Hazards are mostly falling and drowning, with a few very nasty curves through here and there…how do you feel about a trap that teleports half your party underwater in reach of wights?
  Great variety of monsters packed into this tower, mostly book monsters (like those nasty wights in the flooded dungeon) but with a couple tasteful new monsters (illustrated, woot) like the cauldron crabs (giant hermit crabs wearing cauldrons) and the mer-owlbear. I love the mer-owlbear and I wish to subscribe to his newsletter. He’s also the “boss” of the tower, fwiw. There are also some NPCs for interaction, a luckless rival adventurer party and an invisible stalker pressed into service as a janitor. The only criticism I have for the monsters is that it’s a little dense in here, I’d want a little more spacing between contacts personally, going to be a little bit of a slog despite all the work on good interactive bits too.
  Treasure is nicely varied and tends towards “hard to extract”. Actually, in a mean move, the one high-value (8k) easy-to-carry treasure piece is the crystal that floods the whole tower, so how’s that for a kick in the jimmies. The treasure room has bars and bars of silver with a wry comment about the wizard’s love of the silver standard. Nasty merfolk mutant corpses valuable as freak show attractions, there’s creativity here. Magic items are book standard but good, and the spellbook and scrolls here will make your party’s own wizard very happy. My own preference would have been to have a little more of the treasure “forward” in the top two levels, but that’s a mild quibble.
  My mind struggles to think of a D&D world where this wouldn’t work. Wizards’ towers are the bread and butter of your low-level delves, and lakes and seas are everywhere. It’s not so high magic as to be gonzo, just works for almost any D&D campaign.

Written by Louis-Joseph Benoit
OD&D, levels 3-4 (with hirelings)
Desert outpost
  Situated in a desert and flanked by a cliff, this outpost is visible from afar (and vice-versa). Two 100’ spires dart towards the sky, like shiny needles. They seem linked at their third by a hanging rope bridge. To the East, two domed buildings, a hut and an encampment. A couple hundred people must live there. To the West, a pasture with bushes and eight-legged beasts, studded with white dots in the sand. This outpost was built on the site of a battle won with the Hammer of Glory and is a safe place… for the daring. It is occupied by pariahs of the Copper Men and (recently) by orc mercenaries.
  This one’s fresh, my friends, and weird as heck. OD&D makes for some pretty original content in general, but when coupled with a non-Anglophone play tradition like happens here, there’s some very different to experience. I don’t know much about the French D&D scene but it seems like we’re into gonzo in a retro-scifi kind of way, it’s not my favorite vibe but I respect going this hard in the paint for it.
  We have here a visually impressive site, a twin set of rocky spires rising out of the desert next to a cliff. A neutral group of Copper Men, ancient telepathic desert people who use special crossbows (in the author’s own game, radium-powered pistols), hide from their fellows while negotiating with a band of orc mercenaries for help in genociding their oppressive fellows. The majority of the site is dedicated to these generally non-hostile people, with a little bit of undead nastiness beneath the spires in the form of swarming undead all guarding a Hammer of Glory. Neat.
  The map is…confusing, to be honest. The idea of mixing a side-view and a top-down view is good, but, well, YOU try and make sense of this:

  Biggest issue is that the main “crawl” portion of this site is only three keys, despite that very loopy cave map. You wander around facing the pretty dangerous undead without traps or treasure in most of those blobs, while the spires are too abstract to be run as a full assault if you’re of a mind to. The map is rough enough that it is actually more confusing than theatre of the mind. I had to read the text to picture where we’re going.
  When I say dangerous, I mean dangerous. Multiple wraiths, a mummy, a spectre, and zombie/skeleton swarms averaging 24.5 individuals. My gut on OD&D balance isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty confident that those are pretty rough for level 3-4 characters, even though the wraiths and the mummy are very low-HP per hit die. There are also hundreds of Copper Men and orcs if your party is foolish enough to kick things off with them. Couple that with traps like a lightning bolt trap, a finger of death…yeesh these are gnarly. I like the custom “Reptoctohorses”, which as the name would suggest are eight-legged lizard horses, cool. Interactions with the NPCs are great, all the named NPCs have personalities and different interactions based on different reaction rolls. I especially like the dhampir witch/alchemist with her big stock of boons and banes (fake healing potions are actually green slimes with continual light cast on them).
  Beyond potions to steal and worn equipment which gets valued, the bulk of the treasure here is in the undead underground section, and it is pretty cash-light overall. There’s a trend of the real treasure being the friends we found along the way, with sage services, arms and armor for sale, hirelings and food offered in a desert environment, and of course the alchemist witch offering the good stuff if she takes a shine to your heroes. I’d say that, but the Hammer of Glory is a campaign-altering weapon, +1/+3 vs goblins, Chaos, and magicians, additional d6 damage for lawful fighters and clerics, 1/day casts of fly and cure serious wounds. I love this weapon and I’m going to use it.
  Using the entire site is going to be…complicated. It’s weird enough that adaptation would definitely lose some of its not inconsiderable charms, while there’s a ton of effort here both in the running (communicating the map) and the playing (that threat roster). It’s a thing both wild and attractive, but, much like a telepathic milksap-eating lizard octo-horse, it is going to be a beast to saddle up and ride.