A quest by William Greve, levels unlisted. Written for 5E What? Itch.io actually has 5E content? Well, it’s 5E, but “content” is debatable I suppose. Thieves’ Quests: The Early Bird is nine pages, plus two map pages, taken to describe a simple quest given by a thieves’ guild to raid a secret agent’s apartment for information she’s been gathering on a valuable alchemist and I can’t keep describing this my eyes are bleeding. Cute and anachronistic MS-paint illustrations certainly make it a colorful product, and the formatting is inoffensive, but it is over-written beyond belief, hammering away at things shown by those illustrations and the very detailed maps. It’s all very wearying. What we have here is basically a heist, breaking into the apartment (!) of the secret police agent (!!) above a restaurant (!!!). The main gimmick is that the agent lady has a magic desk that with a drawer that uses different mechanical bird-heads of all the apartment’s many clockwork birds (!!!!) to open into different contents. Wandering around the apartment contains no real risks outside of a single trapped crow-head, and the pressure is “if the DM feels like it, maybe the agent returns early”. The main solution to the drawer-puzzle is a brass cuckoo in a clock, plus the hint of a headless goose meandering upstairs. That’s more or less it. I’m having an issue saying what I liked without qualifiers, unfortunately. The illustrations, as I mentioned, are cute…the maps are at least well-drawn, very filled-in with details. There’s some merit to the basic idea of a magical drawer that has different contents based on different opening knobs…I wouldn’t have gone exactly the way the author did with it, but it’s a decent idea. Alas, what can be improved won’t be as much as you might think, probably as an artifact of how thin the premise is. You might expect me to scream about the cosmopolitanism of the setting, but along with the restauranter being a stylish and friendly half-orc (!!!!!) these are just 5E-isms, there’s no more point in complaining about them or encouraging their abandonment than in trying to prevent the sunrise. What can be done is of course adding more *incident*, not just in terms of more traps, but in terms of possible physical threats to overcome, wandering guard/cook/policeman to be evaded, a confrontation with the secret agent…let this quest have *adventure*. That can be done to improve this product even within the nightmarish postmodern anachronism stew that is its context. Best use case then is to steal and adapt the one okay idea in the magical drawer I guess? Even with the most banal 5E group I can’t see playing this as it is to be enjoyable. Thus your “parts” use case, but that’s not worth the hassle of unzipping the highly compressed file stack this sucker came in. Final Rating? */***** at the very kindest, even by the dismal standards of 5E dreck.
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An “adventure” by Brett Sullivan & Fern Cliff Studio, levels unlisted. Written for any system One pager alert. The Spoiled Hollow is a charmingly illustrated little adventure…er…set of adventure ideas set in an isolated little valley with a lake in the middle. I recognized the charming art style of Fern Cliff Studio, which I had quite liked in At the River’s Edge. The style of multiple possibilities for each doohicky present on the map, though, works better in a mini-campaign-scale sandbox region as opposed to this tiny little vale, which would at most be a single hex. I’m capable of solving this, but the author gave me homework, and I resent that. I shall have to spend time staring at the cute little waterfall drawings to soothe my troubled spirit. Okay, so there is a story here, a situation that can be sussed out. Formerly peaceful little hollow, now massive thorny vines are erupting, local wildlife gets blighted, lord of the tower in the lake has disappeared. The details are very shiftable based on these little d4 or d6 tables…I say, the real interest happens if you see the fork in the road and take it. The Abby of…The Maiden of Sorrow, aka Sister of the Peaceful Tenders, aka mother of the Marked Ones, aka she of the Knowing Eyes. Don’t roll, just have all of them true, and enjoy the contradictions. The village? Why not have it be overgrown, inhabited by blighted humanoids, full of happy and healthy people oblivious to the blight, and also be the lair of a huge monster? That is a place to have adventures in. With that modification you have a fun, if distressingly vague about stats/details, adventure here. The home containing an angry/sad/monstrous/lonely/shy/helpful hermit murderer farmer orphan lycanthrope scholar might require D&D 3.5 with full splatbooks to stat out, though. As the author is the cartographer, I’m happy to say what I liked is the map. Slap that puppy down on the table without markings and it’s going to lead to all manner of “I want to go to there” gameplay. As usual the table content is a mixed back of quality, but I liked more than I didn’t here. Particular points for wingless warped blight-gryphons as a monster threat, mourning their sacrificed eggs. You know what I’m going to be saying, but what can be improved is to collapse the tables into singular descriptions. Particularly with a 1-pager, this is a single hex’s contents, and potentially a very good hex at that with some direction given. This wild creativity is impressive in its way but pruned and tended by the gardener’s hand it could have produced even more fruit. That would have also given room for STATISTICS or SPECIFIC NUMBERS, which greatly reduce the burden placed upon the longsuffering man at the table trying to actually turn your vision into a solid gameplay experience for 3-5 hours. Yeah, best use case for the Spoiled Hollow is as a hex’s adventure site, particularly with that lovely illustration/map. There’s a lot of effort implied in turning the tables into a usable adventure, so I might just eschew them in favor of my favorite random encounter generator(s), but there’s definitely a good time if you take all the options as true at once. Not a lot of stripping for parts, sadly. Final Rating? **/***** because of the awkward fit. I like so much here, but it’s a heck of a lot of work to bring to the table. Five stars for the map as object d’art, however. A dungeon by Scott Malthouse, level 3 Written for Heartseeker I find myself wondering about the process here for coming up with an adventure’s name. Are we to contemplate a dread bishop’s own ruined remains, or are we instead being called to explore ruins once belonging to this dread bishop? Idle musings, really, but when a four-page product uses half its meager count to detail a mere seven locations outlined in yet another dreaded node map…well, the mind begins to wander. Heartseeker once more, because it was how my Google drive sorted my itch.io downloading spree. I wonder if this, with double the page count, will be a better representative adventure than last time? Basic setup is that the Dre…er, the Veiled Bishop, one Mr. [404 name not found], was once a very greedy fellow who was very bad and took too many tithes while being directly worshipped by his bishopric. If his people didn’t pay cash money he took the difference in souls and anyway now he’s dead but his soul is in a reliquary and it’s all very standard. Gorgeous piece of art being used for the cover image/node diagram background, I don’t recognize the work exactly, but it has a STRONG Hudson River School feel, wonderous and moody. It’s doing a lot of work. Now what I liked isn’t complex, but simple isn’t bad…there’s a move made to attempt a little bit of interaction, with a crazy bird lady wanting her favorite dagger/ogre’s pet goblin whole stole it/clear water where ogre threw the dagger also showing skeletons, that’s a solid triangle right there. I don’t hate the stab at puzzle-encounter design with undead crusaders in the main sanctuary standing on black squares in a checker pattern. Shyly hinted-at alternate means of vanquishing the bishop’s ghost, namely ringing the ancient church bell, is a cool idea with a decent complication of needing to rehang said bell… …but what can be improved is actually allowing any of those good ideas to be implemented. The bell thing? As written, you might have SEVEN undead whaling on the party while they take multiple rounds to do it (also note variable amounts of adds again, grump). That little drama with the dagger? The bird lady attacks by default, the ogre and goblin attack by default, and the skeletons rise to attack by default. There was potentially something decent here, but then you turned it into a boring hackfest. It almost doesn’t need to be said, but I need to say it…GIVE US A REAL MAP. I understand cartography is scary, but the adventure is set in a ruined church, there are millions of church schematics available, so many that even 2023’s Google could find them. Physical geography always improves an adventure. I’m going to regretfully say that the best use case for Ruins of the Dread Bishop is to look up what whoever that artist was for the inspiration artwork and adventure from that instead. The hackfest is okay but nothing new, the few flashes of good content aren’t anything so novel that you’d want to steal them. Maybe the undead-dispersing church bell? But I feel like I’ve seen that before… Final Rating? */***** not with hate or annoyance, just with mild disappointment. 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. 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. 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. 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. Written by Richard Sharpe. B/X, For levels 4-5 White dragon lair beneath a mountain fortress. The fair Princess Gwaelin needs rescuing, but the white dragon Frostfire guards her in the cavern below Black Gate Castle. With this, we’ve reached the end of our submissions…and what a rewarding trip it has been. I’m sure we’ll end it quietly, with a little trip to -NOPE DRAGON LAIR. In Frostfire’s Durance Vile we have the most classic trope of the genre…a princess, held captive by a dragon, within a fortress. Richard Shape tackles the classic with vast amounts of energy, vast amounts of thought, vast amounts of content…one might even say too much, were one a churl. As an aside, there’s an artist credited, one Luis Torres, who’s done a brilliant job on the two pieces used here; the cover art shows the titular Frostfire being confronted by a trio of PCs…the cover is great, Frostfire is grinning with predatory glee at the puny heroes, positively delighted to have them visit, supreme in confidence and utterly unconcerned. The custom monster, the psionic ghoulish batlike “Hellwing”, gets a lovely sketch as well. Show that to your players and they’ll go “oh crap…” We’re not here to grade art though, how’s the text? Single column slightly surprised me considering how much content the author’s working to cram in, but it’s not terrible to read. There are bullets inside the paragraphs dividing out features, which works, it’s not instantly parsed but a little study goes a lot way. Clearly a student of the Lynch school, the text is sure to add flashy and evocative language (bones are “moldering”, stalactites “hang like teeth”), but never to the point of obscuring the facts. There’s a challenge in organization here, given the scope of the adventure, which Sharpe charges directly at by ignoring rumors, hooks, or preamble to go directly to “you are all recruited by some knights to sneak into the site, they have multiple plans (but if this is a one-shot, use just the fastest one)”. I’m not against that as an intro for a one-shot, but if it’s a place on a map, you can make it organic. The scenario itself is dynamic and time-sensitive, which is great for plotted adventures but can be a problem for a site. The maps for this are…also a lot. The dragon’s lair proper is buried deep beneath a dungeon, within the keep, that’s within a massive castle, up in the hills, within a kingdom that has a criminal Black Legion. The focus of the adventure site is the cavernous white dragon lair, which is right and proper, but the realistic and direct maps of said castle, keep, and dungeon means an enterprising dungeon master could certainly run the full adventure that was obviously planned. By default, though, everyone gets dumped into the lair beneath, and it’s…pretty solid. Much like in the keep above, a lot of efforts have been poured into making it a plausible, semi-realistic environment, but it’s saved from being just caves-in-line-with-caves by a stream that runs throughout the environment, heralded by the echoing thunder of multiple waterfalls, accessed by ledges that lead to perilous ways around the main path (which requires its own ledge-scaling). Multiple methods of entering the lair…yeah, I’ll count it. One note on the map vs key, the keys list “11” twice and I’m not entirely sure which room is supposed to be #12. The adventure hinges mainly on using one or two of the “Orbs of Frost Shield”, spheres made of ice (and as fragile as ice) that emanate a spherical…uh, frost shield. Good item in a vacuum, although somewhat videogamey to be the lair of a white dragon, in the full module I’d recommend rumors of them being a side quest. The aforementioned hellwings are a fun threat, psionic swoopers who’ll probably focus first on your wizard and cleric. The main doors to the dragon’s lair are flanked by massive stone statues with red gems in their foreheads, rock golems with fire-ray attacks, which is a great curveball to throw against a party loaded up on cold resistance in preparation for a white dragon. All good, then it’s straight to the dragon, who is described with thunderous poetic vigor…but then we’re never told his age category. Just his dimensions, so I guess we need to go back to figure that out from our B/X bestiary? Treasure, outside of those two golem’s fire-rubies, only exists in the dragon’s hoard (located at key 11 or 12). The hoard is appropriately nice, 50k plus a frost brand sword…in mixed silver, gold, gems, and jewelry. What’s the mixture of this incredible hoard the PCs are going to have to sneak out beneath a well-garrisoned castle? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s not actually all that difficult to place Frostfire’s Durance Vile and the keep above it into most campaigns…Black Legions made of criminals, chaos-corrupted barons, and controlled white dragons are all very plausible. To use the whole thing I’d need a lot of seeding beforehand, though. This is without a doubt a wonderful adventure, either a one-shot or, as I’d recommend to the author, expanded into a full 8-page module designed as a full-fledged adventure...keep it this sleek, just assume about 4-5 sessions. As an adventure site, it definitely strains its bonds. One heck of a crescendo to end the contest on though, thunderous stuff. |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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