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.
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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. 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. Written by Peter McDevitt. B/X, For “cautious low-levels” Huge mound in a forest. A notable sage or occultist has uncovered an ancient map showing the location of an ancient temple. Go forth and bring back any interesting scrolls or ritual objects! OR It’s in the hex the PCs just entered. Who can’t resist opening a door in the earth with a dead bird nailed to the front? You’re darned right, module. Screw hooks, there’s a burial mound with a crucified raven in front of the PCs, if the players don’t immediately move to explore that I think the dungeon master is required by law to rip up their character sheets and flip the table. Ideally follow that up with noogies all around. Once the players heed the call to adventure and enter the mythic underworld they’re immediately confronted with a vast echoing chamber, its only feature a looming dark monolith with gleaming amber eyes surrounded by bones. It’s a demon of corruption and disease, of course. What follows, involving gnolls and giant spiders and a few missed opportunities, perhaps won’t fulfill the great promise of that beginning, but holy cow is that an intro. The module is neither mussed nor fussed about format; single-column, Times New Roman, above intro, brief blurb on the setting, then into the keys. Monsters are statted (and hp rolled) when first encountered in the key sequence. It’s a pretty simple area, but the author does a great job sprinkling in little details in the descriptions. The guy alive in the spider’s cave? He’s wily but treacherous. First of all, good show having a prisoner to rescue, but secondly great description, I can run that interaction in my sleep (and he also offers the location of his hideout, hooray hooks). Everything has that little extra umph, like the careful order of battle for the gnolls’ ambush. Not a ton going on but I can clearly run everything that’s on the map from memory now. The map itself is…somewhat anatomical. The mound is largely vertical, which is not exactly the same thing as being 3D, the central shaft of the spiders provides some back-and-forth but the rest of it is pretty simple, just walk downwards bonking gnolls. That still massively improves things from a horizontal dungeon, dangling up and down shafts is objectively exciting. At the beginning there’s going to be a frantic, interesting encounter that points for sure to one of the ways downward, and probably to both paths, the dungeon will flow in a fairly simple circle after that most likely. Very nice initial encounter, at least as outlined…the gnolls wait until that cool spooky monolith has drawn the players forward, then boil out of trapdoors in attack, trying to push the invaders back to the pit trap that leads to the spider-hole below. There’s a morale point for the gnolls breaking and retreating, there’s a reaction of the spider if someone falls into her webs, all very nice. Giant black widows are a very nasty threat so it’s nice she gets thrown as the fail state. And hey, there’s a bone-pile beneath ragged cobwebs, you can’t say that’s not been telegraphed. It’s a small site, but with a spider-victim to rescue, pit traps, trapped chests, layered fights…a lot of good content here. The only thing that’s a little sad are a few missed opportunities. Cutting out of the webs? You fall into the spikes further down the shaft. I’d personally run it with sharp shards of bone down below, and coins among those remains, but sadly, it’s just spikes. The place could use a few more opportunities for loot like that. What’s there is good, hidden or trapped, respectively, plus the monolith’s gleaming eyes being valuable chunks of amber with scorpions trapped inside…now that’s a nice treasure. A lack of magic on the loot ledger is defensible for the low level aimed at, I’d just have a couple other spots for cash money. What I do like is that some of the loot, the aforementioned ritual tablets, are not only fragile and valuable to an occultist, but they also “hint to a second unholy fane deeper in the wilderness”. Now that is a valuable find, like a treasure map with a price tag. Heck yeah. Why on Oerth is this site not already in your game world? It’s a secret ancient shrine in the middle of a forest, of course you can place this somewhere. And you really, really should. Written by Giant Goose. AD&D, Mid-high level? Forested hill hex. The Fenevian Forest, of which this is but a small cut of, was once the seat of an Elven empire. The elves turned inwards, focused on fell magics, and were cut down by ascendant men four centuries past. Some claim the Elven cities were built atop older, stranger races. Their baleful influence and that of vengeful Elven magi has left these woods chaos-weft. What is better than an adventure site to place in a hex? How about a whole hex to place in your hexcrawl. That’s the theory put forth by Giant Goose with the Glen of Shrikes, which details not just one adventure site but instead breaks out seven sites within a 6-mile hex, with a lot of backstory suggested by the keys and setup…there are fallen evil elven psionic sages, seductive werewolves, magic-item-using deer men, psionic lolwut-meme pears, a vast ancient obelisk surrounded by evil moth-sized corvids entombing precursor giants who necrophagically grant psi powers, and of course giant shrikes. It’s…a lot, needless to say, genuinely impressive to have it all fit within two pages. Makes for a hard evaluation, though. Despite the density, the adventure looks neither scrunched nor splinched, its clean two-column text organized into the reasonable sequence of overview-> random encounters-> faction motivations-> visibility-> hex key-> obelisk key-> bestiary. I’m fond of the bold monsters and italic treasures style found within the keys, makes things extremely clear. Prose is about as economical as possible, but it doesn’t flatly avoid adjectives and sensory language, there’s some decent depth here. It’s a surprisingly textured reading experience. …which unfortunately is not a compliment that can be given to the maps. You knew there had to be a catch somewhere, right? The big hex is subdivided into smaller 1-mile hexes where the seven main features are called out (plus, amusingly, a star that says “place monster lair here”). Geography within the hilly hex is not particularly complex, annoyingly the feature most likely to be missed by parties is probably the titular glen of that giant shrike. The two hex features that get sub-maps are the aforementioned obelisk and a ruined thorp, but the maps are so simple as to be unneeded; I believe I can picture three linear levels in an obelisk or four houses next to each other without the map. That’s not a problem for a hex exploration, just noting that they don’t add much. That hex exploration though? Potentially a great time. Although also a highly, highly weird time…I don’t know how to best convey the encounters without just quoting every one, but I think the druid guy is probably a good example. Near the northeastern edge of the hex there’s a sod house with a thirty-foot pear tree next to it; 50% of the time the hermit here (who’s a druid 7/sage multiclass) is wildshaped into a porcupine up in the pear tree. Giant psionic pears with laughing mouths orbit said trees, very cheerful, dangerous to attack but not hostile. The filthy druid guy wants to kill the hex’s elf population and to end the chaos taint to the area (kill a precursor giant in the bottom of the obelisk). He’s also decently loaded with magic items and is a complete coward. What do you do with that? Well, it’s organic, none of that is explicitly a quest, but there’s definitely stuff to reward players with if they feel like it, or on the other hand if they want to have a toked-up weirdo acid trip of a fight they can just kill the guy and take his stuff (and the teeth of the pears, it’s a long story). Hope you don’t mind quickly figuring out the prepared spells of a level 7 druid, because those aren’t in the text. Everything is like this, very interesting, ripe with gameplay potential, but very slightly underbaked. Rewards are all over the place but tend to be nicely commensurate with risks; treasures run the gamut from coins in a purse for a skewered shrike victim, to magical weapons from werewolf victims inside of a tainted fountain, to the combat gear of enemies in straight-up brawls. Nontraditional rewards are excellent, from purified water out of the fountain granting +1 hp and WIS to the preserved bodies of the precursor beings able to be eaten for massive psionic power and sudden alignment shift. A king’s ransom in magical booty is available in this hex, with just a few murders in the way of it all being the players’ very own. This is not going to be easy to place in a map willy-nilly. Sure, forested hill hexes are a dime a dozen but there’s a very specific geography to match. More than that, there’s a crapton of settings assumptions being made by module that might make it hard to fit…elves being chaotic and a little evil actually fits a lot, and many settings have precursor races, but psi-pears? Dire shrikes? Calygraunts? (Stags with man-hands that can activate magic stuff remotely) It’s a lot of baggage to bring to the table, requiring either seeding or adaption. What’s here is good enough to be worth the effort, I deem, but it’s definitely going to be an effort. Other reviews: EOTB Owen E An entire dang sandbox campaign by Nameless Designer, levels 1-10 Written for Heroes of Adventure SKENRITH KEEP STANDS AS A SOLITARY BULWARK OF CIVILISATION AGAINST THE VAST AND UNTAMED WILDERNESS THAT SURROUNDS IT. THE SOLDIERS AND RANGERS STATIONED THERE ARE TIRELESS AND VIGILANT IN THEIR EFFORTS TO SAFEGUARD THE KEEP AND THE LANDS FROM THE MYRIAD OF THREATS THAT LURK BEYOND ITS WALLS. AS A HEROIC ADVENTURER SEEKING TO MAKE YOUR MARK IN THE REGION, YOU WILL UNDOUBTEDLY FACE A RANGE OF CHALLENGES AND DANGERS IN THIS VOLATILE AND UNPREDICTABLE LANDSCAPE. I don’t know how to even begin this review; the scope and scale of Crapshoot Monday is all about dinky little artsy adventure modules, put out for free by a random assortment hoping to get the occasional PWYW dollar and high fives from the close little itch.io community. This…this is something different. Fortress on the Wild Frontier bucks the clear B2 reference to present not just a keep on the borderlands, but an entire sandbox designed for campaign(s) of either aimless exploration or involved plots. This thing is sixty-four pages but it is DENSE, holding not just a hexmap with procedural content generation but also multiple factions and sites; something like ten dungeons, multiple villages and adventure sites, and a whole portal to the Shadowlands, another plane of existence between life and death. It assumes you’ll want to adventure in all of these but doesn’t presume anything about the PC actions aside. It’s a Nameless Designer product, so it’s colorful with AI art and nice layouts, everything is clean and clear. Dagum. I guess to describe the plot I’d really look at the “adventure seeds”, which were diffidently offered as optional but you and I both know the way to make this campaign really pop is to have all four seeds active at once. Each one these is neatly set up in a half page that details the antagonist(s) goals, the heroes’ objective, and possible ally and enemy factions, then it lists five milestones, and then neatly summarizes the outcome(s) if the antagonist(s) succeeds. The four ongoing plots are that a marauding tribe of beastmen (orcs) are invading the region, deathly shadowriders from the Shadowlands are emerging from a portal trying to link the two planes, a secretive cult is trying to resurrect a plague god, and finally the guy in charge of the keep wants to mount and expedition to the nearby barrier peaks. Turn on every one of these (they have similar time-scales), add PCs, and you’re cooking with gas. Beyond the presentation and ambition what I liked were most of the adventure sites. Megadungeons they ain’t, but nor are we talking about five-room-dungeons here either. The main hexcrawl’s random encounter table has a clever idea, where every encounter has description->discoverable->secret, fleshing out something that can be just a fight into something that’s a memorable encounter or even a significant quest. The system, lacking as it does simple +1 bonuses, has here encountered varied and interesting magic items ever time they get discovered. NPC personalities are brief but well-sketched, with basically every named NPC (and there are dozens) having enough to run for multiple sessions with motives and moods made very clear. Sites are interlinked, so even a “let’s just go thataway” hexcrawl will rapidly generate objectives and PC-motivated quests. Or also not…the choice is theirs. I know I touched on it above, but I also loved the Shadowlands…it’s not just a hand-wavey “death zone” but an extraplanar location that has multiple points of interest and its own planar rules. There’s a ton to like here. What can be improved is, of course, a lot with this much content. All the interesting things happening are at times a bit difficult to picture; a page-sized timeline of expected events would be helpful in coordinating…obviously the players’ actions will change it but knowing what was baked in at the beginning helps to judge their actions’ impact. A relationship map of factions/prominent NPCs would also be a notable improvement, not just for the reader’s understanding but also so that the author himself thinks about how everyone interacts; this is the homeland of the wildfolk (elves), surely they have opinions about the Shadowlands portal, right? Given the clear aim to keep the module to 64 pages, the page space for these improvements could probably be taken from some of the villages and little outposts that adhere to a strict number/key format unnecessarily. With this many dungeons obviously map quality is going to vary somewhat but a general pass looking for a little more connectivity and verticality wouldn’t go amiss in most cases. As an aside, this is where some reviewers might complain about the vanilla nature of the content overall. It’s a keep on the borderlands with an orc invasion and a dark cult and an expedition to some barrier peaks and a portal to the deathlands, we’ve heard all these adventure seeds before. Sometimes, though, the palate calls for vanilla, it’s a wonderful flavor. This is high-grade genuine pure vanilla extract, not the crappy beaver butt-squeezings that we’ve become accustomed to as “vanilla”. It is what it is, and I think reviewers look too hard for novelty where the real spark in a TTRPG comes from the freeform emergent gameplay at the table…and this module gives all the ingredients for an epic and memorable campaign. The best use case for Fortress on the Wild Frontier is to play it as a great sandbox campaign. While it’s written for the niche Heroes of Adventure system, converting this to either modern-style D&D (5E), tradgames (3.P), or old-school systems shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s so much content that the “mine for bits” use case is well-stocked too, there are well-made adventure sites, neat magic items, and fun monsters (with wonky AI-art) to salt into our own games. This would be worth paying money for, but it's Don’t Pay I Don’t Want (Your Money). Astonishing value. Final rating? *****/***** I waffled back and forth between four and five stars on this one, feeling a little bit of ennui on the more generic elements here. In the end, though, that’s a symptom of Pompous Reviewer Syndrome, or maybe Module Reader but Not Player Syndrome…screw that, this is released to be played and I think in play it’s a top-flight adventure module even in normal competition, let alone in the dire dreck mines of itch.io. |
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