- No Railroads
- Movies and Scenes -- the worst kind of railroad
- Player's Actions have no consequence
- Deus Ex Machina
- Railroads lead to predigested solutions
- Railroads lead to unbelievable outcomes
- Railroads lead to Adversarial DMing
- Don’t be an Asshole
- Killer Dungeons
- Misleading the Players
- Gimping
- Item Gimping
- Ability Gimping
- High Level Gimping
- No Forced Morality
- No ”Evil always betrays”
HOW TO DESIGN?
From that point on they are led around by the nose, told to go from a to b to c, and have the adventures at each location before moving on. It’s not that he individual encounters are good or bad, its that the characters are led around by the nose to most of them. Getting off the railroad means fighting your way through hordes of centaurs. {...} I love being a spectator when I ‘play’ D&D. This “adventure” is just an excuse to talk at the party with monologues and put in some combats {...} Boring.
there’s no chance to really do anything but stare blankly and roll dice for eventual outcomes. It’s hard to get in to something like this. This reminds me of those shitty ass DM’s who think they are “telling a story.” I can’t imagine anything more boring, iconic set pieces or no. You know it’s a set up. Why care?
Just follow the line of set pieces and arrive at the inevitable destination. The DM tells a story, “and then, and then, there’s this ettercap that stalks the trails and he’s wiped out a fortress and then and then …” I loathe this. The story belongs to the players.
Yeah Us! We played D&D! This is nothing but scenery moving past the characters. No better than the worst of the World of Darkness movie adventures, you get to watch, rolle a few dice, and await the inevitable outcome.
This is a stupid fucking railroad. Worse than that, it’s ALMOSt like you’re watching a movie. {...} It’s about 80 bajillion pages long and you can’t do anything but “enjoy” the scenery. It might as well be scene based for all the “exploration” and “choices” you get to make. {...} WALL OF TEXT to rival anything in China, that all it ends up being is a mass of text that doesn’t work together and random shit being inflicted on the party. And not in a good way. Not in a ‘neutral’ way that OD&D works with, but in Deus Ex kind of way that repulses me.
It is, though, a railroad. You go through the adventure, moving from set piece to set piece, and having the encounters Maxwell wanted you to have in the way he wanted. It is, of course, possible for the DM to deviate, as it always is, but the adventure only supports you in one direction. This goes so far as “the party has no chance to detect the deception.” This is poor design. You’re forcing the thing to go down the way you want/wrote it. That’s lame.
Fuck. You. Peter. An old man has a heart attack in the street and if the party doesn’t respond then the adventure is over and DM forces an alignment check? You sound like a real fun guy to game with. He spends a long paragraph on punishing the party and then goes on to say that if the party do a RES on him he automatically fails it. Railroad much? Please forgive us lowly players of D&D who thought our characters had some semblance of free will. Please, Peter, allow us to play the game exactly the way you insist it played!
You get killed in a couple of days AND you almost certainly get killed if you try t leave the village early AND you get killed if you start stabbing NPC’s in the throat (though they are commoners AND you get killed if … you get the picture. This pretends to be open-ended but is a railroad. Do what the designer wants you to do or have your characters killed. Uncool.
And a decent amount of the advice stinks: “The heroes could attempt to climb the walls. Discourage this since it would allow the PC’s to avoid most of the encounters.” What boring and unimaginative advice. How about instead you reward players who think creatively instead of blindly imposing your railroad will? {...} for V{e}cna’s sake, let the characters climb the fucking walls!
Jesus H Fucking Christ. The DM talks for 45 minutes and then the players roll a die and then the DM talks for another 45 minutes. Nonsense act/scene based adventure with almost no content at all.
Pretext after pretext to force combat and “move the plot along”, which means fighting. The party has no chance to impact events.
Utter and complete piece of shit. This, gentle readers, is the adventure that signals the End Times. This is it. 1995. The year RPG’s died. Previously Dungeon adventures had just been wordy and poorly written attempts at translating the designer’s vision to the purchaser. This one though … this one represents The Beginning Of The End. This is a fourteen page movie.{...}There is no meaningful choice. It assumes you kill the ghul you meet. It assumes you can’t keep up with people you meet. (It’s D&D. the players ALWAYS do something else.) It’s just a movie. {...} Events imply you have a choice. Scenes imply you do not. You. Do. Not. The movie keeps moving as planned. Do whatever. It doesn’t matter.
This is just devoid of anything. It’s more like watching a movie than doing something. Kill the friendly NPC? He survives so the showdown can take place. LAME. Why not just roll a d6? On a 1-5 you win, and 6 you roll again.
First have to journey to a village, but rowboat, sailing ship, or overland, varying by days to reach the village. Your choice is meaningless since nothing changes in the village.
A parkour chase across roofs either ends with the bad guy getting away or, if the party make a zillion skill check, him falling to his death. IE: No impact on the adventure. This is a capital offense in Brycelandia.
At the end of the adventure there’s an entire list of consequences based on the PC’s actions. Guess What! Nothing you do matters! No matter what the party does the outcomes are the same! Yeah you! You wasted your time!
Deus Ex Machina
There’s other interesting choices as well: can’t find the tracks? A friendly ranger helps you out! Can’t find X? A friendly Deus Ex helps you out! I can’t find a decent adventure. Who’s gonna help me out?
If the party doesn’t capture a boat, during the raid, then a villager offers them a boat. *sigh* So the parties actions have no effect.
The boss is an M19. If he defeats the party then the beholder sultan shows u{p} in some deus ex and anti-magics everything, accidentally, and saves the party, defeating the MU, etc. LAME. Better to ding the MU a bit in levels and make this a tough, but honest, fight. Then the parties victory is their own instead of the DM’s magic NPC pet showing up. It’s that kind of shit that makes me HATE NPC’s when I’m a player.
Hint: If you have to give the party stuff to make the adventure work then you probably have a big problem in your adventure.
One curiosity stands out: you can’t really interrogate any prisoners from the inn. Oh, you can, but they don’t know anything … even though their comrades are in the second dungeon. It seems strange to shut down this part of and punish, instead of rewarding, characters who took prisoners and played thoughtfully. Instead the location is revealed to the party by a generic scene-based encounter. This DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS the concept player agency, punishing agency in favor of a MEANINGLESS railroad encounter.
a stowaway assassin that takes a DC30 to find if the party searches the ship … because there’s an event built around them. The players should be REWARDED for thinking of searching the hold, not punished because it’s on the DM’s ToDo list for later.
Then there is the arbitrary crap. That loose flagstone, hidden by the DC30 spot check? It can’t be removed from the top. It’s not locked or anything. It just can’t be removed. What? Seriously? Again, this raises the Suspension of Disbelief issue, which, when in an obstacle, raises the spectre of the adversarial DM.
They are given magic items and as many set ups as possible to push everything possible in their favor. Their is D&D in “players vs. DM mode” which is completely lame D&D.
I can only hope that there is a special hell for the designers of these one-trick pony adventures. The party is lured to a house to be killed It’s full of traps, the most notable are in the form of bodies controlled like puppets. The woman who hires you won’t get out of her carriage (her eyes are hurt by bright light …) and has pallid skin. How many parties, do you think, killed her right then and there? Notably, if killed she comes back more powerful as an evil spirit that possesses the house. Go into a room, get impacted by a trap/effect, repeat. I hate these gimpy/DM torture-porn adventures.
I’m not a big fan of the hit&run stuff from the dimension door abilities … I’m perhaps too damaged by adversarial DM tactics.
Pushing the party, repeatedly, and then punishing them for the action you’ve encouraged is Not Cool. In RPG’s the big red button exists to be pushed, because that’s the fun thing to do. The enforced morality in this adventure, the DM pushing the party over and over again …. This is not the way to DM your game
Textbook shitty. Just a bunch of rooms with traps and monsters. Everyone is prepared to fight. Teleport doesn’t work. There are fake walls to stump Find The Path. Bad guys wear “rings of the thirteen” that give them a +2 ac, endure elements, and nondetection .. .and can only be worn by evil people. The place is full of “very realistic curtains that actually feel like a stone wall!” to hide things. Pretext after lame pretext to fuck the party. All so you can go to the next room and fight something in it. Tactical bullshit text all over the place. I’m sure this is a wet fucking dream adventure for the rules mastery/min-max crowd.
DM torture porn. The party buys a wagon that has two gremlins hiding in it that the DM can use to torment the party. The DM is encouraged to make the wagon buying seem normal, ignoring the fact that ANYTHING the DM says in D&D is immediately taken as significant.
The whole thing is full of advice on how to gimp the players. Don’t give the players an even break. Don’t let them use their divination magic. Don’t let them have fun. Blah Blah Blah. It seems that the gods don’t like talking to your 12th level clerics. Oh Well.
This is just one of the numerous death trap adventures where everything is set up and the dice loaded against the party. “They anticipated …” this and “they have prepared …” that.
As Aziz would say, not really my cup of tea, because I don’t like huge piece of shit in my tea. But maybe you’re in to this kind of gimmick/{Tomb of Horrors} stuff. You poor, poor, soul. You deserve better.
There’s this theory that says that deathtraps are ok in a high level adventure. The idea being that the party has access to a lot of magic, divination, and maybe even wishes and if they don’t take advantage of all their capabilities then Fuck Them.
party hears about a white dragon that has just shown up. Turns out it’s an albino red dragon. With no treasure. Lame screw job. I’ll never understand why this sort of thing became popular. All it does it encourage the party to be paranoid, which slows things down. This is different than a mimic or trapper. Those are one-shot ‘gotchas.’, almost traps. This is just an intentional screw-job. LAME.
A double cross from a prisoner. (No double crosses! Fuck it’s tiresome! SOMEONE has to not double cross the party or the party will never trust ANYONE, and the roleplay with evil monsters allied is much more fun than Just Another Stinking Combat.)
I hold a special loathing in my heart for the crocodile encounter. They look like logs and the party is encouraged to cross the river by jumping on them. If they party is not morons and look at the logs the DM’s instr{u}ctions imply that he should say “its really a log”, because the first of the three “logs” IS , actually, a log, with the other two being crocs. That BS. That’s killer asshole DM shit. If the party asks you tell them. You don’t play 20 questions. You don’t make them guess the EXACTLY correct words to use to get the right answer. That sends a bad message, not only about play style but about the dickishness and adversarial nature of the DM. Bullshit I Say! Bullshit.
The potion turns out to be a potion of magic resistance … but it only works on the hag. Why? Why not let the players use it if they want to? It’s not going to unbalance things.
The BULLSHIT death knight has an Anything Sword that allows it to be any magical sword, from round to round. It has three charges. IE: Just enough to fuck the party over and keep them from having it. Lame. Any adventure in which someone wears an amulet guarantees it’s proof against detection. PC’s should kill all amulet wearers on sight, always, in every adventure they ever undertake.
The spear you recover from the barrow is the cursed unicorn’s horn. You need to touch them together to cure the unicorn. The spear is powerful. If they had stopped there it would have been ok. “Keeping the spear is an evil act.” Welllllll…… yes, it is. Calling it an evil act comes with DM-fiat baggage, and all of the implied punishment … even though the adventure doesn’t actually say anything else. TELLING the party the spear is super powerful, describing the powers, and THEN giving them a choice would be delicious indeed.
There’s a nice evil book but, as usual, its set up so the party can’t have it and use it. L A M E!
A sucky adventure. How do you know to trust me on that? Someone is wearing an amulet of proof against detection and ESP. That ALWAYS means sucky adventure.
I always throw up a little in my mouth when I see a hat of disguise in an adventure. It’s almost always paired with some mind-protecting magic item
Like all mysteries it gimps the characters: if you capture someone hired to beat you up then Charm Person doesn’t reveal who hired them … because they are too scared. Uh huh. Why don’t you just say ‘I wrote a weak adventure.’
There’s more gimp stuff inside, like a padlock that can only be unlocked with a key or wish. No knocks, No picking. Just a key. Guarded by monsters. It’s this kind of forced behavior that I find SUCH a turn off. Why not just let the party use their skills and abilities THAT THEY’VE EARNED to overcome obstacles? Why force them in to a fight … just so you can spring your uber-cool Mujina on them?
A murder mystery in a country mansion. And, of course, there’s a Ring of Impersonation and a Ring of Silence involved. When you have to gimp the party through the use of shit like this, that’s a sign you’ve not created a good adventure.
Lots of gimps here: lots of bodies, but speak with dead doesn’t work and all of their valuables were hidden elsewhere, blah blah blah, experience the STORY and … [bleech]. Oops, sorry, threw up in my mouth and accidentally typed it out while doing so.
Need a bad guy to launch a plot that can’t be foiled by Detect Evil or ESP? Rakshasa! puke
The hags all have rings of spell storing with teleport, so they can escape. Joy. What a gimp. Why not just scream “DM PET! YOU CAN’T KILL THEM HA HA HA !” at the players instead? They both make the players feel the same way.
D&D does a great job at low levels and high-level adventures have yet to be figured out. Too much gimping of the characters abilities to force them in to what is, essentially, a low level adventure design. Or, just as bad, resorting to defining high-level as “tougher monsters.” The need to drive players through the plot turns the things in to a railroad.
Most of the sins of bad high level adventures are present. Lame-o hooks that assume the party are still level 1 scroungers. Magic items that work against you but you can’t use. (So what if the party takes the giant inviso purge geodes? They’re level 14, who cares?) No digging/teleport gimping. {...} nd there’s the CR9 orcs riding a flock of tamed chimera. Most of this could be solved by making this a lower level adventure. Level 5 or something. Then the orcs are still mundane and still a real threat. The giant frog as their king would be cool.
Spells like augury, commune, contact other plane, etc were all originally used to AVOID death traps, but in this dungeon they, and others, are all gimped so the players can’t use them. This is a clear indication that the adventure is written for the wrong levels. Relying on Temporal Stasis is also a technique to disguise weak design.
This contains one of my favorite design elements ever: the tomb builder cast multiple wishes so detection spells and teleport-ish spells would not work. Maybe … you didn’t mean to write a level 10+ adventure? Maybe you meant to write a level 5 adventure, before adventurers get those abilities in quantity? Maybe? No? You’re just a sucky DM who imposes rules arbitrarily on the players in order to force them to suffer through your ‘adventure?’ Ok, just clearing that up.
{To be fair, high-level mages and clerics in a world where scrying and teleport exist would seek measures to protect against it. So would kings and the wealthy able to employ them.}
It also deals with the high-level magic issue in an interesting way. Teleport and passwall all you want! But the souls of the dead, embedded in the walls and constantly screaming and moaning, will take a high toll on you as you save vs insanity. Likewise, hack through a wall … but it regens at 10hp per round. This is a much better way to handle things than just saying “you can’t do it.” Give the party a choice.
The first real scene is the party trying to talk to a guy in a restaurant. The maitre d’ won’t let you in. You’re 13th level and that’s not famous enough. You can’t bribe him. Period. You can’t wait outside to talk to the guy, since the guard captain dimension door’d in. It’s interesting that the most obvious solution, slitting his throat and letting him watch himself bleed out, isn’t discussed at all
You go to piratetown to track people down, only to find your contact kidnapped, ambushes (CR11, you’re level 15. The adventure correctly notes the party could just kill everyone in town, but doesn’t deal with it well. IE: it’s a shittly designed adventre for level 15’s, unless they agree to play along.) It would be more fun as a direct assault, letting the players flex their might, instead of the linear shit-fest with forced encounters and the overreliance on conspiracies that high level adventures always seem to hang their flag on.
The piece of shit adventure has a kidnapping ring run by a level 20 evil wizard. He’s got the fucking Wish spell but he kidnaps people for money. And he DOES have the Wish spell. It’s crazy.
Moral ambiguity makes the set up quite a bit more interesting to game through than a simple morality play would be.
There’s a questionable decision or two, like sealing the tax inside a wizard-locked container. How much more fun would it be to put the constant temptation under the players noses?
Are there good nazi’s? What’s your position on orc babies? This adventure, either intentionally or unintentionally, asks those questions. {...} You get a couple of combats with a well organized military group painted in a realistic, and yet tactically fun, manner. And then you toss in the orc babies … the slavery. DM’s you throw that shit in are not good DM’s. They are dicks. The game is supposed to be fun not make you think about the meaning of life, hopelessness of existence, and put you in to existential crisis. {...} The orc baby issue is what pushes from “the usual dreck” to “total piece of shit.”
It does contain that implied morality I hate so much: no X for killing people who are trying to kill you.
In another stunning example of middle-class morality, you get more XP for letting an undead possess you and less-than-book-value if you kill it. Lovely.
As written this has a bunch of the bullshit implied morality that I hate. Kill the guy? Oh No! That’s murder! His god doesn’t like you and curses you! Loot the hut after killing him? Oh no! You’re a thief and the law comes after you! There’s no excuse for a dick DM. Baby orcs are there to kill. If you’re DM puts them there to test you, or fuck with you, then you need to go find a new DM.
After the party gets the potion for the hag she attacks them. Why? They did a great job for her! WOuldn’t the game be much more fun if the party had this kind of amoral/evil associate they could go visit from time to time? {...} why not give the players a choice and tempt them instead of deciding why they HSOULD do and enforcing it through the rules of the adventure? Everything in this adventure sucks.
Middle class morality. That’s the problem with this adventure. A green dragon contacts the party in order to get five of her eggs rescued. They fell in a hole in a volcano and she needs you to go in and get them back. Inside is an assortment of vermin (who attack), magmen (who attack), grue (who attack) and an efretti (who eventually attacks.) Then you get out and the dragon attacks. Wouldn’t it be so much more interesting if you could get an ally from green dragon, or from the eftreeti? You are doing a major boon to both, and both are highly intelligent. But they attack. Lame.
There are some demons that show up in the end, to get revenge on the raptors, but they betray the party. LAME! LAME LAME LAME LAME LAME! It would be SO much better if they actually joined forces and the party had some potential demon buddies. Think of all the fun THAT would bring in a campaign!
Bryce’s Standard Hook Advice: Every time you read “adventurer”, replace it with “mercenary” or “mercenary scum”, as your campaign dictates. Things make a lot more sense that way and give you a radically different vibe.
This adventure has a different vibe than most and it’s something I can get in to. The party is presented more as a group of mercenaries. A lot of hooks essentially imply as much: “you’re hired to …” but there’s also some implied morality in most. This one doesn’t really have that implied morality.
“Neutral characters will have trouble finding motivation to complete the adventure.” In lazy adventure writer speak this means “I couldn’t be bothered to think of any way to motivate the party.”
Hell even the hook is good: while passing by at night the party sees a tower of the castle erupt in eldritch green flame and then sees a body hanging from the window. Which then falls to the ground as the party approaches. There’s no way in fucking hell ANYBODY is going to ignore that hook, no matter how jaded the player. And that is the key to a good hook: an appeal to the player rather than the character.
It also has a hook I like. 3e-era players are looking for masterwork weapons at low levels. Sending the players to the dwarf hold and herding the beetles is a nicely little integrated response to the players wants/needs. THIS is the way plot os developed in D&D. Not by the DM but in response to what the players want. “We need/want this thing.” Well Mr and/or Ms Player, you can go get it here … Player driven action.
one of the party members is deeded a mill, which is one of the better hook ideas.
The hooks are not exactly original, but do have some nice quirks. “Seeing the first murder” hook has the body falling off a balcony and landing right in front of the party … an oldie but a goody. The other has the guard hiring the party to investigate. Always a lame hook, this is spiced up by having the sergeant being REALLY dumb.
Several hooks are presented for this lair/tomb, one of which, a boring “you see reward posters”
It’s one of the lamest of hooks: you’re hired to go fetch some spell components.
For some pretext of a lame hook reason (do gooder! Stop evil! It’s tonight’s adventure!) you’re poknig around in a dungeon.
It does rely on the party being nice people, for the hook, and saving a merchant under attack. That’s akin to “this is the adventure I have for you tonight, save the guy if you want to play D&D.”
I also don’t dig the whole “you get a map via a will” thing. That’s a hook that’s not trying at all.
The hook is lame: the characters get visions telling them to go the dwarf kingdom. How about you don’t even make an effort next time?
Your motivation here is that a town you call home is threatened. Lame. PC’s are murder hobos with no families precisely to avoid this kind of ham-handed DM manipulation. “Get married? Fuck No. I don’t want to go rescue her next week and every week for the rest of my life.”
The hooks are mostly lame, including the horrendous “one of your loved ones is captured/killed” … which should never be used, ever, in any game, ever.
You’re hired t go to jail and watch the back of a new prisoner. {...} I can’t imagine the tenth level party who says “Yes! Let’s get rid of all our gear and go to jail for little to no reward!”
The party undertakes a mission for 1000gp. They are 5 or 6 10th level characters doing a delivery run for 1000 gp? It’s hard to be objective when the pretext is so lame.
Does your CR14 character want to investigate a caravan disappearing? No? Go on a fetch quest for a poor half-elf noble? No? Two strikes on the Boring-O meter. The third hook send the party after the orcs to unlock hidden powers in some weapon/item they’ve recently gained, which is better.
The setup/hook is a total railroad job where a group of 15th level adventurers are expected to be caught with their pants down. You’re forced to trust the NPC … it goes on and on. One of the worst hooks I’ve ever seen. At least “caravan guard” doesn’t insult our intelligence.
The world is ending and you need to stop it. I only hold back a *yawn* because at level 30 “the world is ending” seems like an ok thing to me.
The whole Omniscient and Omnipotent being manipulating you and testing you thing has NEVER been a good hook. EVER. It is only a crutch for a weak writer taking a shortcut.
There’s a scarecrow in the field. STOP! Any PC gets any whiff of a scarecrow is going to immediately go whole hog in destroying it. It’s like saying there are gargoyles. The adventure wants a series of small misfortunes to happen over a week. (A couple of good examples are provided, but a lot more would have been better.) Then the final night the scarecrow attacks. In reality the party is going to focus on the scarecrow and destroy it instantly. And if they don’t then they deserve to be murdered in their sleep. Shhesh. They call themselves murder hobos...
You also have to beg the villagers to help, with rolls, which is always lame, IMO. Don’t want my help? How about I burn the place to the ground instead of begging?
Someone needs to fail a save vs magic in order to go not he adventure? For serious?
The party finds a book in a clearing while setting up camp for the night. Touching it curses the party with certain death in 4 nights unless they go destroy the book. Fortunately, the way to destroy it is only 2-3 days away. That’s kind of a suck ass hook. {...} TPK. All for doing what the players should be doing … pushing buttons. “If’s the PC choose to ignore the warning and do not follow the quest then the DM is free to destroy them at his lea sure” This is the kind of DM behavior that a generation learned from. LAME.
It is also once of the worst examples of adventure design I’ve seen. A kid comes out of the forest crying. Questioning turns up his friend Drake is missing. The kid runs away. That’s it. That’s your hook. And this adventure is recommended as the Premier Adventure for your new campaign. Sigh. If you follow the kid you get to his parents house. They are complete dicks and won’t talk to party or allow them to talk to the kid, other than shouting “Go Away!” This is your premier adventure. Why would anyone go on this? Because that’s what the DM is running that night? That’s the reality of the situation, but, fuck, you have to make the adventure at least A LITTLE appealing to the players and characters to go on.
New to town, to get the job you need a reference from the guild in question, two from other people, or a reference from the towns wizard’s guild, or a 500-gp bond. All for 50gp. Uh …. What’s the likelihood of any of that? How about we just burn down your fucking boat and make massacring the town the adventure for this evening? SO many adventures, especially in Dungeon, are like torture porn for the DM/players. How much bullshit will the players put up with from the DM in order to play D&D tonight?
Perhaps the only good thing about this adventure is that the Eta village, maybe the third encounter, is the turning point where the adventure moves from reality to fantasy. After the village the encounters are all myth: tengu, were-tiger, goblins. That’s a good transition to The Mythic Underworld.
A wilderness outpost is about to be attacked by a gnoll army. The party is tasked with getting behind them and disrupting their cattle to delay them until reinforcements arrive. When I read the synopsis I thought ‘Great! Cool sandbox!’
I also like sandbox things like sieges.
I like the open-ended nature of city games.
This is a faction adventure. And therefore an adventure with NPC’s. These are very good things to have in an adventure. The players and their characters will always interact with the world around them, especially in a village adventure like this, and having strongly imagined NPC’s goes a VERY long way to brin{g}ing an adventure to life.
Their lair is a short little ten room place, mostly linear, but with more adventure in it than Dungeon adventures that run 35 pages long. There are at least three groups of people in the small place that you can negotiate with, including crabmen and a vapor rat! For being such a small place there’s a lot going on.
Lots of factions. Murky morality. This one has potential.
It claims to have factions, but since they all attack it’s really just some theming to the different areas. It’s just a fucking hack.
The cave maps are above average, and can provide a good non-linear environment for this sort of thing.
the real level has decent amount of looping corridor variety, especially for a level with only 15 or so rooms. It works and fits together well and provides some decent variety.
I like my adventures best when hook after hook after complication after complication is piled up to create a nice living environment. {...} Having a whole lot going on is a great way to build a realistic environment.
If you took this, and six or so other good linear {...} adventures, and ran them all at the same time then you’d have something very interesting adventure with the appearance of free will.
The map is excellent and reminds me a bit of the garden level of barrier peaks, with its mixed indoor/outdoor space, balconies, and so on, along with a shit ton of roof entrances to the temple.
The second level has a totally generic looking map (hints of symmetry. Ug!)
Ah, the linear adventure. Usually with set pieces. When it comes to Combat as War vs Combat as Sport, I’m very much in the War category. Linear adventures, rules mastery, balanced combats … these are not the D&D elements I enjoy.
I really got the sense, in reading this, that it is just a generic adventure formula spiced up a bit. Hook. Slow explore with a couple of monsters. Bad Guy. Dangerous “hidden” area that’s the true location. And then a quick escape! It’s a generic formula and works sometimes, but when you can TELL it’s the generic formula .. .then it loses some luster. It feels constructed rather than imagined.
This is the first example, in Dungeon anyway, of the shitty linear 3e adventure. Some people really like this one. You should not play D&D with those people.
The tomb is nothing more than the usual trap/stasis-monster fest. These sort of set-piece things may be my least-favorite kind of adventure.
There’s nothing here NOT related to main plot … and very little related to the main plot, and that’s disappointing. So while the set up might be a nice one, it’s far too long with not nearly enough variety to make it on to my list.
Maybe eight or nine encounters, all in a line, with far too much boring combat. When your adventure has the line “To keep player suspense alive, roll some dice to make it seem like they are having an effect on the battle” then you know you are a failure as an adventure writer.
It reminds me of those “How to write an adventure” articles. Start things off with a fight, include some roleplaying vignettes, etc … but all in the context of a linear story.
COMPLETELY linear cave under the pretext of being a troll lair but have yuan-ti at the rear. The first few rooms are a “test” to “try the mettle of intruders.” Ug. A lame pretext by the designer to just throw shit in and solve some imaginary continuity problems, you mean?
Dungeon Magazine has conditioned me to throw up in my mouth a little every time I read “the party must race to …” Also, that phrase actually means “linear plot” instead of what I believe to be the more common read of “time pressure.”
“roll to continue the adventure” diplomacy check with the kobold. Fail, and you don’t get to go on the adventure.
And EVERYTHING is under a DC10 search check for a secret door … adventure blocks, even at DC10, are never a good thing.
The group is then supposed to wander around the forest looking for clues. Except they will probably fail and/or give up. There’s a 10% chance per party member of finding a clue. What if they don’t find a clue? I guess they don’t get to go on the adventure then. Yeah! Let’s Oh, wait, I don’t think that’s the reaction you are supposed to have. I’ve never understood this shit. If you HAVE to find the clue to go on the adventure then why are you making people roll for it? “Roll 1d6. On a ‘1’ you get to play D&D tonight.” Ug! Further, the clues are bullshit! There are three. The first two provide NO insight on where to go. The third, it is stated repeatedly, should only be used if the party is getting frustrated and don’t know where to go. Seriously? YOU HAVENT PROVIDED ANY DATA ON WHERE TO GO UP TO THIS POINT!!!!!!
A LOT of secret doors that you to find to keep playing. I’ve never quite liked that; secrets should lead to a reward and not be work required to be done in order to go have fun.
Of all the dream adventures I’ve seen it tends to be one of the better ones. Which still means it’s total bullshit, but it tries harder than the others. {...} The dreaming … not so much. Same old issues … no real threat and no real consequences. Fake XP awards and fake treasures. Yeah, sure, the party can die. Dream adventures always do that. But somehow these always seem like ‘kp duty’ adventures; they feel like punishment and no one cares about the outcomes.
Plus: plot reveals via journals, letters, notes are lame and lazy. If you have to resort to it then you should rewrite/rethink the plot/adventure. Fire & Torture are popular alternatives.
I usually HATE logs & journals and diaries, find them just a cheap way to communicate things. A ships log makes sense though
I could point to the varied terrain and obstacles in the cave, elevation, boulders, water levels, etc, as being nice elements which provide both variety and tactical opportunities for both sides.
It’s got a couple of loops and seems more like a realistic cave. The way from the upper level to the lower is a huge chasm. There are ledges, nooks, and crannies. I really like cave adventurers that feel like caves and this one.
Finally, the catacombs, under the pyramid, are a little too combat oriented. It’s like every room is a guard room, and all hallways run directly in to rooms. This turns the adventure in the catacombs in to a hack-fest, IMO, instead of a “smart party” adventure.
There are four levels here, each with a theme. Themes in these classic dungeons are good, they keep things fresh between levels and prevent everything from having that samey feel when you’re on room #206 of dungeon level five.
All of the “interesting” bits seem to be set-piece combats … which I don’t find interesting when they make up the preponderance of encounters.
All three present an environment in which a large and ranging combat could take place. {...} I like a complex environment for a battle, crashing through floors, pulling down walls, setting hay on fire, etc. {...} I really like the party coming up to a combat site, formulating a plan, attacking the farmhouse compound, and then the plan going to hell and chaos breaking out. Those sorts of wide-ranging things are conducive to creative play and fun. But endless combat after combat in the dungeon against an organized foe? Slog-fest.
{I disagree here - you also need empty rooms for contrast and to keep players guessing. There is a wisdom in the Moldvay formula. He even says so himself in his review guidelines; "Dungeons should have a good quantity of empty rooms and some unguarded treasure."}
Nice “fire-lord/bandit-king” theming on some plate armor make it a treasure worth keeping.
An inkwell made out of a griffon hoof? Sign me up!
A special callout to the dracolich treasures. A little overly described in places, but a scandalous dress, a nice violin, a large drinking horn emblazoned with runes and carvings of dead dragons.
The treasure is all book item items, and boring old +1 swords and shields at that.
There’s also, notably, a non-standard magic item that is both powerful and cursed … but maybe not enough to make the party throw it away. That sort of Deal with Devil kind of item is exactly the sort of thing that should be in D&D adventures. The artifacts in the 1e DMG were cool because of those small enigmatic backstories AND the cursed nature of the items
On the negative side there’s a lame “usable only once” magic item, a dead man’s hand. Cool things like this should have a second use, at least, for the party to take advantage of. Carrying around the hand of a hanged man grasping a black candle is much more interesting than a stupid old wand.
There’s also a platinum handled gold knife: a magic sacrificial knife with the whole ego/personality thing going on. That’s pretty cool and something I haven’t seen before. (IE: doing it to a sacrificial knife.)
There are a decent magic item or two: a bookmark of continual light and a pair of “penetrate disguise” glasses, for example.
Then there are the people who come to visit, PERFECTLY described. “Nina’s dim-witted but good-natured nephew.” or “a greasy but ambitious banker” and so on. In one fucking sentence for each NPC this adventure does what so many others can’t seem to do: focus on the NPC description on interactivity. Who the fuck cares what your special snowflakes eye color is? What we need to know is how to play them when the party comes to interact.
The NPC’s have decent motivations and are interesting enough to get them involved with the party. {...} nd their detail is PLAY focused, not just generic trivia that will never come up during play.
“she erupts out of the ground with hollowed eyes and a gaping mouth!” I like that kind of description for the monsters instead of a generic “banshee.” When I mention extra flavor that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. Not paragraph after paragraph but just a little more.
I still assert that the non-traditional undead are the BEST undead. Except skeletons. Basic skeletons should always be Harryhousen skeletons.
there’s a door that comes alive and sucks the party in. The adventure says something like “the door is a mimic.” Let me suggest that there is a world of difference, in inspiring a DM, between “the door is a mimic” and the door comes alive and reaches out and tries to suck the party in. Treat it as a mimic.”
A bunch of random monsters thrown together in the “controller, artillery, grunt” style with the barest pretext holding it together. This has always yanked my suspension of disbelief and, I think, shifted the ground too far toward “game” instead of “RPG”
Fourteen rooms of a wizard’s tower. {...} There’s nothing in this wizard’s tower that feels remotely wizard like.
This is then combined with a lack of the weird. Dude is an evil sorcerer and his tower feels boring and generic. This might work in a Harn-like setting but room after room of generic contents (Pantry, bedroom, bathroom, storage room) isn’t the kind of Magic & Whimsy, Wonder & The Fantastic! That’s what I’m looking for. This isn’t that.
The wizards falls much more closely to the Reprobate side of the spectrum. That makes him, and his bizarro home, much more interesting than the vast majority of wizards TSR and WOTC ever published.
Attempts to build reason in to a dungeon via rules … A magic mouth says a key word that dispels a contingency that holds a stasis that summons a monster. You’re the DM. You can do anything, the rules don’t apply. I can’t imagine how anyone prefers this style.
Just do the effect, you don’t need a justification from the book.
This thing suffers a great deal from the authors “I NEED it to make SENSE” syndrome. You need a pretext of believability, you don’t need to rationalize everything from what’s in the books. Just do something new … THAT’S WHAT THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE THE ITEMS IN THE BOOK DID.
Published adventures set an example for people and for many will be how they learn to play. OD&D NPC wizards shot lazer beams from their nipples and summoned blue cloud of sparkly shrinking dust. Rules are for players. Judges judge.
It like to explain things. A LOT. “A trigger spell activates a blah blah blah spell which activates a …” It’s fucking magic. The sword flies around because that’s what swords do.
Just let magic be magic. You don’t need to explain magic, Mr. Technocracy. I DESPISE these sort of set-up adventures.
Finally, if the summoning/storm spell DOES succeed? It brings a new creature to the island to terrorize folks … left unspecified. MYSTERY is always welcome as a springboard to the future.
The impact of NOT explaining the mystery is very strong.
I hate the magical RenFaire stuff and the magical society environment and the streetlights of continual light and the garbage disposals of spheres of annihilation and the way it treated the magic and wonder as routine, ensuring that nothing was magical or wondrous.
My own personal sign of a crappy adventure is the presence of spheres of annihilation, black puddings, etc, located in the bottom of drains and waste chutes. As soon as I see that I have a pretty good idea that the adventure will suck.
There’s a bit of the ol magical society bullshit, with skylights held in place with sovereign glue and permanent whispering wind spell intercom systems. Without that stuff, and changing the place from a bank to “Karl the moneylender” and you’ve have more standard fantasy world adventure.
It’s a fucking Eberron magic railroad adventure. Joy. Magic tech. Bound air elements. A need to explain everything.
Oh boy. This is an investigation adventure in a magical ren-faire theater. Magical chandeliers. Illusionists creating theater effects. Potions to help the actors. It’s enough to make you puke gorbels.
It’s also got that Magic Ren Faire vibe that I dislike. Decanters of Endless Water as a water source, permanent heat and chill metal spells, a captured air elemental to provide air flow, and so on.
There are glow globes that light rooms and a trapped fire elemental and piping system for hot water, etc. I really don’t get in to that kind of a “magical economy” sort of setting.
Oh Jesus H. Fucking Christ. A magical industry that makes water elemental powered flatboats. That’s right Roger, just strip all of the joy and wonder of magic away and turn it into another fucking steam engine.
In particular, how the manor reacts to intrusion is missing. This sort of thing should ALWAYS be present with intelligent opponents.
A nice order of battle for how the castle reacts to incursions as well as nice overview sections to get oriented to things. A good map supports the adventure, giving the party non-linear opportunities.
It does have a nice order of battle for the citadel which is always useful for an inhabited area.
Uh, a plan other than “I spy on you with my magic mirror and prepare for you in the final room.” That’s ALWAYS lame.
There’s not really a coordinated defense of the tower, so it’s another “guards die in place”a adventure. It’s too bad.
Ultimately this is a sucky adventure because of the main encounter, the ship, is described as just a series of keyed entires instead of living, breathing place with a crew schedule, etc.
While many have names they don’t really interact with others other than “Attack!” and there’s no coordinated response by the occupants.
One of the things I like about D&D adventures is when the players come up with crazy ideas on how to do something and we get to watch the comedy/tragedy that unfolds as they implement their zany plan.
I REALLY like the last part, where the party has the chance to mess up the negotiations. It’s these sorts of situations in which RPG”s excel. The party is SURE to come up with some kooky plan and the creation and unfolding disaster of kooky character/player plans is one of the great joys of D&D.
I have a fondness for the absurd, or, maybe, the ALMOST absurd. This is running right up close to the line. Generally I like my DM pretexts normal and my players to do the wacky shit, like come up with plans that say “I have the perfect plan! First we need forty giant beetles …” Too much from the DM and the games in danger of Paranoia ZAP territory.
The most boring thing a monster can do is attack. The best thing a monster can do if be friendly … while carrying a big and obvious bag of loot … and turning its back to the party a lot. I like combat, but its the easy solution and the one that can be universally appealed to at a later date.
By far the most interesting encounter is the lair of a drow necromancer. She’s got a nice little set up going, along with her juju servants and, remarkably, does NOT attack on sight. Her area is well described and interesting and she’s put out there as an ally to the party. I find that sort of thing MUCH more interesting than a plain old ‘she attacks immediately!’ type of encounter. Roleplay possibilities abound when the monsters & creatures are treated like real people with their own ambitions other than simply murdering the party.
It’s a hell of a thing, killing an ma^h^h orc. Oh yeah, and it’s more fun to talk to someone and THEN kill them then it is to just hack them down.
Hill giant mummies lay DORMANT until their sarcophagi are looted. How great is that? They don’t attack on sight!
bullywugs or lizard men or cannibals being social encounters that COULD end up in combat instead they are just boring old “they attack!” encounters. This in spite of the fact that all of the groups are natural enemies of the leopard men cult and hate them. Being allied with cannibals would be much more fun to role-play through the rest of the adventure.
First, it’s got great NPC’s. Some of them have a little too much text describing them, but they all seem to be real people (even the monster NPC’s) and a purpose behind them. They respond intelligently, and not just in a “they attack!” manner.
The monsters don’t attack on sight, which means the adventure immediately has more possibilities. Long-term allies? More hooks in the future?
Fucking piece of shit sidetrek adventure! A leprechaun gets captured by two dudes. His brother asks the party to free him. I have no idea how any other adventure pretext could be so implausible. Fuck no, I’m not freeing your brother! Gimme the gold and wishes you little bastard! Fucking fey! How many times have they tortured party members! Payback time asshole! Oh, oh, oh, if you try and talk to the two two dudes they attack immediately. Isn’t that fun? No bargaining. No Bilbo Baggins and the Trolls. No Bilbo and the Spiders. Nope, They just attack. That’s the most boring thing that can possibly happen. Exploiting leprechauns? THAT’S exciting! So of course you don’t get to do that.
Monsters attack out of spite, even though they should have other motivations.
I’m also more than a little tired of seeing “the guards fight to the death.” This time the lame ass excuse is that its a cultural thing, and how they show their manliness. Take a cue from Ramses 2 boys: march back in town and say you won.
Exploring some ruins the party encounters bugbears. You can’t talk to them/question them … they fear their leader! How many fucking times do we have to read this bullshit justification? What surprise is going to be spoiled? Do you really need this crap? Isn’t’ it much better to reward the smart party, and take advantage of scheming plots and everything else that a social element adds? No? You say you’re a {s}hitty DM and you run D&D like it’s a mini’s combat game? Oh, ok, as long as we’re all clear that you’re a tool ….
I don’t find the adventure interesting, because of its linear nature and focus on combat
It’s just some window dressing for set-piece battles. Fucking piece of shit.
I find the tactical mini’s aspect and rules mastery shit tedious and boring
These sorts of things remind me more of mini’s gaming than RPG’s. You CAN do assaults RPG-style, but these high level ones, especially, just seem like excuses to combine kits and stats and make EL-appropriate encounters. *sigh* high-level D&D …
It starts with the usual ‘lets build excitement with a starting combat’ bullshit common to these plot shitholes.
This ‘Lost Valley’ adventure starts with an attack by an awakened dire ape ranger. And that, alone, was enough to let me know how this thing was going to go. {...} Anyway, it has two more set pieces after the first two and then you get to pick up a bunch of coins in treasure. Joy. The whole transition from adventure and wonder to set-pieces with columns of pages of tactics has been more than a little disappointing for me.
Again, each more of a set piece. We are in full on Combat As Sport mode in this adventure. Room, “interesting” combat, repeat. [Insert tirade about the death of D&D here.]
Fucking seriously? Five rooms of combat? I see that Dungeon has just given up trying. “Go fight through these five rooms. Because.” I am both excited and depressed at this new Dungeon style. Depressed at the lack of trying and excited because the “reviews” I provide are now much easier. But the reading of them is not …
The longest adventure in this issue is a big ol monster zoo battle with just about every evil high HD monster in the book. {...} It’s just room after room of combat. Nothing too interesting.
Oh, so you can go to the other plane and experience the linear combat shit-fest that the designer thinks is “adventure.” Monster zoo, with weirdly allied trolls and other creatures. No motivation. No goals beyond killing things
Adventure Path! Which is synonymous with linear adventure and forced combats! This starts with a forced combat; an assassination attempt. It moves to overly detailed text, another forced combat, a forced-combat assault on a temple and then a linear forced combat dungeon crawl. So, the usual shit show.
A true piece of shit {...} “Linear” doesn’t begin to describe this, {...} the party MUST have all five encounters. {...} Thus this “adventure” is nothing more than a D&D Miniatures ”campaign.” {...} the COMPLETE lack of pretext and bold-faced turning of D&D in to tactics porn and calling it an “adventure”? Fuck. You.
Six rooms, six monster fights. Calling this piece of shit an adventure is an insult to the word. And you know what? It makes PERFECT sense. The intro says these came from a D&D session at GenCon in … 2004. My experience with organized play/RPGA/DDAL have been UNIVERSALLY negative. Nothing more than min/max hack & slash fests. One time they took the character out of my wifes hand when she announced she only had a +1 to hit, stating “you must have built your character wrong.” This adventure is PERFECT for those kinds of ass hats. And before someone chimes in with “Different strokes for different folks.”let me come in a preemptive FUCK. YOU.
This nothing piece of garbage is just a series of forced fights, in eight rooms, with some half-dragon cult members. Oh, and your ally betrays you, of course. There’s nothing going on here other than rolling nice.
Room after room after room after room after room after room of combat make this one of the saddest adventures pushed thus far in Dungeon. Big HP opponents. “All of the cloud giants drink fly potions before the combat.” Long read alouds. Magic walls with 720hp. This is all textbook how to not write a high level adventure.
This is full on crap-fest combat-as-sport mode. Pretext after pretext is given for combat. Made with rage. Mad with fury. Mad with pain. The end result of every encounter is that everything in the room attacks the party on sight. {...} If you want set piece after set piece and combat and combat then this adventure is for you!
The worst kind of dreck: tactics/mechanics porn. Reams and reams of Break DC’s and long-winded tactics passages for combats. I note that there’s a section on some Forgotten Realms spell that prevents teleportation and divination from working. Such shitty creativity that player gimping has been memorialized as official Forgotten Realms cannon!
This is a dungeon crawl full of combats full of the usual “you can’t skip the encounter” movement/passwall/teleport gimps and ends with a potential 750hp combat with a god. {...} it’s just combat tactics porn, room after room.
Ant dwarf hybrids are featured in this linear hack-fest. Linear maps. Rooms with nothing more than combat. Go from room to room, with no choice, and masturbate to your min-max’d characters tactics. This “adventure” is just a simple wargame, and not a very good one. The word count is padded to shit and back.
The party is assigned a mission, they take a linear path through a forest, having linear combat encounters, reach a destination and have more linear encounters. Everything attacks. It’s just all combat. You know how to detect when you are being tricked? The NPC doesn’t start combat immediately. That’s your clue that you should just stab the due in the eye socket. {...} mini-combat with a little pretext wrapped around and nicer terrain than most mini-combat folks make an effort at.
I think it was the winner of the “design the shittiest series” contest? Sixteen room linear dungeon with nothing going on. The highlight is a succubus feigning damsel in distress. Sorry baby, we kill all prisoners and hostages on sight; it’s safer that way. Walk in a room, get attacked. Open an urn, trigger a trap. There’s nothing to this. Again. There’s no adventure, just encounters. I find this design style disgusting.
You follow a linear trail, having fight after fight. Pretext after pretext for combat. Dude doesn’t answer his door and has a “guard drake.” Thugs don’t like people asking questions. On it goes. This is augmented by MOUNTAINS of justifying text. There has to be multiple paragraphs justifying the guard drake.
You go to a bar and get attacked. You go to a house and get attacked. You go to an eight room linear dungeon. End. It’s just set-piece combats linked with the barest pretext of non-combat. Utter garbage. I’d wipe my ass with it but I got a bidet for Christmas.
There are NPC’s on the train, but they get no personalities, names, or anything else. A new fucking low in adventure design, you move from room to room on the train and in each you fight someone. No roleplaying. “A big climax fight on the roof of the train! Ohhhhhh!” *yawn* The tactics porn is the only thing that matters. Fuck the roleplay. Fuck creativity. Go memorize the rules and build your min/max piece of shit character with your impotent DPS ratings. Fuck you and your “different people like different things” shit. Go fucking play Dust Tactics.
There’s a whole “wilderness survival guide”/”torture the players with bookkeeping for rations, etc” thing going on that I don’t think adds any fun to the adventure at all. I can go to work if I want to find the crossover point to carrying rations/winter supplies to travel speeds.
As usual, a big effect is made of the environment impacts of the snow & cold. I loathe these DM torture porn things. I’d rather the environment was used to make things awesome rather than to pedantically punish the players. {Several comments defend the ice & snow cold travel challenges and say the adventure was good. I concur, environment can also be an interesting challenge, until PCs get magicked enough to ignore it. And traveling in the arctic or jungle is about the closest to real-world adventure you can get.}
It’s also interspersed with nitpicky rule reminders. “Remember, you get a +5 to free from spiderwebs if you have your footing!” and “you get a -2 to stealth over rubble!” All of these are fine RULINGS and suck ass RULES. Fuck your rules mastery.
Oh my. This point out the 3.5 problem, as well as how far adventure design fell. This is an attempt to create a high-level adventure that does not feature combat. Given that Dungeon Magazine seems to think that “high level” means “linear combat shit fest”, this is a quite welcome goal. Unfortunately, the design is incompetent. {...} the core of the adventure is “make a diplomacy check.” At the welcoming dinner you have to succeed on two DC50 checks or the adventure ends right there; you’re kicked out. In other debates the party has if they fail their checks (DC 61!) then they lose. They are free to stay and watch the movie play out. Joy. During the debates, if the party responds to an argument with one of two specific lines of debate then they get a bonus to their diplomacy check. Reducing a night of gaming to a die roll is never a good thing. The lack of options after “failing” means the adventure is badly written. It’s roleplaying, not making a point in craps. The SUPER high DC checks are related to the attribute check bloat in 3.5. Either you pumped points in to Diplomacy and make the check or you didn’t and don’t. {...} But there’s no ADVENTURE around it, just a die roll. No support for the DM to run a investigation, bribe, or whatever. And, if you do ferret the plot out ahead of time, it doesn’t change anything.
The adventure also illustrates the problem with the Search check. Previous editions had an element of player skill in the searching. The DM dropped hints in their descriptions, the players followed up and discovered things. In 3e this was abstracted to The Search Check. Just roll the dice, or take 20, and don’t bother with the more interactive portions. Rolling dice for routine resolution is boring as fuck. Once, running 4e RPGA at a con, a dude rolled his diplomacy to recruit an army of floating eyeballs from a bunch of wizards. “Uh, nope. What do you actually SAY?” I asked. “Uh, you’re one of THOSE dm’s. Can’t I just roll?” was the reply. This moment has stayed with me an excellent example of how mechanics can ruin play.
{This is a tough game system issue - you invalidate social interaction skills and screw players who invest in them rather than combat skills, if you demand or allow role-play instead of a roll. Maybe allow to roll only if the player has a good story. }
{This is about writing adventures for use by others. When you write for yourself, most of it is in your head, and jotted notes to trigger your imagination are enough. Staying close to this idea also applies here.}
I have review standards and strong beliefs on what makes a good adventure. First and foremost it has to be useful to the DM at the table while they running it. This is the primary purpose of every adventure ever written, even if the designer didn’t understand that fact. You can use it as inspiration, steal parts from it, or use it as a doorstop if you want, but, judged as an adventure, it has to be useful at the table.
A large part of being useful at the table is a writing style that allows the DM to scan the text quickly during play and locate information. The characters walk in to a room and the DM must quickly, in just seconds, locate the description, grok it, and relate it to the players. Then as they react the DM must continue scanning and absorbing to react to their actions as guided by the DM text for the room. This almost always means a terse and evocative writing style that’s well organized. After this, we come to creativity, interesting encounters, and all the rest. It can’t be boring. But first, it has to be useful to the DM at the table.
Mountains of backstory, mountains of room text. All of it fights the DM running it at the table. If you are including something in the main text then it has to be directly useful for play. If it’s not then it needs to be removed or moved to an appendix where it can be ignored.
Rooms are described in detail for the DM. Detail that is meaningless and has no impact on the game. I THINK the writer is trying to set some ambiance, trying to inspire the DM to communicate a creepy vision to the players. But it all becomes Wall of Text. The entries are so long that the important bits are lost. Even the inspiring bits are then lost. Three sentences are used when one will do. Six are used when it needed two, or three. This is one of the major sins of the adventure. There is so much text provided that instead of being inspired you are lost in it all. It’s impossible to run with the book open in front of you. You’re going to have to prepare notes ahead of time and/or highlight the shit out of the adventure in order to run it at the table. And, after all, that’s what this thing is supposed to do, right? Be run at the table? The PLAYABILITY of the text suffers.
It reveled in useless detail. A LONG room description that describes a trophy room, all of the trophies and accomplishments, and then ends “but it was long ago looted and now nothing remains but dust.” Backstory, history, detail that doesn’t apply to play, a verbose writing style … these were the hallmarks of most Dungeon Magazine adventures.
Seriously, this must be the Brothers Karamazov of Dungeon adventures. A entire page for a back-alley fight in which the bad guy escapes in the first round. Nuts!
Oh boy, a full page of read-aloud! Soliloquy, HO! AND a page of useless background?!! And useless fresco’s on the walls showing suffering?!?! Say it isn’t so! A symmetrical star layout?!?! Hot diggity dirt!
And it is LONG. LONG. There’s mountains and mountains and mountains of text for EVERYTHING. There’s backstory embedded and expanded upon to explain EVERYTHING. What’s that, an aboleth in an isolated chamber? Eight hundred paragraphs later we learn why, up to and including the use of a decanter of endless water. Someone, somewhere, thinks this extra detail is great. That person is a fucking moron. You have to dig through mountains of data.
This is it kids, the poster child for bad Dungeon adventures. If you want to know what the evil bad guy had for lunch on one random day thirty years earlier and the impact it had on their digestive system, then this is the adventure for you. I’m sure that kind of detail is in this somewhere … because EVERYTHING else is also in here. Nine pages of text before the dungeon. Three pages of triple column text as background BEFORE the information for the dungeon master is presented. I’m also happy to report that there is a great abundance of overly-long and complicated names of places and people … Oh Boy! “[Long text describing something] … but all that remains of the massacre are a few small chunks of stone.” Jesus H Fucking Christ. Really? Seriously?
If the name of the room was “Well stocked Larder” then the DM can say “Yup, it’s got salt.” You don’t need to TELL the DM what’s in a well stocked larder, any more than you need to, say, describe a normal bedroom. (You might mention the salt in the DM text, speifically, if there ARE slugs in the lower level and you intend that. But you dont NEED to. Players see slugs, remember larder, ask DM is there’s salt, they say yes.)
This may be the dictionary definition of Wall of Text. It goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph, with little to save the poor DM from misery. It features such classics as: “2. Closets. These rooms are identical. Each has several hooks affixed to interior walls. Just inside the doorway sits a low shelf designed to hold boots and shoes. An everburning torch is mounted to the wall opposite the door. Both chambers are empty.” Which is a fine description of a boring closet. It adds nothing and nor do many of the room descriptions. {At lower levels, everburning torches would be of interest}
The guildhall is just another building stuffed full of boring encounters. Mundane rooms, training rooms, quarters, etc. The whole thing is more than a little mundane and boring.
My chief complaint would be that too much space is spent describing the mundane portions of the castle. No one needs a paragraph to describe a normal hallway.
THINK. What is the purpose of your adventure? Your content should match that. {...} too much text telling you irrelevant things; aka the style of the time. Instead the text should be used to … support the adventure! Stunning thought, I know. In this adventure the demon is supposed to be doing hit & runs on the party. The text for the rooms should be supporting that. Instead of giving us a long paragraphs on describing a well in the parade grounds it should instead be loading us up with ideas. It hides in the well, ready to yank someone in looking over the edge, and things like that. {...} Figure out what your adventure is supposed to be doing and use the text to support it. Really THINK.
The purpose of the text is not to create a rich world with fully flavored backgrounds for everyone and everything. The purpose of the text is to help the DM run the damn thing; aim the text and content at things that the players will interact with not a laundry list of the contents of my kitchen drawer.
But there is a special place in my heart, next to my ball of white male rage, that is reserved for the Overly Detailed Backstory. Look, I get it: there’s dragons and white walkers and they are gonna fight. I don’t need page after page of what color gout the swineherds brother has when the swineherd is only barely glimpsed from the road.
There are THREE pages of backstory and history that will NEVER come up in play. It’s CrAzY! MOUNTAINS and PAGES of text
Jesus Fuck, two and half pages of backstory for four pages of adventure! That must be a new Dungeon record.
The room descriptions note the history of the room and things which WERE instead of concentrating on things that ARE.
The additional text has a lot of “used to be” and other other descriptions of history and motivations of people long dead. NONE of this is relevant to running the adventure. It has no use when the characters enter the room. The content needs to be focused on supporting actual play, and a great deal of the content here does not do that.
A pretty classic Dungeon Magazine: seven rooms in ten pages. It accomplishes this by spending a decent amount of time telling us what each room used to be used for, in detail. This, of course, adds nothing to the adventure.
it’s boring room after boring room with too much description tell us what the room was once used for, or how its not being used right now, or yet another explanation of how the jailer is not a nice guy. That. Doesn’t. Support. Play.
Lots of opportunity for useless background data “A year ago a destrachan crawled up from the underdark and fought some adventurers and died, resulting in this rubble filled room.” Note the contrast between this “explaining why” and Curse of the Shrine Goddess, where stars disappear from the sky with no explanation of why. One concentrates on play and creates fun. The other concentrates on some historical novelization of the adventure, and sucks shit.
Here’s the DM notes for a room with four pools of slime in it: “Morbion created these four pools of olive slime by using stone shape to create two-foot-deep hollow depression in the floor. He then transplanted a batch of olive slime to each and has been cultivating the four over the past several days in an attempt to develop variant forms of the ooze. So far, his experiments have met with failure and he’s only grown four patches or ordinary olive slime.” So, basically, there’s four pools of slime in a Jubliex temple? Who woulda thunk it! A great example of padding your word count using backstory that has nothing to do with the adventure at the table.
“The other six hold only the barest bits of bone and shreds of cloth. This displacer beasts that occupy this room licked the lacquer from the corpses like giant candies before consuming the bodies.” Great. Does the adventure take place while they are doing this? No? And they’ve completely consumed the bodies? So everything in the LONG background paragraph is irrelevant to the adventure, as well as those sentences? Perfect. Glad you were able to pad out your Pay Per Word score.
It provides stats for a dead body on the floor, that will not come back to life in any way during this boring snoozefest.
There is the usual nonsense with room descriptions, like the paragraph that describes the history of a pool of dried blood. Yes, an entire paragraph to tell us that a pool of loos on the battlements is from where some skeletons shot an escaping priest. No body. Not fresh. Just some dried blood.
It contains one of my all-time favorite examples of how to not write a room description: 5a. Old Animal Pen This area, defined by the eight stake holes shown on the map, was used as a holding are for horses and animals that would ventrally end up in the goblins’ stewpot. The wooden pen has long since rotted away. Adventurers finding the holes can only guess at their original purpose. Fucking seriously? Not just what is used to be, but how it was used before you tell us it’s all irrelevant?
One of the greatest examples in all Christendom of bad room writing is contained herein. It’s not platonic, but pretty damn close. I leave you with it, as an example of the joy you can find herein: “4. Trophy Room. This room once contained trophies of war. Swords, spears, and armor of all kinds were dedicated here to the everlasting glory of the fallen orc leaders. Centuries ago, the walls were draped with elven banners, dwarves sigils, gnome heraldry, and the flags and standards of men, goblins, and various orc tribes. The moonorc leaders have stripped the room of anything useful in order to outfit the tribe. The weapons and armor were quickly divided among the warriors, while the flags and banners were torn down and used for blankets or ripped apart and resewn into bags, sacks, and clothing. The room now contains only refuse and rusty, unusable equipment.”
The village is described in WAY too much detail. Almost every entry seems to give us a short tutorial on how medieval farming practices work. There’s also a nice section how the gatekeeper purchases vegetables from the local general store. WTF? NONE of this is relevant to the adventure. It’s absurd.
They get names, and individual lair rooms, and have some semblance of personality. There will, however, be no chance to interact with them and so all that they ever were or will be is lost in an instant.
Each has a name and a personality that goes on for quite some word count. They attack immediately and no doubt die ignominious deaths at the hands of 8th-12th level PC’s. Why pay all this detail to creatures which die immediately in 10 minutes of pure combat? And yes, later on in the fortress, the party encounter 8 elf prisoners who get NO detail at all, in spite of the fact they are eager to join the party and wipe out the evil menace. WTF?!
The enemies are well-described with personalities, etc, but that will never be used because you’re just going to butcher them mindlessly in the opening battle. I guess maybe you could parley with one or two during the battle, or during a chase.
The kidnappers have decent flavor & personalities … which will never see the light of day and they exist to say about 4 sentences, total, and then get cut down.
WHich is then combined with MONSTROUS amounts of text. We get a paragraph describing a tattoo on the back of the hands of some of the soldiers WHICH HAS NO IMPACT ON THE ADVENTURE.
Generic Adventure is generic.
It’s just the generic magic items, generic monsters, generic rooms, etc that I’m having a problem with.
The rooms get boring little descriptions like “full of ruined sofas and tapestries.” A kind of generic decay description that infests the fantasy adventure market.
The city is not detailed and a city without flavor is atrocious to run.
There are a lot of rumors, which is nice, but they are a little generic and could be beefed up with some more exciting language. “A hermit lives in the wooded vale south of the pass. Don’t disturb him – he owns a powerful magic staff.” That’s too generic for my tastes. I’m looking for a story about crazy old ben who has a lazer staff , or crazy old Ichibod and how he fought off a giant by using his staff to turn him to a manta ray. Effects and color, not flavorless fact.
“Brigands” are mentioned in the read-aloud. You should never say “Brigands” or “Bandits” in a game. It should always be “Jacks’s Gang” or “that mob of Bandy’s boys.” Specificity brings a world alive and genericism kills immersion.
Uh … show, don’t tell. Maybe it’s a problem with the Standards people, but I hate being told something is evil. Show me. Put some heads on stakes. Flay someone, still alive. The reaction of the PLAYERS will be better.
The read aloud has some truly horrid things to say, like “A woman named Mother Grundy owns this stall.” That’s a conclusion that can’t be reached by observation.
“Only if attacked do they scatterm in which case they retreat in a strangely orderly, unnervingly silent exodus.” Also, unnerving is a conclusion. It’s telling instead of showing. Strike that word.
The problem here is that you can’t just say “run it spooky”, you need to provide resources to help the DM run it spooky. That’s what we’re paying for. Without that you haven’t really provided anything of value to the DM. “Zombies attack while the group is in a lighthouse.” There’s no value in that. It’s very important to remember when designing an adventure that it’s your job to communicate the vibe.
The best encounters kind of stick with you. You read them one, maybe twice, and they are completely internalized. You need not hardly refer to the encounters again during play, it’s like you wrote it yourself.
Oh wait, oh wait! Here’s a masterpiece of creative read-aloud writing!!! “You find something on the ground.” What the FUCK is up with that? PPW?
I hate boxed text. My eyes glaze over when I listen OR read it. I start to think about succubi art. I groan. I LOATHE it.
It’s got a nice column long read-aloud, those are always fun, right?
The amount of text and lack of an overview makes deciphering the entire adventure a chore for the DM.
There’s no orientation to the adventure for the DM. “Sandbox” is not an excuse. There’s clearly some things meant to be worked in and the adventure as a whole suffers from not having an overview of how these things fit together.
It needs help, in particular it needs some reference tables to summarize events, NPC’s, and so on.
A simple timeline, with events on it. A simple list of NPC’s, with their personalities. A list of flavor suggestions for building dread.
For example, summarizing all of the guards/NPC on a single reference sheet with simple stats and personalities.
And, even better, the table notes WHERE YOU CAN FIND THINGS! Giving the daughter some letters from her dead fiance will give you some positive modifier, but the table also tells you that they are in room six! Oh the humanity! A writer who actually makes things easier for the DM!
The NPC’s are detailed in a table THAT ALSO NOTES WHERE THEY CAN BE FOUND IN THE KEYED ENTRIES.
Traps are shows. ABout 30 glyphs of wrding are shown. Light sources are shown. (Yeah!)
The 20-entry wandering table is just a list of monsters with stats. Nothing more. Rot Grubs. Common Rats. Giant Rats. Razors so you can slit your own throats to make it end. No, sorry, just kidding about that last one.
The {...} wandering monster tables are lame and boring ad just consist of a monster listing.
In a dungeon the wanderers act as a kind of push your luck timer; the more time you are in the more danger you are in as your resources are depleted. Wilderness wanderers though, because they only happen once or twice a day, should be full fledged encounters; interesting things that happen with interesting folks, be they monsters or otherwise.
A nice little wandering monster table that adds some encounter notes/suggestions next to each entry. I like that sort of thing. it prompts the DM to riff off of it and loads their imagination up to run the adventure. Tribesmen are from one of the villages and may travel with the party back. Animals act like animals. These little notes add a lot to the adventure.
There are bits and pieces of good design in this. Some of the creatures you encounter are doing things; dragging away a dead body, or in the process of attacking others.
The wandering table, in particular, for the wilderness areas has a good little sentence or two after each encounter listing which adds quite a bit to the encounters. Goblins are looking for a lair, ghouls with a grievance against their former lord, and ogre looking for a goat or fox to eat.
The wandering monster table is a nice one, with things like “you step on a sandling” and “dervishes looking for a ruin” and “nomads who trade with you.” There are a few “attack on sight” encounters and many more that have just a bit more to them. That extra bit, usually just a single short sentence, adds a wonderful variety to what otherwise could have been yet another generic desert dreck-fest.
you get to a pretty decent wandering monster table, that are excellent little set ups for adventure. A little long, at a paragraph each instead of a sentence, but still good.
There are a lot of rumors … but not a lot of colorful characters to get them from.
There’s also a nice colloquial rumor table, done in story format. These are much nicer than the fact-based rumor tables, especially when worked in Grandpa Simpson style.
The inn has the same problem that most older adventures have: it’s described fully. It’s almost like the writers are stuck in the old “dungeon map key” style of play. Instead of abstracting the inn map and describing the people IN the inn, instead the inn if fully described, along with the people in it, in the rooms they are found in.
the adventure correctly recognizes that this is a social adventure and therefore the map, and keyed encounters, are not as important as they are in exploration adventures.
There’s just no reason for the descriptions. It’s like you were docking at a w{h}arf in a city to get a tax stamp from the harbormaster before moving on the same day, and the entire city was described, room by room. I suppose you could reuse it, but then again you can say that for ANYTHING.
Instead of including all of the information about the people in the description for the locale it should have been broken out to a short description of the “mundane” village locations and another section on the people, personalities, and politics of the situation.
The text of the adventure also lists how those villagers feel about other villagers and how they interact with them and what they have to stay about them. That is GREAT. A good social adventure thrives on the interpersonal relationships among the NPC’s in order to come alive.
A host of NPC’s, with appearances, personalities, goals and so on, but it’s all presented in giant text form … meaning you’ll need to take copious notes to run it. Tables. USE. A. FUCKING. TABLE. TO. SUMMARIZE. Ug.
The village could really use more life to it, things going on other than the adventure and more NPC’s in the village to interact with and get rumors from.
This is then augmented by many of the locations having events. Things HAPPEN in this adventure. People are not just waiting around. Parades of ghosts, vampire attacks, almost every location has one or two events to augment and/or enhance some of the plotlines in the village. This is REALLY good. It brings the place to life. No longer static many of the villages now feel alive
What you get are some brief descriptions of some notable places in the city and some idea of what happens to them over a month, and then a series of events over the next month that the party can take part in. Looters, food riots, and so on. There is a little advice on how to get things going and maintain them, some general tools such as a quite nice rumor table, and then … you’re off! as such this is more like a sandbox setting. One of the most successful campaigns I ever ran was a city game. The lessons I learned from that campaign are present in this adventure, although implicitly. EVERYTHING is a hook. Everyone you meet, every interaction you have will cause something else to happen. Free someone trapped under a cart? He was once an important person in the city army. Don’t do X, then Y happens. This entire adventure is a springboard to adventure. {...} City games take a lot of work & record keeping, so don’t tread lightly, but the sense of context and connections the characters make will cause the work to pay off in great play experiences.
The town portion does have a bit of a sandbox feel, and it quite open ended in the solutions available to solve the town portion. That’s very nice.
The information in town is organized, with “here’s this person and heres what they know”, and it’s fairly easy to see how one lead can point out another person to seek out.
Laborers, pilgrims, city guards, merchant, unaffiliated street gangs … just enough content to give you a great idea of what like if life in this city.
It is organized quite well: there’s a description of the key people in town and what they know/how they react, a list of events that can take place, and then a location list. The locations are very briefly described, except for the main abandoned dwarven hold. In short: it’s organized exactly the way it needs to be to support the type of play it wants to be
It’s a fairly ‘realistic’ exploration of a small bandit fortress {...}. It feels more like a tactical assault on a real place. Here’s the keep, here’s the patrols, here’s the watches, and here’s an obvious hole in the bad guys plan. It ALMOST keeps to that formula but doesn’t beat the thing to death (unlike the points I make in reviews.)
It’s just a place, with guards, that you break in to. A Caper! Except … it’s not written that way. We need schedules! Patrol routes! How the dudes inside react when the alarm is raised! An order of battle! When do they release the Death Dogs to roam the halls? None of that is here.
It’s a little too “room/key” to support an infiltration/spy mission. In one room entry it notes that to keep up morale sometimes entertainers come in to the closely guarded citadel. That sort of stuff is better moved outside of the keys, for example.
The “big picture” details of the security and procedures should have been pulled out in general sections and then a terse room/key presented, with the two referencing each other. I don’t want to dig for information about the patrolling animals by trying to find the correct room with the info. Put it in “night patrols” section and reference room 4 as their pen, with room 4 referencing the night patrols section, noting it’s the home of the patrolling animals.
Mystery adventures don’t work in D&D. The characters cast a spell and the mystery is over in short order.
Let me get this out of the way: mysteries don’t work in D&D, or most RPG’s. The players have access to just too many ways to get information. At this level {5} we have Augury, Detect Charm, Know Alignment, Speak with Animals and maybe Speak with Dead and Locate Object. And that’s just the clerics list. Druids and Wizards will have their own allotment. The only way past this problem is with a bizarre assortment of customer tailored magic items just to fuck with the players and deny them the powers their characters have earned. So, the adventure sucks. A decent attempt is made at a character-driven story by giving some decent details of a dozen or so key NPC’s, their personalities and how they act and react. It’s like a Poirot mystery: everyone has something to hide. This is ten ruined by providing overly long and uselessly detailed room descriptions in order that they make up the majority of the page count. It would have been REALLY helpful to have had all of the NPC’s detailed on one summary page for the DM to refer to during play.
It occurs to me that much was lost in OD&D between the resource-management of the early game and the plot from the later games. The “Detect Being Fucked With by the DM” spells made sense when you couldn’t refresh any spell at any time, didn’t have your books with you, couldn’t learn any spell at will, and had to manage your wizard slots more. As those limitations were houseruled away, or officially ruled away, the “Detect DM Bullshit” spells became adventure breakers when the entire adventure revolved around them. WOTC should have removed them from the modern era game, or at least publish “genre packs” of appropriateness. {Which they did, 5e Detect Evil does not detect alignment anymore. Zone of Truth has a save.}
The encounter locations are quite terse, generally, and the investigative elements point STRAIGHT at the bandit camp, over and over again. This is the ONLY way to run an investigation: provide an overwhelming number of clues … and this adventure does that.
The format used here, which is the traditional keyed room format, really does not fit this sort of adventure. You get a massive wall of text and need to try and hunt down things which makes running this sort of thing a prep nightmare. Better would be a list of NPC personalities/goals, a timeline, and a minimal room key. IE: reference material.
This is a murder mystery. Someone is killing people in Sharn. It tries to do the right thing. It’s organized in to locations, murder details, and other events. This is a good style for a murder mystery, recognizing that the locations are just a framework for the events to take place in. It’s got a nice NPC summary with names, roles, and rumors about them … but then leaves off their locations and their personalities
Is there a better way to present investigations? The method in this adventure, a search check with the DM then feeding information, seems too abstracted. It reduces an “Ah Ha!” moment to a simple die roll. Room/Key format may be cumbersome for this sort of thing, but just listing the “important” rooms and what someone can find in it would seem to be both better than the die roll and the room/key. It preserves the player agency, eliminates the “all D&D elements are die rolls” nonsense, and can be relatively dense/terse in presentation.
Somethings gotta give here, or should have anyway. Either don’t make it a high-level adventure or don’t make it “investigating the murder of a night watchman.”
This is a pretty classi{c} (IE: shitty) plot based adventure that wants to be an investigation. It contains such wonders as “let the bad guy escape if they catch on too soon” and “even if they use scry, don’t give them the clues”, as well as “the DC to interrogate is 50.” {...} If the party thinks to scry, pushes their odds and makes it then they should be given helpful information. Likewise if they capture people to question the DC should NOT be 50 for a run of mill hired thug. They should be rewarded for their interesting and non-combat/non-linear attempts of actually trying to play D&D instead of a mini’s combat game.
Given a ruined fort the party has to hold out against a band of 22 gnolls and a few leader-types. I like these desperate last stand type adventures; {...} For this to work you need an environment dynamic & colorful enough for the party to use their brains to come up with defenses. Given a ruined fort full of stuff, MacGyver/Hannibal your way to survival. To do that you need things to work with.
The party ends up in a fort/manor and a large group of orcs attack and lay siege to it. The party gets to control all of the locals, from lord to peasant, and has access top all of the general supplies in the fort in order to fight off the attackers. There’s a timeline presented, some rough orc battle plans, and general plans of the fort and the surrounding lands. {...} I like these sorts of “heres a location and heres a goal. Make it happen” kinds of adventures. The players are given a very free hand, controlling all of the NPC’s.
The map is relatively simple and probably doesn’t support the kind of hit & run & guerilla tactics that might be wonderful to see in a Dungeon Defender type adventure.
The whole thing is supposed to be a creepy assault with a kind of cramped and claustrophobic atmosphere. The designer says as much in one brief sentence. Unfortunately there’s not enough here to enable the DM to do as much. Zombie assaults are about defending the building with what’s at hand.
I’s linear, and essentially a series of set pieces with the generally hated “escort mission” tag attached to it.
There’s an allotment of NPC’s to spice things up on board, some generics to die horrible, and some locations to visit along the way. {...} The thing is full of nice little vignettes and encounters on the way to the island. In short, I think it’s a pretty damn good sea/travel adventure, one of the best I’ve seen.
One thing I REALLY like about this adventure is the way a decent sized wilderness map is presented, with encounters all over the place, so the party can choose to avoid the swamp, or go through the mountains, or whatever. That’s a good way to support the DM.
All spells are on scrolls and all weapons provided, no armor, blah blah blah, which is how it’s an All Levels adventure. This is more X-Crawl then it is old school funhouse. 10 challenges, all of which are really puzzles of one sort of another. It’s hard for me to recognize this as an adventure; it’s more of an evening activity in my mind.
It is SO very hard for me to get past my prejudices. This is a training ground adventure (Duh!) This must be the lowest form of adventure. No pretext of adventure at all, just a bunch of shit that the players have to figure out. Suck it you fucking haters of the metagame, the Training Ground adventure writers know the score! {...} Joy. Why not just open the monster manual to a random page and announce that there are now 7 ogres in the room. At least TRY to come up with an idea!
Adventure Setting Or Theme Specific Advise
Faery Tale Adventures
Danger! Folklore! Danger! I Love this stuff to an unnatural degree! OMG! I LUV this shit. A talking fish, a talking owl, and a talking giant rat are a part of the adventure; {...} It’s the OLD folklore goblins rather than the generic sword-bait goblins that D&D usually presents. {...} Anyway, you have no soul if you don’t like this. I’m just saying.
There’s a nice fairy tale feel here, with injured animals, old wells, haughty warriors blocking a shrine, and a forceful merchant.
It’s got a decent winter vibe, much more so than most winter adventures. From a village fight to worgs attacking a mastadon to a field of frozen corpses, it does a decent job of bringing in a variety of encounters and options for resolution that don’t just involve combat.
3D adventures don’t work. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has written a decent one. But in general they don’t work. I’m no historian but I suspect that the underwater and flying rules were meant for players to solve problems in the 2D world. Swim a river in a cave, or fly up to a new location to explore. extended adventures underwater or in the air just don’t fit in the groove well. The DM/adventure has to give the party a bunch of stuff to allow them to fly/breathe, and then everyone gets to have fun with the new movement & encumbrance and environmental rules. Yeah! Bookkeeping!
Underwater? Ha! A million loaned things for the {p}arty, right? Right? No! Nixie kisses! It’s wonderful! All is right in the world, it fits perfectly! {...} And the DM Torture Porn of Underwater Adventuring is toned down to be just the good parts that are fun and enhance the adventure! How is that? Light sources halved … so the descriptions play on that … shadows and chaos suddenly appearing in your (very) restrictive magic 10’ light circle! And not immediately attacking you! Lungs full of water and can’t cast? How about an air pocket under an overturned boat? Or a glob of air stuck to a diving beetle? Perfect!
You get water breathing potions from the captain to explore it. {...} I just hate the underwater portion with the madness of someone prejudiced against underwater adventures.
It wants to provide a magical and wondrous adventure in a strange and alien world under the sea. All it actually does is provide boring combat after combat. As with all crappy underwater adventures, it provides the party with gear to survive.
Fucking. Sewers. I LOATHE sewers.
Fucking god dammit! Sewers! Skulks and ghouls in the sewers. Lots of read-aloud, lots of DM’s text, not much interesting.
This is a linear crawl in a … sewer! Yes, that’s right, it’s a linear sewer crawl, that most exciting of all adventure types. Actually, I’m being unfair. You can select the right or left hand linear room set to go down. Well, before they merge into one and then it’s REALLY linear.
And it has sewers. I can’t do it. I can’t review another sewer adventure. Oh world, I have failed thee. My only charge and I have failed. I just can’t. Pretext to get you in to the sewers and then SEWER DUNGEON. The map does appear to have pools and bridges, so at least there are some tactical options. In the sewers. Spriggan drug dealers in greyhawk sewers. Tonally, D&D is dead.
Joy. An asylum. I’ll put this in the pile of museum and archeology dig adventures I’ve collected. {...} It’s unclear why the party doesn’t just kill everyone they see and burn the place down right after “asylum” and “don’t know anything about it” and “please stay the night to keep out of the weather.” You know the deal.
Masquerade ball. Oasis. Archeological dig. Drugged food. Pretty close to shitty trope bingo!
What is the fascination with the circus and carnival? I get the festivals are an important part of village life but no circus ever appeared in a D&D adventure that did not have something fishy going on. Smart players would just have their characters burn it down and put everyone to the sword summarily. It’s called ‘Risk Mitigation.’ JESES H FUCKING CHRIST WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE OBSESSED WITH PUTTING EVIL CARNIVALS IN D&D? It doesn’t work. It NEVER works. Unless you put festivals in routinely then the party will know something is up when the circus shows up. The smart thing to do is to just burn it down and kill everyone. Especially when you are level 10+, as in this adventure. Who is going to mess with your 10+ party? The local authorities? The party is probably the local law.
Ug! An All thief adventure! All signs point to SUCK, Captain!
Transported to Ravenloft, kill the evil vampire Baron. Heard that one before? Ravenloft adventures are a one-trick pony: one is all you get before the party kills all Barons, Mayors, etc, on sight.
The party washes ashore on a misty isle (Ravenloft!) and sees a mansion on the island. (I burn it down.) They are greeted by a distracted doctor. (I stab him in the face.) who offers you each a room for the night. (Uh, fuck you. No. We all sleep in the same room. Also, I kill the doctor.) Weird things happen. (Uh, I burned the house down, remember? I do it again.) Turns out the doctor is evil and salvaging body parts to repair his maimed daughter in the basement.
Dragonlance. Tinker gnomes. Gully dwarves. Are you still reading? Why? Why would you keep reading after I disclosed all of that?
That’s right, I enjoy having my 10th level PC laughed at because of some DM bullshit. And of course, they are actually good guys because they fight to capture instead of kill. “Why do you interrupt our dancing?” Because you, Mr Korrad, like all the Kender and Dragonborn and Gnomes before you, deserve death.
A word of advice: when running NPC halfling, tinkers and gully, a little goes a LONG way. It’s often more useful to murder them all and dump the bodies (or display them proudly if you have cool DM.)
I fucking hate the rascally/innocent halfling meme.
- Adventure Structure
- Adventure Hooks
- Entrance to the Mythic Underworld
- Sandboxes and Hexcrawls
- Factions
- Nonlinear Design
- Avoid Linear Adventures
- Minimize Choke points
- Use time-bound Events
- Use Dreams sparingly
- Avoid Diaries
- Have some Imagination
- Dungeon and Cave Design
- Set Pieces
- Empty Rooms
- Evocative Treasure
- Cool Magic Items
- Colorful NPCs
- Fantastic Monsters
- Weird Wizard Towers
- Wonder beats Mechanics
- Avoid Magic as Technology
HOW TO MASTER?
- Intelligent Opponents coordinate
- Encourage Crazy Hijinks
- Monsters and NPCs negotiate
- Avoid Fight to the Death
- Battle Fatigue - D&D is no wargame
- Play, not Accounting
- Play, not Rules Nitpicking
- Roleplay instead of skill checks
HOW TO WRITE?
- Usefulness at the Table
- Avoid Verbosity
- Leave out what the DM can make up effortlessly
- Describe ONLY what will be needed in play
- Omit Irrelevant Backstory
- Omit Room Background that will not affect play
- Omit Character Background that will not affect play
- Good Writing
- Specific beats Generic
- Show, don't tell
- Terse, Evocative Descriptions
- No Boxed Text
- Organizing Information
- Provide an Overview
- Maps
- Random Encounter Tables
- Rumor Tables
- Adventure Type Specific Advise
- Social Adventures
- Town/City Adventures
- Detective Adventures
- Caper/Heist Adventures
- Tower Defense Adventures
- Caravan Guard / Travel Adventures
- Wilderness Exploration Adventures
- Gauntlet Adventures
- Adventure Setting or Theme Advise
- Faery Tale Adventures
- Winter, Ice and Snow Adventures
- 3D Adventures
- Underwater Adventures
- Sewer Adventures
- Museum, Asylum, Circus, and All Thieves Adventures
- Ravenloft Adventures
- Dragonlance Adventures
Quotes that show the insight from his Dungeon and other reviews on how to design, write and run a good adventure - no infringement on copyright intended. You can find the full grandeur of his reviews at tenfootpole.org, which also has links on how to donate to him. In { } are my comments or spelling corrections, although I mostly left it verbatim. See his own explanation of what he is looking for in an adventure, here: https://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?page_id=1201
It interesting to me how the nature of complaints changes over time. Forced morality, player gimping and adversarial GMing are a constant concern. Wall of text, endless intro and useless background gets worse over time. In early issues, railroading is rare, then with 2nd Edition it becomes rampant. With the advent of 3e and especially 3.5, it gets even worse as the “adventures” increasingly are just sequenced combats.
I think that railroading is at the root of many wrongs. It means both the adventure design and the DM must force the players to follow the preconceived narrative and strip them of agency and freedom of choice, by gimp, cheat, and any other means.
HOW TO DM
No Railroads
{A railroad:} Essentially, the party is just watching events unfold around them with little chance to do anything about it, except stab someone when they show up and attack. That’s pretty poor design.From that point on they are led around by the nose, told to go from a to b to c, and have the adventures at each location before moving on. It’s not that he individual encounters are good or bad, its that the characters are led around by the nose to most of them. Getting off the railroad means fighting your way through hordes of centaurs. {...} I love being a spectator when I ‘play’ D&D. This “adventure” is just an excuse to talk at the party with monologues and put in some combats {...} Boring.
there’s no chance to really do anything but stare blankly and roll dice for eventual outcomes. It’s hard to get in to something like this. This reminds me of those shitty ass DM’s who think they are “telling a story.” I can’t imagine anything more boring, iconic set pieces or no. You know it’s a set up. Why care?
Just follow the line of set pieces and arrive at the inevitable destination. The DM tells a story, “and then, and then, there’s this ettercap that stalks the trails and he’s wiped out a fortress and then and then …” I loathe this. The story belongs to the players.
Yeah Us! We played D&D! This is nothing but scenery moving past the characters. No better than the worst of the World of Darkness movie adventures, you get to watch, rolle a few dice, and await the inevitable outcome.
This is a stupid fucking railroad. Worse than that, it’s ALMOSt like you’re watching a movie. {...} It’s about 80 bajillion pages long and you can’t do anything but “enjoy” the scenery. It might as well be scene based for all the “exploration” and “choices” you get to make. {...} WALL OF TEXT to rival anything in China, that all it ends up being is a mass of text that doesn’t work together and random shit being inflicted on the party. And not in a good way. Not in a ‘neutral’ way that OD&D works with, but in Deus Ex kind of way that repulses me.
It is, though, a railroad. You go through the adventure, moving from set piece to set piece, and having the encounters Maxwell wanted you to have in the way he wanted. It is, of course, possible for the DM to deviate, as it always is, but the adventure only supports you in one direction. This goes so far as “the party has no chance to detect the deception.” This is poor design. You’re forcing the thing to go down the way you want/wrote it. That’s lame.
Fuck. You. Peter. An old man has a heart attack in the street and if the party doesn’t respond then the adventure is over and DM forces an alignment check? You sound like a real fun guy to game with. He spends a long paragraph on punishing the party and then goes on to say that if the party do a RES on him he automatically fails it. Railroad much? Please forgive us lowly players of D&D who thought our characters had some semblance of free will. Please, Peter, allow us to play the game exactly the way you insist it played!
You get killed in a couple of days AND you almost certainly get killed if you try t leave the village early AND you get killed if you start stabbing NPC’s in the throat (though they are commoners AND you get killed if … you get the picture. This pretends to be open-ended but is a railroad. Do what the designer wants you to do or have your characters killed. Uncool.
And a decent amount of the advice stinks: “The heroes could attempt to climb the walls. Discourage this since it would allow the PC’s to avoid most of the encounters.” What boring and unimaginative advice. How about instead you reward players who think creatively instead of blindly imposing your railroad will? {...} for V{e}cna’s sake, let the characters climb the fucking walls!
Movies and Scenes -- the worst kind of railroad
This “adventure” is a riff on The Tempest. In that vein it’s organized in Acts and Scenes. IE: a railroad hell hole with very little free will.Jesus H Fucking Christ. The DM talks for 45 minutes and then the players roll a die and then the DM talks for another 45 minutes. Nonsense act/scene based adventure with almost no content at all.
Pretext after pretext to force combat and “move the plot along”, which means fighting. The party has no chance to impact events.
Utter and complete piece of shit. This, gentle readers, is the adventure that signals the End Times. This is it. 1995. The year RPG’s died. Previously Dungeon adventures had just been wordy and poorly written attempts at translating the designer’s vision to the purchaser. This one though … this one represents The Beginning Of The End. This is a fourteen page movie.{...}There is no meaningful choice. It assumes you kill the ghul you meet. It assumes you can’t keep up with people you meet. (It’s D&D. the players ALWAYS do something else.) It’s just a movie. {...} Events imply you have a choice. Scenes imply you do not. You. Do. Not. The movie keeps moving as planned. Do whatever. It doesn’t matter.
This is just devoid of anything. It’s more like watching a movie than doing something. Kill the friendly NPC? He survives so the showdown can take place. LAME. Why not just roll a d6? On a 1-5 you win, and 6 you roll again.
Player's Actions have no consequence
Consequence free adventureing, that’s what really embeds an adventure in the parties minds, isn’t it? Knowing that nothing they do matters.First have to journey to a village, but rowboat, sailing ship, or overland, varying by days to reach the village. Your choice is meaningless since nothing changes in the village.
A parkour chase across roofs either ends with the bad guy getting away or, if the party make a zillion skill check, him falling to his death. IE: No impact on the adventure. This is a capital offense in Brycelandia.
At the end of the adventure there’s an entire list of consequences based on the PC’s actions. Guess What! Nothing you do matters! No matter what the party does the outcomes are the same! Yeah you! You wasted your time!
Deus Ex Machina
There’s other interesting choices as well: can’t find the tracks? A friendly ranger helps you out! Can’t find X? A friendly Deus Ex helps you out! I can’t find a decent adventure. Who’s gonna help me out?
If the party doesn’t capture a boat, during the raid, then a villager offers them a boat. *sigh* So the parties actions have no effect.
The boss is an M19. If he defeats the party then the beholder sultan shows u{p} in some deus ex and anti-magics everything, accidentally, and saves the party, defeating the MU, etc. LAME. Better to ding the MU a bit in levels and make this a tough, but honest, fight. Then the parties victory is their own instead of the DM’s magic NPC pet showing up. It’s that kind of shit that makes me HATE NPC’s when I’m a player.
Railroads lead to predigested solutions
The captain {gives} you three potions of tongues so you can talk to people in the village. Bad Mojo that’s a little too deus ex for me. Either use gestures to talk, or give all the villagers perfect english accents, or use the MU to cast comprehend languages. But by giving the party potions you introduce an obstacle and then do NOTHING with it.Hint: If you have to give the party stuff to make the adventure work then you probably have a big problem in your adventure.
Railroads lead to unbelievable outcomes
Every possible trick in the GM book is made to screw with the party so “the big reveal” can be a surprise. They don’t lie. They don’t detect evil. They don’t detect as BLAH. They can control their transformations. They can blah blah blah. It’s a DM railroad of epic proportion.One curiosity stands out: you can’t really interrogate any prisoners from the inn. Oh, you can, but they don’t know anything … even though their comrades are in the second dungeon. It seems strange to shut down this part of and punish, instead of rewarding, characters who took prisoners and played thoughtfully. Instead the location is revealed to the party by a generic scene-based encounter. This DIRECTLY CONTRADICTS the concept player agency, punishing agency in favor of a MEANINGLESS railroad encounter.
a stowaway assassin that takes a DC30 to find if the party searches the ship … because there’s an event built around them. The players should be REWARDED for thinking of searching the hold, not punished because it’s on the DM’s ToDo list for later.
Then there is the arbitrary crap. That loose flagstone, hidden by the DC30 spot check? It can’t be removed from the top. It’s not locked or anything. It just can’t be removed. What? Seriously? Again, this raises the Suspension of Disbelief issue, which, when in an obstacle, raises the spectre of the adversarial DM.
Railroads lead to Adversarial DMing
How about making the main enemies cultists who all have a suicide tooth that they use to kill themselves if captured. No? How about death traps everywhere in the dungeon. No, again? I know what’s fun! How about an arch with a high save disintegrate trap! And if you fail you also take a lot of damage! With a high spot check! You know … if only some of those cultists could have been captured,, I bet they could tell us all about those traps! Look, I ain’t got a problem with death traps, especially at high levels, but I do have a thing about stacking the deck against the party. It’s adversarial, and D&D ain’t adversarial. If your DM is adversarial then tell them to Piss Off and go get a new DM.They are given magic items and as many set ups as possible to push everything possible in their favor. Their is D&D in “players vs. DM mode” which is completely lame D&D.
I can only hope that there is a special hell for the designers of these one-trick pony adventures. The party is lured to a house to be killed It’s full of traps, the most notable are in the form of bodies controlled like puppets. The woman who hires you won’t get out of her carriage (her eyes are hurt by bright light …) and has pallid skin. How many parties, do you think, killed her right then and there? Notably, if killed she comes back more powerful as an evil spirit that possesses the house. Go into a room, get impacted by a trap/effect, repeat. I hate these gimpy/DM torture-porn adventures.
I’m not a big fan of the hit&run stuff from the dimension door abilities … I’m perhaps too damaged by adversarial DM tactics.
Pushing the party, repeatedly, and then punishing them for the action you’ve encouraged is Not Cool. In RPG’s the big red button exists to be pushed, because that’s the fun thing to do. The enforced morality in this adventure, the DM pushing the party over and over again …. This is not the way to DM your game
Textbook shitty. Just a bunch of rooms with traps and monsters. Everyone is prepared to fight. Teleport doesn’t work. There are fake walls to stump Find The Path. Bad guys wear “rings of the thirteen” that give them a +2 ac, endure elements, and nondetection .. .and can only be worn by evil people. The place is full of “very realistic curtains that actually feel like a stone wall!” to hide things. Pretext after lame pretext to fuck the party. All so you can go to the next room and fight something in it. Tactical bullshit text all over the place. I’m sure this is a wet fucking dream adventure for the rules mastery/min-max crowd.
DM torture porn. The party buys a wagon that has two gremlins hiding in it that the DM can use to torment the party. The DM is encouraged to make the wagon buying seem normal, ignoring the fact that ANYTHING the DM says in D&D is immediately taken as significant.
The whole thing is full of advice on how to gimp the players. Don’t give the players an even break. Don’t let them use their divination magic. Don’t let them have fun. Blah Blah Blah. It seems that the gods don’t like talking to your 12th level clerics. Oh Well.
Don’t be an Asshole
Killer Dungeons
Fuck you and die. The world would be a better place if {Tomb of Horrors} had never been published. It has generated a culture of adversarial DM’ing.This is just one of the numerous death trap adventures where everything is set up and the dice loaded against the party. “They anticipated …” this and “they have prepared …” that.
As Aziz would say, not really my cup of tea, because I don’t like huge piece of shit in my tea. But maybe you’re in to this kind of gimmick/{Tomb of Horrors} stuff. You poor, poor, soul. You deserve better.
There’s this theory that says that deathtraps are ok in a high level adventure. The idea being that the party has access to a lot of magic, divination, and maybe even wishes and if they don’t take advantage of all their capabilities then Fuck Them.
Intentionally Misleading the Players
This is a very short adventure, meant to frustrate the players. Do your players like to be frustrated on purpose? Mine don’t.party hears about a white dragon that has just shown up. Turns out it’s an albino red dragon. With no treasure. Lame screw job. I’ll never understand why this sort of thing became popular. All it does it encourage the party to be paranoid, which slows things down. This is different than a mimic or trapper. Those are one-shot ‘gotchas.’, almost traps. This is just an intentional screw-job. LAME.
A double cross from a prisoner. (No double crosses! Fuck it’s tiresome! SOMEONE has to not double cross the party or the party will never trust ANYONE, and the roleplay with evil monsters allied is much more fun than Just Another Stinking Combat.)
I hold a special loathing in my heart for the crocodile encounter. They look like logs and the party is encouraged to cross the river by jumping on them. If they party is not morons and look at the logs the DM’s instr{u}ctions imply that he should say “its really a log”, because the first of the three “logs” IS , actually, a log, with the other two being crocs. That BS. That’s killer asshole DM shit. If the party asks you tell them. You don’t play 20 questions. You don’t make them guess the EXACTLY correct words to use to get the right answer. That sends a bad message, not only about play style but about the dickishness and adversarial nature of the DM. Bullshit I Say! Bullshit.
Item Gimping
{Do not pimp weak opponents with magic items the players cannot use.}The potion turns out to be a potion of magic resistance … but it only works on the hag. Why? Why not let the players use it if they want to? It’s not going to unbalance things.
The BULLSHIT death knight has an Anything Sword that allows it to be any magical sword, from round to round. It has three charges. IE: Just enough to fuck the party over and keep them from having it. Lame. Any adventure in which someone wears an amulet guarantees it’s proof against detection. PC’s should kill all amulet wearers on sight, always, in every adventure they ever undertake.
The spear you recover from the barrow is the cursed unicorn’s horn. You need to touch them together to cure the unicorn. The spear is powerful. If they had stopped there it would have been ok. “Keeping the spear is an evil act.” Welllllll…… yes, it is. Calling it an evil act comes with DM-fiat baggage, and all of the implied punishment … even though the adventure doesn’t actually say anything else. TELLING the party the spear is super powerful, describing the powers, and THEN giving them a choice would be delicious indeed.
There’s a nice evil book but, as usual, its set up so the party can’t have it and use it. L A M E!
Ability Gimping
“You can’t do X because it would ruin the adventure” crap. Characters have scry spells for a reason: to keep their 7th levels character alive. Yeah, they are gonna know there’s a dragon. Better to let smart players plan than punish someone just so you can surprise them. After all, we’re rewarding player skill, right?A sucky adventure. How do you know to trust me on that? Someone is wearing an amulet of proof against detection and ESP. That ALWAYS means sucky adventure.
I always throw up a little in my mouth when I see a hat of disguise in an adventure. It’s almost always paired with some mind-protecting magic item
Like all mysteries it gimps the characters: if you capture someone hired to beat you up then Charm Person doesn’t reveal who hired them … because they are too scared. Uh huh. Why don’t you just say ‘I wrote a weak adventure.’
There’s more gimp stuff inside, like a padlock that can only be unlocked with a key or wish. No knocks, No picking. Just a key. Guarded by monsters. It’s this kind of forced behavior that I find SUCH a turn off. Why not just let the party use their skills and abilities THAT THEY’VE EARNED to overcome obstacles? Why force them in to a fight … just so you can spring your uber-cool Mujina on them?
A murder mystery in a country mansion. And, of course, there’s a Ring of Impersonation and a Ring of Silence involved. When you have to gimp the party through the use of shit like this, that’s a sign you’ve not created a good adventure.
Lots of gimps here: lots of bodies, but speak with dead doesn’t work and all of their valuables were hidden elsewhere, blah blah blah, experience the STORY and … [bleech]. Oops, sorry, threw up in my mouth and accidentally typed it out while doing so.
Need a bad guy to launch a plot that can’t be foiled by Detect Evil or ESP? Rakshasa! puke
The hags all have rings of spell storing with teleport, so they can escape. Joy. What a gimp. Why not just scream “DM PET! YOU CAN’T KILL THEM HA HA HA !” at the players instead? They both make the players feel the same way.
High Level Gimping
Wanna be “famous?” Figure out high-level D&D. This shit fest is an excuse to put AC 41 & 200HP monsters in front of the party. {...} And you get to look forward to stat blocks pages that span one and a half pages. There’s no arc from low to medium to high. No advice for high that’s worthwhile, in a meaningful way.D&D does a great job at low levels and high-level adventures have yet to be figured out. Too much gimping of the characters abilities to force them in to what is, essentially, a low level adventure design. Or, just as bad, resorting to defining high-level as “tougher monsters.” The need to drive players through the plot turns the things in to a railroad.
Most of the sins of bad high level adventures are present. Lame-o hooks that assume the party are still level 1 scroungers. Magic items that work against you but you can’t use. (So what if the party takes the giant inviso purge geodes? They’re level 14, who cares?) No digging/teleport gimping. {...} nd there’s the CR9 orcs riding a flock of tamed chimera. Most of this could be solved by making this a lower level adventure. Level 5 or something. Then the orcs are still mundane and still a real threat. The giant frog as their king would be cool.
Spells like augury, commune, contact other plane, etc were all originally used to AVOID death traps, but in this dungeon they, and others, are all gimped so the players can’t use them. This is a clear indication that the adventure is written for the wrong levels. Relying on Temporal Stasis is also a technique to disguise weak design.
This contains one of my favorite design elements ever: the tomb builder cast multiple wishes so detection spells and teleport-ish spells would not work. Maybe … you didn’t mean to write a level 10+ adventure? Maybe you meant to write a level 5 adventure, before adventurers get those abilities in quantity? Maybe? No? You’re just a sucky DM who imposes rules arbitrarily on the players in order to force them to suffer through your ‘adventure?’ Ok, just clearing that up.
{To be fair, high-level mages and clerics in a world where scrying and teleport exist would seek measures to protect against it. So would kings and the wealthy able to employ them.}
It also deals with the high-level magic issue in an interesting way. Teleport and passwall all you want! But the souls of the dead, embedded in the walls and constantly screaming and moaning, will take a high toll on you as you save vs insanity. Likewise, hack through a wall … but it regens at 10hp per round. This is a much better way to handle things than just saying “you can’t do it.” Give the party a choice.
The first real scene is the party trying to talk to a guy in a restaurant. The maitre d’ won’t let you in. You’re 13th level and that’s not famous enough. You can’t bribe him. Period. You can’t wait outside to talk to the guy, since the guard captain dimension door’d in. It’s interesting that the most obvious solution, slitting his throat and letting him watch himself bleed out, isn’t discussed at all
You go to piratetown to track people down, only to find your contact kidnapped, ambushes (CR11, you’re level 15. The adventure correctly notes the party could just kill everyone in town, but doesn’t deal with it well. IE: it’s a shittly designed adventre for level 15’s, unless they agree to play along.) It would be more fun as a direct assault, letting the players flex their might, instead of the linear shit-fest with forced encounters and the overreliance on conspiracies that high level adventures always seem to hang their flag on.
The piece of shit adventure has a kidnapping ring run by a level 20 evil wizard. He’s got the fucking Wish spell but he kidnaps people for money. And he DOES have the Wish spell. It’s crazy.
No Forced Morality
Moral ambiguity makes the set up quite a bit more interesting to game through than a simple morality play would be.
There’s a questionable decision or two, like sealing the tax inside a wizard-locked container. How much more fun would it be to put the constant temptation under the players noses?
Are there good nazi’s? What’s your position on orc babies? This adventure, either intentionally or unintentionally, asks those questions. {...} You get a couple of combats with a well organized military group painted in a realistic, and yet tactically fun, manner. And then you toss in the orc babies … the slavery. DM’s you throw that shit in are not good DM’s. They are dicks. The game is supposed to be fun not make you think about the meaning of life, hopelessness of existence, and put you in to existential crisis. {...} The orc baby issue is what pushes from “the usual dreck” to “total piece of shit.”
It does contain that implied morality I hate so much: no X for killing people who are trying to kill you.
In another stunning example of middle-class morality, you get more XP for letting an undead possess you and less-than-book-value if you kill it. Lovely.
As written this has a bunch of the bullshit implied morality that I hate. Kill the guy? Oh No! That’s murder! His god doesn’t like you and curses you! Loot the hut after killing him? Oh no! You’re a thief and the law comes after you! There’s no excuse for a dick DM. Baby orcs are there to kill. If you’re DM puts them there to test you, or fuck with you, then you need to go find a new DM.
No ”Evil always betrays”
Oh, the humanity! A group of monsters that betray the party! What fun that, eh? {...} This kind of shit is what {makes} me say things like “Dwarf lepers? I mercilessly massacre all of them.” Fuck your bullshit, DM! Misdirection spell. Fight to the death. All of the usual crappy design bullshit is present.After the party gets the potion for the hag she attacks them. Why? They did a great job for her! WOuldn’t the game be much more fun if the party had this kind of amoral/evil associate they could go visit from time to time? {...} why not give the players a choice and tempt them instead of deciding why they HSOULD do and enforcing it through the rules of the adventure? Everything in this adventure sucks.
Middle class morality. That’s the problem with this adventure. A green dragon contacts the party in order to get five of her eggs rescued. They fell in a hole in a volcano and she needs you to go in and get them back. Inside is an assortment of vermin (who attack), magmen (who attack), grue (who attack) and an efretti (who eventually attacks.) Then you get out and the dragon attacks. Wouldn’t it be so much more interesting if you could get an ally from green dragon, or from the eftreeti? You are doing a major boon to both, and both are highly intelligent. But they attack. Lame.
There are some demons that show up in the end, to get revenge on the raptors, but they betray the party. LAME! LAME LAME LAME LAME LAME! It would be SO much better if they actually joined forces and the party had some potential demon buddies. Think of all the fun THAT would bring in a campaign!
HOW TO DESIGN
Adventure Structure
Adventure Hooks
{ The focus on hooks is due to the short adventures reviewed here. I do not think they matter in a campaign, you fit adventures in by providing leads in earlier ones and ignore the generic hooks. }Bryce’s Standard Hook Advice: Every time you read “adventurer”, replace it with “mercenary” or “mercenary scum”, as your campaign dictates. Things make a lot more sense that way and give you a radically different vibe.
This adventure has a different vibe than most and it’s something I can get in to. The party is presented more as a group of mercenaries. A lot of hooks essentially imply as much: “you’re hired to …” but there’s also some implied morality in most. This one doesn’t really have that implied morality.
“Neutral characters will have trouble finding motivation to complete the adventure.” In lazy adventure writer speak this means “I couldn’t be bothered to think of any way to motivate the party.”
Hell even the hook is good: while passing by at night the party sees a tower of the castle erupt in eldritch green flame and then sees a body hanging from the window. Which then falls to the ground as the party approaches. There’s no way in fucking hell ANYBODY is going to ignore that hook, no matter how jaded the player. And that is the key to a good hook: an appeal to the player rather than the character.
It also has a hook I like. 3e-era players are looking for masterwork weapons at low levels. Sending the players to the dwarf hold and herding the beetles is a nicely little integrated response to the players wants/needs. THIS is the way plot os developed in D&D. Not by the DM but in response to what the players want. “We need/want this thing.” Well Mr and/or Ms Player, you can go get it here … Player driven action.
one of the party members is deeded a mill, which is one of the better hook ideas.
The hooks are not exactly original, but do have some nice quirks. “Seeing the first murder” hook has the body falling off a balcony and landing right in front of the party … an oldie but a goody. The other has the guard hiring the party to investigate. Always a lame hook, this is spiced up by having the sergeant being REALLY dumb.
Several hooks are presented for this lair/tomb, one of which, a boring “you see reward posters”
It’s one of the lamest of hooks: you’re hired to go fetch some spell components.
For some pretext of a lame hook reason (do gooder! Stop evil! It’s tonight’s adventure!) you’re poknig around in a dungeon.
It does rely on the party being nice people, for the hook, and saving a merchant under attack. That’s akin to “this is the adventure I have for you tonight, save the guy if you want to play D&D.”
I also don’t dig the whole “you get a map via a will” thing. That’s a hook that’s not trying at all.
The hook is lame: the characters get visions telling them to go the dwarf kingdom. How about you don’t even make an effort next time?
Your motivation here is that a town you call home is threatened. Lame. PC’s are murder hobos with no families precisely to avoid this kind of ham-handed DM manipulation. “Get married? Fuck No. I don’t want to go rescue her next week and every week for the rest of my life.”
The hooks are mostly lame, including the horrendous “one of your loved ones is captured/killed” … which should never be used, ever, in any game, ever.
You’re hired t go to jail and watch the back of a new prisoner. {...} I can’t imagine the tenth level party who says “Yes! Let’s get rid of all our gear and go to jail for little to no reward!”
The party undertakes a mission for 1000gp. They are 5 or 6 10th level characters doing a delivery run for 1000 gp? It’s hard to be objective when the pretext is so lame.
Does your CR14 character want to investigate a caravan disappearing? No? Go on a fetch quest for a poor half-elf noble? No? Two strikes on the Boring-O meter. The third hook send the party after the orcs to unlock hidden powers in some weapon/item they’ve recently gained, which is better.
The setup/hook is a total railroad job where a group of 15th level adventurers are expected to be caught with their pants down. You’re forced to trust the NPC … it goes on and on. One of the worst hooks I’ve ever seen. At least “caravan guard” doesn’t insult our intelligence.
The world is ending and you need to stop it. I only hold back a *yawn* because at level 30 “the world is ending” seems like an ok thing to me.
The whole Omniscient and Omnipotent being manipulating you and testing you thing has NEVER been a good hook. EVER. It is only a crutch for a weak writer taking a shortcut.
There’s a scarecrow in the field. STOP! Any PC gets any whiff of a scarecrow is going to immediately go whole hog in destroying it. It’s like saying there are gargoyles. The adventure wants a series of small misfortunes to happen over a week. (A couple of good examples are provided, but a lot more would have been better.) Then the final night the scarecrow attacks. In reality the party is going to focus on the scarecrow and destroy it instantly. And if they don’t then they deserve to be murdered in their sleep. Shhesh. They call themselves murder hobos...
You also have to beg the villagers to help, with rolls, which is always lame, IMO. Don’t want my help? How about I burn the place to the ground instead of begging?
Someone needs to fail a save vs magic in order to go not he adventure? For serious?
The party finds a book in a clearing while setting up camp for the night. Touching it curses the party with certain death in 4 nights unless they go destroy the book. Fortunately, the way to destroy it is only 2-3 days away. That’s kind of a suck ass hook. {...} TPK. All for doing what the players should be doing … pushing buttons. “If’s the PC choose to ignore the warning and do not follow the quest then the DM is free to destroy them at his lea sure” This is the kind of DM behavior that a generation learned from. LAME.
It is also once of the worst examples of adventure design I’ve seen. A kid comes out of the forest crying. Questioning turns up his friend Drake is missing. The kid runs away. That’s it. That’s your hook. And this adventure is recommended as the Premier Adventure for your new campaign. Sigh. If you follow the kid you get to his parents house. They are complete dicks and won’t talk to party or allow them to talk to the kid, other than shouting “Go Away!” This is your premier adventure. Why would anyone go on this? Because that’s what the DM is running that night? That’s the reality of the situation, but, fuck, you have to make the adventure at least A LITTLE appealing to the players and characters to go on.
New to town, to get the job you need a reference from the guild in question, two from other people, or a reference from the towns wizard’s guild, or a 500-gp bond. All for 50gp. Uh …. What’s the likelihood of any of that? How about we just burn down your fucking boat and make massacring the town the adventure for this evening? SO many adventures, especially in Dungeon, are like torture porn for the DM/players. How much bullshit will the players put up with from the DM in order to play D&D tonight?
Entrance to the Mythic Underworld
There’s this concept in the OSR of the dungeon as the Mythic Underworld. An important part of this is that the entrance MUST be significant. Or, maybe, that it has to feel like crossing the threshold is significant. This does that. You’re poling your raft down this river, across a lake and discover … a large stone arch that the water flows through. This is it. This is the place you’re looking for. As is so often the case, my own words can’t describe the brilliant SIMPLE imagery that is conveyed.Perhaps the only good thing about this adventure is that the Eta village, maybe the third encounter, is the turning point where the adventure moves from reality to fantasy. After the village the encounters are all myth: tengu, were-tiger, goblins. That’s a good transition to The Mythic Underworld.
Sandboxes and Hexcrawls
Holy shit! A sandbox! I’m not kidding, a real sandbox! In a late issue dungeon! It’s a bank heist. {...} There’s a corrupt clerk you can give you information on the maps, the guard rotations, security procedures, and so on. Then, it’s just game fucking on! Come up with a crazy plan and go to town, the essence of great D&D!A wilderness outpost is about to be attacked by a gnoll army. The party is tasked with getting behind them and disrupting their cattle to delay them until reinforcements arrive. When I read the synopsis I thought ‘Great! Cool sandbox!’
I also like sandbox things like sieges.
I like the open-ended nature of city games.
Factions
{Faction: a group of NPCs or monsters in conflict with other such groups, that the PCs could play against each other, or ally with.}This is a faction adventure. And therefore an adventure with NPC’s. These are very good things to have in an adventure. The players and their characters will always interact with the world around them, especially in a village adventure like this, and having strongly imagined NPC’s goes a VERY long way to brin{g}ing an adventure to life.
Their lair is a short little ten room place, mostly linear, but with more adventure in it than Dungeon adventures that run 35 pages long. There are at least three groups of people in the small place that you can negotiate with, including crabmen and a vapor rat! For being such a small place there’s a lot going on.
Lots of factions. Murky morality. This one has potential.
It claims to have factions, but since they all attack it’s really just some theming to the different areas. It’s just a fucking hack.
Nonlinear Design
That’s the kind of adventure type I like most: a setting the party gets to run rampant in, be it city, dungeon, or wilderness.The cave maps are above average, and can provide a good non-linear environment for this sort of thing.
the real level has decent amount of looping corridor variety, especially for a level with only 15 or so rooms. It works and fits together well and provides some decent variety.
I like my adventures best when hook after hook after complication after complication is piled up to create a nice living environment. {...} Having a whole lot going on is a great way to build a realistic environment.
If you took this, and six or so other good linear {...} adventures, and ran them all at the same time then you’d have something very interesting adventure with the appearance of free will.
The map is excellent and reminds me a bit of the garden level of barrier peaks, with its mixed indoor/outdoor space, balconies, and so on, along with a shit ton of roof entrances to the temple.
The second level has a totally generic looking map (hints of symmetry. Ug!)
Avoid Linear Adventures
Ah, the linear adventure. Usually with set pieces. When it comes to Combat as War vs Combat as Sport, I’m very much in the War category. Linear adventures, rules mastery, balanced combats … these are not the D&D elements I enjoy.
I really got the sense, in reading this, that it is just a generic adventure formula spiced up a bit. Hook. Slow explore with a couple of monsters. Bad Guy. Dangerous “hidden” area that’s the true location. And then a quick escape! It’s a generic formula and works sometimes, but when you can TELL it’s the generic formula .. .then it loses some luster. It feels constructed rather than imagined.
This is the first example, in Dungeon anyway, of the shitty linear 3e adventure. Some people really like this one. You should not play D&D with those people.
The tomb is nothing more than the usual trap/stasis-monster fest. These sort of set-piece things may be my least-favorite kind of adventure.
There’s nothing here NOT related to main plot … and very little related to the main plot, and that’s disappointing. So while the set up might be a nice one, it’s far too long with not nearly enough variety to make it on to my list.
Maybe eight or nine encounters, all in a line, with far too much boring combat. When your adventure has the line “To keep player suspense alive, roll some dice to make it seem like they are having an effect on the battle” then you know you are a failure as an adventure writer.
It reminds me of those “How to write an adventure” articles. Start things off with a fight, include some roleplaying vignettes, etc … but all in the context of a linear story.
COMPLETELY linear cave under the pretext of being a troll lair but have yuan-ti at the rear. The first few rooms are a “test” to “try the mettle of intruders.” Ug. A lame pretext by the designer to just throw shit in and solve some imaginary continuity problems, you mean?
Dungeon Magazine has conditioned me to throw up in my mouth a little every time I read “the party must race to …” Also, that phrase actually means “linear plot” instead of what I believe to be the more common read of “time pressure.”
Minimize Choke points
It also places A LOT of the adventure behind choke point DC checks. To find the location of the wood from the hook, to be allowed to talk to the elves. To find the trap door in the ruins that hides the dungeon. These are (mostly) trivial … but choke point DC checks are NEVER a good thing, in spite of the advice to “get the players rolling dice.”“roll to continue the adventure” diplomacy check with the kobold. Fail, and you don’t get to go on the adventure.
And EVERYTHING is under a DC10 search check for a secret door … adventure blocks, even at DC10, are never a good thing.
The group is then supposed to wander around the forest looking for clues. Except they will probably fail and/or give up. There’s a 10% chance per party member of finding a clue. What if they don’t find a clue? I guess they don’t get to go on the adventure then. Yeah! Let’s Oh, wait, I don’t think that’s the reaction you are supposed to have. I’ve never understood this shit. If you HAVE to find the clue to go on the adventure then why are you making people roll for it? “Roll 1d6. On a ‘1’ you get to play D&D tonight.” Ug! Further, the clues are bullshit! There are three. The first two provide NO insight on where to go. The third, it is stated repeatedly, should only be used if the party is getting frustrated and don’t know where to go. Seriously? YOU HAVENT PROVIDED ANY DATA ON WHERE TO GO UP TO THIS POINT!!!!!!
A LOT of secret doors that you to find to keep playing. I’ve never quite liked that; secrets should lead to a reward and not be work required to be done in order to go have fun.
Use time-bound Events
This is a great way to handle an adventure of this type. The party still drives the action and the events are triggers for more to happen, rather than being on a bullshit railroad.Use Dreams sparingly
There’s good advice present on how to run a spooky adventure, including he one dream sequence. I normally hate dream sequences, but this one is done ok and emphasizes the need to not do another one after it since they get old real quick. (True That.)Of all the dream adventures I’ve seen it tends to be one of the better ones. Which still means it’s total bullshit, but it tries harder than the others. {...} The dreaming … not so much. Same old issues … no real threat and no real consequences. Fake XP awards and fake treasures. Yeah, sure, the party can die. Dream adventures always do that. But somehow these always seem like ‘kp duty’ adventures; they feel like punishment and no one cares about the outcomes.
Avoid Diaries
Finally, the backstory is told through a found journal entry. Here’s a tip: if you have to tell your story through a journal/diary/etc, then you haven’t done a good job with the adventure and need to edit it again.Plus: plot reveals via journals, letters, notes are lame and lazy. If you have to resort to it then you should rewrite/rethink the plot/adventure. Fire & Torture are popular alternatives.
I usually HATE logs & journals and diaries, find them just a cheap way to communicate things. A ships log makes sense though
Have some Imagination
Dungeon and Cave Design
The caves are multi-level, with bridges, chasms, chimneys, multiple ledges, cramped corridors, short 5’ ceilings full of smoke from torches, and other cave features. And then suddenly some crazed goblins come screaming out the darkness!I could point to the varied terrain and obstacles in the cave, elevation, boulders, water levels, etc, as being nice elements which provide both variety and tactical opportunities for both sides.
It’s got a couple of loops and seems more like a realistic cave. The way from the upper level to the lower is a huge chasm. There are ledges, nooks, and crannies. I really like cave adventurers that feel like caves and this one.
Finally, the catacombs, under the pyramid, are a little too combat oriented. It’s like every room is a guard room, and all hallways run directly in to rooms. This turns the adventure in the catacombs in to a hack-fest, IMO, instead of a “smart party” adventure.
There are four levels here, each with a theme. Themes in these classic dungeons are good, they keep things fresh between levels and prevent everything from having that samey feel when you’re on room #206 of dungeon level five.
Set Pieces
The big encounter at the end {...} could use a more set-piece nature. More environmental stuff, ropes to swing from, or something stuff like that. As is it’s just a big room with a monster at one end, the agent hiding, and some chasms. Rope bridges, stone ledges, rubble to jump off of, etc, would have made this a more memorable boss monster fight.All of the “interesting” bits seem to be set-piece combats … which I don’t find interesting when they make up the preponderance of encounters.
All three present an environment in which a large and ranging combat could take place. {...} I like a complex environment for a battle, crashing through floors, pulling down walls, setting hay on fire, etc. {...} I really like the party coming up to a combat site, formulating a plan, attacking the farmhouse compound, and then the plan going to hell and chaos breaking out. Those sorts of wide-ranging things are conducive to creative play and fun. But endless combat after combat in the dungeon against an organized foe? Slog-fest.
Empty Rooms
“This was once the lair’s armor but holds little more than dust now.” Then why did you put it in the adventure? Because a room with dust is fun? Because you are constructing a realistic view of what an abandoned room would look like? Because that’s fun? The was the hobby strays from its task is amazing. We’re here to have fun. PUT SOMETHING IN THE FUCKING ROOM! Something that the group can interact with. Something that does something.{I disagree here - you also need empty rooms for contrast and to keep players guessing. There is a wisdom in the Moldvay formula. He even says so himself in his review guidelines; "Dungeons should have a good quantity of empty rooms and some unguarded treasure."}
Evocative Treasure
There’s no reward “the DM should determine what treasure is in their lair.” Thanks fuckwit. Maybe you forgot that I’m paying YOU for YOUR imagination.Nice “fire-lord/bandit-king” theming on some plate armor make it a treasure worth keeping.
An inkwell made out of a griffon hoof? Sign me up!
A special callout to the dracolich treasures. A little overly described in places, but a scandalous dress, a nice violin, a large drinking horn emblazoned with runes and carvings of dead dragons.
Cool Magic Items
That’s the key to a good item, it makes the party drool over it and thin{k} “Awesome!”. Sword, +1 doesn’t do that. Ring of Feather Falling doesn’t do that. Black Dragon throne with glowing red eyes DOES it.The treasure is all book item items, and boring old +1 swords and shields at that.
There’s also, notably, a non-standard magic item that is both powerful and cursed … but maybe not enough to make the party throw it away. That sort of Deal with Devil kind of item is exactly the sort of thing that should be in D&D adventures. The artifacts in the 1e DMG were cool because of those small enigmatic backstories AND the cursed nature of the items
On the negative side there’s a lame “usable only once” magic item, a dead man’s hand. Cool things like this should have a second use, at least, for the party to take advantage of. Carrying around the hand of a hanged man grasping a black candle is much more interesting than a stupid old wand.
There’s also a platinum handled gold knife: a magic sacrificial knife with the whole ego/personality thing going on. That’s pretty cool and something I haven’t seen before. (IE: doing it to a sacrificial knife.)
There are a decent magic item or two: a bookmark of continual light and a pair of “penetrate disguise” glasses, for example.
Colorful NPCs
And there’s are NPC’s hanging around! REAL people with real problems and real emotions and they are wonderful and they are dicks and are complex but you can grasp them easily and run them well.Then there are the people who come to visit, PERFECTLY described. “Nina’s dim-witted but good-natured nephew.” or “a greasy but ambitious banker” and so on. In one fucking sentence for each NPC this adventure does what so many others can’t seem to do: focus on the NPC description on interactivity. Who the fuck cares what your special snowflakes eye color is? What we need to know is how to play them when the party comes to interact.
The NPC’s have decent motivations and are interesting enough to get them involved with the party. {...} nd their detail is PLAY focused, not just generic trivia that will never come up during play.
Fantastic Monsters
New monsters with weird attacks/looks/breeding makes for fun times!“she erupts out of the ground with hollowed eyes and a gaping mouth!” I like that kind of description for the monsters instead of a generic “banshee.” When I mention extra flavor that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. Not paragraph after paragraph but just a little more.
I still assert that the non-traditional undead are the BEST undead. Except skeletons. Basic skeletons should always be Harryhousen skeletons.
there’s a door that comes alive and sucks the party in. The adventure says something like “the door is a mimic.” Let me suggest that there is a world of difference, in inspiring a DM, between “the door is a mimic” and the door comes alive and reaches out and tries to suck the party in. Treat it as a mimic.”
A bunch of random monsters thrown together in the “controller, artillery, grunt” style with the barest pretext holding it together. This has always yanked my suspension of disbelief and, I think, shifted the ground too far toward “game” instead of “RPG”
Weird Wizard Towers
The wizards mansions is nice and wondrous in the non-standard/non-book way that I like, with some great unique items, like a talking door plaque, that the party can grab. It’s D&D as if you hadn’t read all of the D&D books and adventures from the last 30 years.Fourteen rooms of a wizard’s tower. {...} There’s nothing in this wizard’s tower that feels remotely wizard like.
This is then combined with a lack of the weird. Dude is an evil sorcerer and his tower feels boring and generic. This might work in a Harn-like setting but room after room of generic contents (Pantry, bedroom, bathroom, storage room) isn’t the kind of Magic & Whimsy, Wonder & The Fantastic! That’s what I’m looking for. This isn’t that.
The wizards falls much more closely to the Reprobate side of the spectrum. That makes him, and his bizarro home, much more interesting than the vast majority of wizards TSR and WOTC ever published.
Wonder beats Mechanics
An attempt to explain a mystery, by definition, destroys the mystery. Imagination & wonder resist definition by their very nature. But that didn’t stop Cody. He’s desgined a tomb under the assumption that the only valid way to do something in D&D is what is published in the rules. {...} I’m gonna confess: this is the first dungeon EVER that I could not get through. I could only read about half of it before I just couldn’t take it anymore.Attempts to build reason in to a dungeon via rules … A magic mouth says a key word that dispels a contingency that holds a stasis that summons a monster. You’re the DM. You can do anything, the rules don’t apply. I can’t imagine how anyone prefers this style.
Just do the effect, you don’t need a justification from the book.
This thing suffers a great deal from the authors “I NEED it to make SENSE” syndrome. You need a pretext of believability, you don’t need to rationalize everything from what’s in the books. Just do something new … THAT’S WHAT THE PEOPLE WHO WROTE THE ITEMS IN THE BOOK DID.
Published adventures set an example for people and for many will be how they learn to play. OD&D NPC wizards shot lazer beams from their nipples and summoned blue cloud of sparkly shrinking dust. Rules are for players. Judges judge.
It like to explain things. A LOT. “A trigger spell activates a blah blah blah spell which activates a …” It’s fucking magic. The sword flies around because that’s what swords do.
Just let magic be magic. You don’t need to explain magic, Mr. Technocracy. I DESPISE these sort of set-up adventures.
Finally, if the summoning/storm spell DOES succeed? It brings a new creature to the island to terrorize folks … left unspecified. MYSTERY is always welcome as a springboard to the future.
The impact of NOT explaining the mystery is very strong.
Avoid Magic as Technology
{RenFaire - a renaissance festival, with stage acts, performances, artisanal wares, costumes and food. }I hate the magical RenFaire stuff and the magical society environment and the streetlights of continual light and the garbage disposals of spheres of annihilation and the way it treated the magic and wonder as routine, ensuring that nothing was magical or wondrous.
My own personal sign of a crappy adventure is the presence of spheres of annihilation, black puddings, etc, located in the bottom of drains and waste chutes. As soon as I see that I have a pretty good idea that the adventure will suck.
There’s a bit of the ol magical society bullshit, with skylights held in place with sovereign glue and permanent whispering wind spell intercom systems. Without that stuff, and changing the place from a bank to “Karl the moneylender” and you’ve have more standard fantasy world adventure.
It’s a fucking Eberron magic railroad adventure. Joy. Magic tech. Bound air elements. A need to explain everything.
Oh boy. This is an investigation adventure in a magical ren-faire theater. Magical chandeliers. Illusionists creating theater effects. Potions to help the actors. It’s enough to make you puke gorbels.
It’s also got that Magic Ren Faire vibe that I dislike. Decanters of Endless Water as a water source, permanent heat and chill metal spells, a captured air elemental to provide air flow, and so on.
There are glow globes that light rooms and a trapped fire elemental and piping system for hot water, etc. I really don’t get in to that kind of a “magical economy” sort of setting.
Oh Jesus H. Fucking Christ. A magical industry that makes water elemental powered flatboats. That’s right Roger, just strip all of the joy and wonder of magic away and turn it into another fucking steam engine.
HOW TO MASTER
Intelligent Opponents coordinate
Notes on what a coordinated response to an attack from the party would entail. That sort of thing is critically important in any lair encounter with intelligent opponents.In particular, how the manor reacts to intrusion is missing. This sort of thing should ALWAYS be present with intelligent opponents.
A nice order of battle for how the castle reacts to incursions as well as nice overview sections to get oriented to things. A good map supports the adventure, giving the party non-linear opportunities.
It does have a nice order of battle for the citadel which is always useful for an inhabited area.
Uh, a plan other than “I spy on you with my magic mirror and prepare for you in the final room.” That’s ALWAYS lame.
There’s not really a coordinated defense of the tower, so it’s another “guards die in place”a adventure. It’s too bad.
Ultimately this is a sucky adventure because of the main encounter, the ship, is described as just a series of keyed entires instead of living, breathing place with a crew schedule, etc.
While many have names they don’t really interact with others other than “Attack!” and there’s no coordinated response by the occupants.
Encourage Crazy Hijinks
One of the things I like about D&D adventures is when the players come up with crazy ideas on how to do something and we get to watch the comedy/tragedy that unfolds as they implement their zany plan.
I REALLY like the last part, where the party has the chance to mess up the negotiations. It’s these sorts of situations in which RPG”s excel. The party is SURE to come up with some kooky plan and the creation and unfolding disaster of kooky character/player plans is one of the great joys of D&D.
I have a fondness for the absurd, or, maybe, the ALMOST absurd. This is running right up close to the line. Generally I like my DM pretexts normal and my players to do the wacky shit, like come up with plans that say “I have the perfect plan! First we need forty giant beetles …” Too much from the DM and the games in danger of Paranoia ZAP territory.
Monsters and NPCs negotiate
The most boring thing a monster can do is attack. The best thing a monster can do if be friendly … while carrying a big and obvious bag of loot … and turning its back to the party a lot. I like combat, but its the easy solution and the one that can be universally appealed to at a later date.
By far the most interesting encounter is the lair of a drow necromancer. She’s got a nice little set up going, along with her juju servants and, remarkably, does NOT attack on sight. Her area is well described and interesting and she’s put out there as an ally to the party. I find that sort of thing MUCH more interesting than a plain old ‘she attacks immediately!’ type of encounter. Roleplay possibilities abound when the monsters & creatures are treated like real people with their own ambitions other than simply murdering the party.
It’s a hell of a thing, killing an ma^h^h orc. Oh yeah, and it’s more fun to talk to someone and THEN kill them then it is to just hack them down.
Hill giant mummies lay DORMANT until their sarcophagi are looted. How great is that? They don’t attack on sight!
bullywugs or lizard men or cannibals being social encounters that COULD end up in combat instead they are just boring old “they attack!” encounters. This in spite of the fact that all of the groups are natural enemies of the leopard men cult and hate them. Being allied with cannibals would be much more fun to role-play through the rest of the adventure.
First, it’s got great NPC’s. Some of them have a little too much text describing them, but they all seem to be real people (even the monster NPC’s) and a purpose behind them. They respond intelligently, and not just in a “they attack!” manner.
The monsters don’t attack on sight, which means the adventure immediately has more possibilities. Long-term allies? More hooks in the future?
Fucking piece of shit sidetrek adventure! A leprechaun gets captured by two dudes. His brother asks the party to free him. I have no idea how any other adventure pretext could be so implausible. Fuck no, I’m not freeing your brother! Gimme the gold and wishes you little bastard! Fucking fey! How many times have they tortured party members! Payback time asshole! Oh, oh, oh, if you try and talk to the two two dudes they attack immediately. Isn’t that fun? No bargaining. No Bilbo Baggins and the Trolls. No Bilbo and the Spiders. Nope, They just attack. That’s the most boring thing that can possibly happen. Exploiting leprechauns? THAT’S exciting! So of course you don’t get to do that.
Avoid Fight to the Death
Monsters attack out of spite, even though they should have other motivations.
I’m also more than a little tired of seeing “the guards fight to the death.” This time the lame ass excuse is that its a cultural thing, and how they show their manliness. Take a cue from Ramses 2 boys: march back in town and say you won.
Exploring some ruins the party encounters bugbears. You can’t talk to them/question them … they fear their leader! How many fucking times do we have to read this bullshit justification? What surprise is going to be spoiled? Do you really need this crap? Isn’t’ it much better to reward the smart party, and take advantage of scheming plots and everything else that a social element adds? No? You say you’re a {s}hitty DM and you run D&D like it’s a mini’s combat game? Oh, ok, as long as we’re all clear that you’re a tool ….
Battle Fatigue - D&D is no wargame
I don’t find the adventure interesting, because of its linear nature and focus on combat
It’s just some window dressing for set-piece battles. Fucking piece of shit.
I find the tactical mini’s aspect and rules mastery shit tedious and boring
These sorts of things remind me more of mini’s gaming than RPG’s. You CAN do assaults RPG-style, but these high level ones, especially, just seem like excuses to combine kits and stats and make EL-appropriate encounters. *sigh* high-level D&D …
It starts with the usual ‘lets build excitement with a starting combat’ bullshit common to these plot shitholes.
This ‘Lost Valley’ adventure starts with an attack by an awakened dire ape ranger. And that, alone, was enough to let me know how this thing was going to go. {...} Anyway, it has two more set pieces after the first two and then you get to pick up a bunch of coins in treasure. Joy. The whole transition from adventure and wonder to set-pieces with columns of pages of tactics has been more than a little disappointing for me.
Again, each more of a set piece. We are in full on Combat As Sport mode in this adventure. Room, “interesting” combat, repeat. [Insert tirade about the death of D&D here.]
Fucking seriously? Five rooms of combat? I see that Dungeon has just given up trying. “Go fight through these five rooms. Because.” I am both excited and depressed at this new Dungeon style. Depressed at the lack of trying and excited because the “reviews” I provide are now much easier. But the reading of them is not …
The longest adventure in this issue is a big ol monster zoo battle with just about every evil high HD monster in the book. {...} It’s just room after room of combat. Nothing too interesting.
Oh, so you can go to the other plane and experience the linear combat shit-fest that the designer thinks is “adventure.” Monster zoo, with weirdly allied trolls and other creatures. No motivation. No goals beyond killing things
Adventure Path! Which is synonymous with linear adventure and forced combats! This starts with a forced combat; an assassination attempt. It moves to overly detailed text, another forced combat, a forced-combat assault on a temple and then a linear forced combat dungeon crawl. So, the usual shit show.
A true piece of shit {...} “Linear” doesn’t begin to describe this, {...} the party MUST have all five encounters. {...} Thus this “adventure” is nothing more than a D&D Miniatures ”campaign.” {...} the COMPLETE lack of pretext and bold-faced turning of D&D in to tactics porn and calling it an “adventure”? Fuck. You.
Six rooms, six monster fights. Calling this piece of shit an adventure is an insult to the word. And you know what? It makes PERFECT sense. The intro says these came from a D&D session at GenCon in … 2004. My experience with organized play/RPGA/DDAL have been UNIVERSALLY negative. Nothing more than min/max hack & slash fests. One time they took the character out of my wifes hand when she announced she only had a +1 to hit, stating “you must have built your character wrong.” This adventure is PERFECT for those kinds of ass hats. And before someone chimes in with “Different strokes for different folks.”let me come in a preemptive FUCK. YOU.
This nothing piece of garbage is just a series of forced fights, in eight rooms, with some half-dragon cult members. Oh, and your ally betrays you, of course. There’s nothing going on here other than rolling nice.
Room after room after room after room after room after room of combat make this one of the saddest adventures pushed thus far in Dungeon. Big HP opponents. “All of the cloud giants drink fly potions before the combat.” Long read alouds. Magic walls with 720hp. This is all textbook how to not write a high level adventure.
This is full on crap-fest combat-as-sport mode. Pretext after pretext is given for combat. Made with rage. Mad with fury. Mad with pain. The end result of every encounter is that everything in the room attacks the party on sight. {...} If you want set piece after set piece and combat and combat then this adventure is for you!
The worst kind of dreck: tactics/mechanics porn. Reams and reams of Break DC’s and long-winded tactics passages for combats. I note that there’s a section on some Forgotten Realms spell that prevents teleportation and divination from working. Such shitty creativity that player gimping has been memorialized as official Forgotten Realms cannon!
This is a dungeon crawl full of combats full of the usual “you can’t skip the encounter” movement/passwall/teleport gimps and ends with a potential 750hp combat with a god. {...} it’s just combat tactics porn, room after room.
Ant dwarf hybrids are featured in this linear hack-fest. Linear maps. Rooms with nothing more than combat. Go from room to room, with no choice, and masturbate to your min-max’d characters tactics. This “adventure” is just a simple wargame, and not a very good one. The word count is padded to shit and back.
The party is assigned a mission, they take a linear path through a forest, having linear combat encounters, reach a destination and have more linear encounters. Everything attacks. It’s just all combat. You know how to detect when you are being tricked? The NPC doesn’t start combat immediately. That’s your clue that you should just stab the due in the eye socket. {...} mini-combat with a little pretext wrapped around and nicer terrain than most mini-combat folks make an effort at.
I think it was the winner of the “design the shittiest series” contest? Sixteen room linear dungeon with nothing going on. The highlight is a succubus feigning damsel in distress. Sorry baby, we kill all prisoners and hostages on sight; it’s safer that way. Walk in a room, get attacked. Open an urn, trigger a trap. There’s nothing to this. Again. There’s no adventure, just encounters. I find this design style disgusting.
You follow a linear trail, having fight after fight. Pretext after pretext for combat. Dude doesn’t answer his door and has a “guard drake.” Thugs don’t like people asking questions. On it goes. This is augmented by MOUNTAINS of justifying text. There has to be multiple paragraphs justifying the guard drake.
You go to a bar and get attacked. You go to a house and get attacked. You go to an eight room linear dungeon. End. It’s just set-piece combats linked with the barest pretext of non-combat. Utter garbage. I’d wipe my ass with it but I got a bidet for Christmas.
There are NPC’s on the train, but they get no personalities, names, or anything else. A new fucking low in adventure design, you move from room to room on the train and in each you fight someone. No roleplaying. “A big climax fight on the roof of the train! Ohhhhhh!” *yawn* The tactics porn is the only thing that matters. Fuck the roleplay. Fuck creativity. Go memorize the rules and build your min/max piece of shit character with your impotent DPS ratings. Fuck you and your “different people like different things” shit. Go fucking play Dust Tactics.
Play, not Accounting
There’s a whole “wilderness survival guide”/”torture the players with bookkeeping for rations, etc” thing going on that I don’t think adds any fun to the adventure at all. I can go to work if I want to find the crossover point to carrying rations/winter supplies to travel speeds.
As usual, a big effect is made of the environment impacts of the snow & cold. I loathe these DM torture porn things. I’d rather the environment was used to make things awesome rather than to pedantically punish the players. {Several comments defend the ice & snow cold travel challenges and say the adventure was good. I concur, environment can also be an interesting challenge, until PCs get magicked enough to ignore it. And traveling in the arctic or jungle is about the closest to real-world adventure you can get.}
Play, not Rules Nitpicking
It’s also interspersed with nitpicky rule reminders. “Remember, you get a +5 to free from spiderwebs if you have your footing!” and “you get a -2 to stealth over rubble!” All of these are fine RULINGS and suck ass RULES. Fuck your rules mastery.
Roleplay instead of skill checks
Oh my. This point out the 3.5 problem, as well as how far adventure design fell. This is an attempt to create a high-level adventure that does not feature combat. Given that Dungeon Magazine seems to think that “high level” means “linear combat shit fest”, this is a quite welcome goal. Unfortunately, the design is incompetent. {...} the core of the adventure is “make a diplomacy check.” At the welcoming dinner you have to succeed on two DC50 checks or the adventure ends right there; you’re kicked out. In other debates the party has if they fail their checks (DC 61!) then they lose. They are free to stay and watch the movie play out. Joy. During the debates, if the party responds to an argument with one of two specific lines of debate then they get a bonus to their diplomacy check. Reducing a night of gaming to a die roll is never a good thing. The lack of options after “failing” means the adventure is badly written. It’s roleplaying, not making a point in craps. The SUPER high DC checks are related to the attribute check bloat in 3.5. Either you pumped points in to Diplomacy and make the check or you didn’t and don’t. {...} But there’s no ADVENTURE around it, just a die roll. No support for the DM to run a investigation, bribe, or whatever. And, if you do ferret the plot out ahead of time, it doesn’t change anything.
The adventure also illustrates the problem with the Search check. Previous editions had an element of player skill in the searching. The DM dropped hints in their descriptions, the players followed up and discovered things. In 3e this was abstracted to The Search Check. Just roll the dice, or take 20, and don’t bother with the more interactive portions. Rolling dice for routine resolution is boring as fuck. Once, running 4e RPGA at a con, a dude rolled his diplomacy to recruit an army of floating eyeballs from a bunch of wizards. “Uh, nope. What do you actually SAY?” I asked. “Uh, you’re one of THOSE dm’s. Can’t I just roll?” was the reply. This moment has stayed with me an excellent example of how mechanics can ruin play.
{This is a tough game system issue - you invalidate social interaction skills and screw players who invest in them rather than combat skills, if you demand or allow role-play instead of a roll. Maybe allow to roll only if the player has a good story. }
HOW TO WRITE
{This is about writing adventures for use by others. When you write for yourself, most of it is in your head, and jotted notes to trigger your imagination are enough. Staying close to this idea also applies here.}
Usefulness at the Table
I have review standards and strong beliefs on what makes a good adventure. First and foremost it has to be useful to the DM at the table while they running it. This is the primary purpose of every adventure ever written, even if the designer didn’t understand that fact. You can use it as inspiration, steal parts from it, or use it as a doorstop if you want, but, judged as an adventure, it has to be useful at the table.
A large part of being useful at the table is a writing style that allows the DM to scan the text quickly during play and locate information. The characters walk in to a room and the DM must quickly, in just seconds, locate the description, grok it, and relate it to the players. Then as they react the DM must continue scanning and absorbing to react to their actions as guided by the DM text for the room. This almost always means a terse and evocative writing style that’s well organized. After this, we come to creativity, interesting encounters, and all the rest. It can’t be boring. But first, it has to be useful to the DM at the table.
Avoid Verbosity
Mountains of backstory, mountains of room text. All of it fights the DM running it at the table. If you are including something in the main text then it has to be directly useful for play. If it’s not then it needs to be removed or moved to an appendix where it can be ignored.
Rooms are described in detail for the DM. Detail that is meaningless and has no impact on the game. I THINK the writer is trying to set some ambiance, trying to inspire the DM to communicate a creepy vision to the players. But it all becomes Wall of Text. The entries are so long that the important bits are lost. Even the inspiring bits are then lost. Three sentences are used when one will do. Six are used when it needed two, or three. This is one of the major sins of the adventure. There is so much text provided that instead of being inspired you are lost in it all. It’s impossible to run with the book open in front of you. You’re going to have to prepare notes ahead of time and/or highlight the shit out of the adventure in order to run it at the table. And, after all, that’s what this thing is supposed to do, right? Be run at the table? The PLAYABILITY of the text suffers.
It reveled in useless detail. A LONG room description that describes a trophy room, all of the trophies and accomplishments, and then ends “but it was long ago looted and now nothing remains but dust.” Backstory, history, detail that doesn’t apply to play, a verbose writing style … these were the hallmarks of most Dungeon Magazine adventures.
Seriously, this must be the Brothers Karamazov of Dungeon adventures. A entire page for a back-alley fight in which the bad guy escapes in the first round. Nuts!
Oh boy, a full page of read-aloud! Soliloquy, HO! AND a page of useless background?!! And useless fresco’s on the walls showing suffering?!?! Say it isn’t so! A symmetrical star layout?!?! Hot diggity dirt!
And it is LONG. LONG. There’s mountains and mountains and mountains of text for EVERYTHING. There’s backstory embedded and expanded upon to explain EVERYTHING. What’s that, an aboleth in an isolated chamber? Eight hundred paragraphs later we learn why, up to and including the use of a decanter of endless water. Someone, somewhere, thinks this extra detail is great. That person is a fucking moron. You have to dig through mountains of data.
This is it kids, the poster child for bad Dungeon adventures. If you want to know what the evil bad guy had for lunch on one random day thirty years earlier and the impact it had on their digestive system, then this is the adventure for you. I’m sure that kind of detail is in this somewhere … because EVERYTHING else is also in here. Nine pages of text before the dungeon. Three pages of triple column text as background BEFORE the information for the dungeon master is presented. I’m also happy to report that there is a great abundance of overly-long and complicated names of places and people … Oh Boy! “[Long text describing something] … but all that remains of the massacre are a few small chunks of stone.” Jesus H Fucking Christ. Really? Seriously?
Leave out what the DM can make up effortlessly
If the name of the room was “Well stocked Larder” then the DM can say “Yup, it’s got salt.” You don’t need to TELL the DM what’s in a well stocked larder, any more than you need to, say, describe a normal bedroom. (You might mention the salt in the DM text, speifically, if there ARE slugs in the lower level and you intend that. But you dont NEED to. Players see slugs, remember larder, ask DM is there’s salt, they say yes.)
This may be the dictionary definition of Wall of Text. It goes on and on, paragraph after paragraph, with little to save the poor DM from misery. It features such classics as: “2. Closets. These rooms are identical. Each has several hooks affixed to interior walls. Just inside the doorway sits a low shelf designed to hold boots and shoes. An everburning torch is mounted to the wall opposite the door. Both chambers are empty.” Which is a fine description of a boring closet. It adds nothing and nor do many of the room descriptions. {At lower levels, everburning torches would be of interest}
The guildhall is just another building stuffed full of boring encounters. Mundane rooms, training rooms, quarters, etc. The whole thing is more than a little mundane and boring.
My chief complaint would be that too much space is spent describing the mundane portions of the castle. No one needs a paragraph to describe a normal hallway.
Describe ONLY what will be needed in play
THINK. What is the purpose of your adventure? Your content should match that. {...} too much text telling you irrelevant things; aka the style of the time. Instead the text should be used to … support the adventure! Stunning thought, I know. In this adventure the demon is supposed to be doing hit & runs on the party. The text for the rooms should be supporting that. Instead of giving us a long paragraphs on describing a well in the parade grounds it should instead be loading us up with ideas. It hides in the well, ready to yank someone in looking over the edge, and things like that. {...} Figure out what your adventure is supposed to be doing and use the text to support it. Really THINK.
The purpose of the text is not to create a rich world with fully flavored backgrounds for everyone and everything. The purpose of the text is to help the DM run the damn thing; aim the text and content at things that the players will interact with not a laundry list of the contents of my kitchen drawer.
Omit Irrelevant Backstory
But there is a special place in my heart, next to my ball of white male rage, that is reserved for the Overly Detailed Backstory. Look, I get it: there’s dragons and white walkers and they are gonna fight. I don’t need page after page of what color gout the swineherds brother has when the swineherd is only barely glimpsed from the road.
There are THREE pages of backstory and history that will NEVER come up in play. It’s CrAzY! MOUNTAINS and PAGES of text
Jesus Fuck, two and half pages of backstory for four pages of adventure! That must be a new Dungeon record.
Omit Room Background that will not affect play
The room descriptions note the history of the room and things which WERE instead of concentrating on things that ARE.
The additional text has a lot of “used to be” and other other descriptions of history and motivations of people long dead. NONE of this is relevant to running the adventure. It has no use when the characters enter the room. The content needs to be focused on supporting actual play, and a great deal of the content here does not do that.
A pretty classic Dungeon Magazine: seven rooms in ten pages. It accomplishes this by spending a decent amount of time telling us what each room used to be used for, in detail. This, of course, adds nothing to the adventure.
it’s boring room after boring room with too much description tell us what the room was once used for, or how its not being used right now, or yet another explanation of how the jailer is not a nice guy. That. Doesn’t. Support. Play.
Lots of opportunity for useless background data “A year ago a destrachan crawled up from the underdark and fought some adventurers and died, resulting in this rubble filled room.” Note the contrast between this “explaining why” and Curse of the Shrine Goddess, where stars disappear from the sky with no explanation of why. One concentrates on play and creates fun. The other concentrates on some historical novelization of the adventure, and sucks shit.
Here’s the DM notes for a room with four pools of slime in it: “Morbion created these four pools of olive slime by using stone shape to create two-foot-deep hollow depression in the floor. He then transplanted a batch of olive slime to each and has been cultivating the four over the past several days in an attempt to develop variant forms of the ooze. So far, his experiments have met with failure and he’s only grown four patches or ordinary olive slime.” So, basically, there’s four pools of slime in a Jubliex temple? Who woulda thunk it! A great example of padding your word count using backstory that has nothing to do with the adventure at the table.
“The other six hold only the barest bits of bone and shreds of cloth. This displacer beasts that occupy this room licked the lacquer from the corpses like giant candies before consuming the bodies.” Great. Does the adventure take place while they are doing this? No? And they’ve completely consumed the bodies? So everything in the LONG background paragraph is irrelevant to the adventure, as well as those sentences? Perfect. Glad you were able to pad out your Pay Per Word score.
It provides stats for a dead body on the floor, that will not come back to life in any way during this boring snoozefest.
There is the usual nonsense with room descriptions, like the paragraph that describes the history of a pool of dried blood. Yes, an entire paragraph to tell us that a pool of loos on the battlements is from where some skeletons shot an escaping priest. No body. Not fresh. Just some dried blood.
It contains one of my all-time favorite examples of how to not write a room description: 5a. Old Animal Pen This area, defined by the eight stake holes shown on the map, was used as a holding are for horses and animals that would ventrally end up in the goblins’ stewpot. The wooden pen has long since rotted away. Adventurers finding the holes can only guess at their original purpose. Fucking seriously? Not just what is used to be, but how it was used before you tell us it’s all irrelevant?
One of the greatest examples in all Christendom of bad room writing is contained herein. It’s not platonic, but pretty damn close. I leave you with it, as an example of the joy you can find herein: “4. Trophy Room. This room once contained trophies of war. Swords, spears, and armor of all kinds were dedicated here to the everlasting glory of the fallen orc leaders. Centuries ago, the walls were draped with elven banners, dwarves sigils, gnome heraldry, and the flags and standards of men, goblins, and various orc tribes. The moonorc leaders have stripped the room of anything useful in order to outfit the tribe. The weapons and armor were quickly divided among the warriors, while the flags and banners were torn down and used for blankets or ripped apart and resewn into bags, sacks, and clothing. The room now contains only refuse and rusty, unusable equipment.”
The village is described in WAY too much detail. Almost every entry seems to give us a short tutorial on how medieval farming practices work. There’s also a nice section how the gatekeeper purchases vegetables from the local general store. WTF? NONE of this is relevant to the adventure. It’s absurd.
Omit Character Background that will not affect play
They get names, and individual lair rooms, and have some semblance of personality. There will, however, be no chance to interact with them and so all that they ever were or will be is lost in an instant.
Each has a name and a personality that goes on for quite some word count. They attack immediately and no doubt die ignominious deaths at the hands of 8th-12th level PC’s. Why pay all this detail to creatures which die immediately in 10 minutes of pure combat? And yes, later on in the fortress, the party encounter 8 elf prisoners who get NO detail at all, in spite of the fact they are eager to join the party and wipe out the evil menace. WTF?!
The enemies are well-described with personalities, etc, but that will never be used because you’re just going to butcher them mindlessly in the opening battle. I guess maybe you could parley with one or two during the battle, or during a chase.
The kidnappers have decent flavor & personalities … which will never see the light of day and they exist to say about 4 sentences, total, and then get cut down.
WHich is then combined with MONSTROUS amounts of text. We get a paragraph describing a tattoo on the back of the hands of some of the soldiers WHICH HAS NO IMPACT ON THE ADVENTURE.
Good Writing
Specific beats Generic
Generic Adventure is generic.
It’s just the generic magic items, generic monsters, generic rooms, etc that I’m having a problem with.
The rooms get boring little descriptions like “full of ruined sofas and tapestries.” A kind of generic decay description that infests the fantasy adventure market.
The city is not detailed and a city without flavor is atrocious to run.
There are a lot of rumors, which is nice, but they are a little generic and could be beefed up with some more exciting language. “A hermit lives in the wooded vale south of the pass. Don’t disturb him – he owns a powerful magic staff.” That’s too generic for my tastes. I’m looking for a story about crazy old ben who has a lazer staff , or crazy old Ichibod and how he fought off a giant by using his staff to turn him to a manta ray. Effects and color, not flavorless fact.
“Brigands” are mentioned in the read-aloud. You should never say “Brigands” or “Bandits” in a game. It should always be “Jacks’s Gang” or “that mob of Bandy’s boys.” Specificity brings a world alive and genericism kills immersion.
Show, don't tell
Uh … show, don’t tell. Maybe it’s a problem with the Standards people, but I hate being told something is evil. Show me. Put some heads on stakes. Flay someone, still alive. The reaction of the PLAYERS will be better.
The read aloud has some truly horrid things to say, like “A woman named Mother Grundy owns this stall.” That’s a conclusion that can’t be reached by observation.
“Only if attacked do they scatterm in which case they retreat in a strangely orderly, unnervingly silent exodus.” Also, unnerving is a conclusion. It’s telling instead of showing. Strike that word.
The problem here is that you can’t just say “run it spooky”, you need to provide resources to help the DM run it spooky. That’s what we’re paying for. Without that you haven’t really provided anything of value to the DM. “Zombies attack while the group is in a lighthouse.” There’s no value in that. It’s very important to remember when designing an adventure that it’s your job to communicate the vibe.
Terse, Evocative Descriptions
The best encounters kind of stick with you. You read them one, maybe twice, and they are completely internalized. You need not hardly refer to the encounters again during play, it’s like you wrote it yourself.
No Boxed Text
Oh wait, oh wait! Here’s a masterpiece of creative read-aloud writing!!! “You find something on the ground.” What the FUCK is up with that? PPW?
I hate boxed text. My eyes glaze over when I listen OR read it. I start to think about succubi art. I groan. I LOATHE it.
It’s got a nice column long read-aloud, those are always fun, right?
Organizing Information
Provide an Overview
The amount of text and lack of an overview makes deciphering the entire adventure a chore for the DM.
There’s no orientation to the adventure for the DM. “Sandbox” is not an excuse. There’s clearly some things meant to be worked in and the adventure as a whole suffers from not having an overview of how these things fit together.
It needs help, in particular it needs some reference tables to summarize events, NPC’s, and so on.
A simple timeline, with events on it. A simple list of NPC’s, with their personalities. A list of flavor suggestions for building dread.
For example, summarizing all of the guards/NPC on a single reference sheet with simple stats and personalities.
And, even better, the table notes WHERE YOU CAN FIND THINGS! Giving the daughter some letters from her dead fiance will give you some positive modifier, but the table also tells you that they are in room six! Oh the humanity! A writer who actually makes things easier for the DM!
The NPC’s are detailed in a table THAT ALSO NOTES WHERE THEY CAN BE FOUND IN THE KEYED ENTRIES.
Maps
Traps are shows. ABout 30 glyphs of wrding are shown. Light sources are shown. (Yeah!)
Random Encounter Tables
The 20-entry wandering table is just a list of monsters with stats. Nothing more. Rot Grubs. Common Rats. Giant Rats. Razors so you can slit your own throats to make it end. No, sorry, just kidding about that last one.
The {...} wandering monster tables are lame and boring ad just consist of a monster listing.
In a dungeon the wanderers act as a kind of push your luck timer; the more time you are in the more danger you are in as your resources are depleted. Wilderness wanderers though, because they only happen once or twice a day, should be full fledged encounters; interesting things that happen with interesting folks, be they monsters or otherwise.
A nice little wandering monster table that adds some encounter notes/suggestions next to each entry. I like that sort of thing. it prompts the DM to riff off of it and loads their imagination up to run the adventure. Tribesmen are from one of the villages and may travel with the party back. Animals act like animals. These little notes add a lot to the adventure.
There are bits and pieces of good design in this. Some of the creatures you encounter are doing things; dragging away a dead body, or in the process of attacking others.
The wandering table, in particular, for the wilderness areas has a good little sentence or two after each encounter listing which adds quite a bit to the encounters. Goblins are looking for a lair, ghouls with a grievance against their former lord, and ogre looking for a goat or fox to eat.
The wandering monster table is a nice one, with things like “you step on a sandling” and “dervishes looking for a ruin” and “nomads who trade with you.” There are a few “attack on sight” encounters and many more that have just a bit more to them. That extra bit, usually just a single short sentence, adds a wonderful variety to what otherwise could have been yet another generic desert dreck-fest.
you get to a pretty decent wandering monster table, that are excellent little set ups for adventure. A little long, at a paragraph each instead of a sentence, but still good.
Rumor Tables
There are a lot of rumors … but not a lot of colorful characters to get them from.
There’s also a nice colloquial rumor table, done in story format. These are much nicer than the fact-based rumor tables, especially when worked in Grandpa Simpson style.
Adventure Type Specific Advise
Social Adventures
The inn has the same problem that most older adventures have: it’s described fully. It’s almost like the writers are stuck in the old “dungeon map key” style of play. Instead of abstracting the inn map and describing the people IN the inn, instead the inn if fully described, along with the people in it, in the rooms they are found in.
the adventure correctly recognizes that this is a social adventure and therefore the map, and keyed encounters, are not as important as they are in exploration adventures.
There’s just no reason for the descriptions. It’s like you were docking at a w{h}arf in a city to get a tax stamp from the harbormaster before moving on the same day, and the entire city was described, room by room. I suppose you could reuse it, but then again you can say that for ANYTHING.
Instead of including all of the information about the people in the description for the locale it should have been broken out to a short description of the “mundane” village locations and another section on the people, personalities, and politics of the situation.
The text of the adventure also lists how those villagers feel about other villagers and how they interact with them and what they have to stay about them. That is GREAT. A good social adventure thrives on the interpersonal relationships among the NPC’s in order to come alive.
A host of NPC’s, with appearances, personalities, goals and so on, but it’s all presented in giant text form … meaning you’ll need to take copious notes to run it. Tables. USE. A. FUCKING. TABLE. TO. SUMMARIZE. Ug.
The village could really use more life to it, things going on other than the adventure and more NPC’s in the village to interact with and get rumors from.
This is then augmented by many of the locations having events. Things HAPPEN in this adventure. People are not just waiting around. Parades of ghosts, vampire attacks, almost every location has one or two events to augment and/or enhance some of the plotlines in the village. This is REALLY good. It brings the place to life. No longer static many of the villages now feel alive
Town/City Adventures
What you get are some brief descriptions of some notable places in the city and some idea of what happens to them over a month, and then a series of events over the next month that the party can take part in. Looters, food riots, and so on. There is a little advice on how to get things going and maintain them, some general tools such as a quite nice rumor table, and then … you’re off! as such this is more like a sandbox setting. One of the most successful campaigns I ever ran was a city game. The lessons I learned from that campaign are present in this adventure, although implicitly. EVERYTHING is a hook. Everyone you meet, every interaction you have will cause something else to happen. Free someone trapped under a cart? He was once an important person in the city army. Don’t do X, then Y happens. This entire adventure is a springboard to adventure. {...} City games take a lot of work & record keeping, so don’t tread lightly, but the sense of context and connections the characters make will cause the work to pay off in great play experiences.
The town portion does have a bit of a sandbox feel, and it quite open ended in the solutions available to solve the town portion. That’s very nice.
The information in town is organized, with “here’s this person and heres what they know”, and it’s fairly easy to see how one lead can point out another person to seek out.
Laborers, pilgrims, city guards, merchant, unaffiliated street gangs … just enough content to give you a great idea of what like if life in this city.
It is organized quite well: there’s a description of the key people in town and what they know/how they react, a list of events that can take place, and then a location list. The locations are very briefly described, except for the main abandoned dwarven hold. In short: it’s organized exactly the way it needs to be to support the type of play it wants to be
Caper or Heist Adventures
It’s a fairly ‘realistic’ exploration of a small bandit fortress {...}. It feels more like a tactical assault on a real place. Here’s the keep, here’s the patrols, here’s the watches, and here’s an obvious hole in the bad guys plan. It ALMOST keeps to that formula but doesn’t beat the thing to death (unlike the points I make in reviews.)
It’s just a place, with guards, that you break in to. A Caper! Except … it’s not written that way. We need schedules! Patrol routes! How the dudes inside react when the alarm is raised! An order of battle! When do they release the Death Dogs to roam the halls? None of that is here.
It’s a little too “room/key” to support an infiltration/spy mission. In one room entry it notes that to keep up morale sometimes entertainers come in to the closely guarded citadel. That sort of stuff is better moved outside of the keys, for example.
The “big picture” details of the security and procedures should have been pulled out in general sections and then a terse room/key presented, with the two referencing each other. I don’t want to dig for information about the patrolling animals by trying to find the correct room with the info. Put it in “night patrols” section and reference room 4 as their pen, with room 4 referencing the night patrols section, noting it’s the home of the patrolling animals.
Detective Adventures
Mystery adventures don’t work in D&D. The characters cast a spell and the mystery is over in short order.
Let me get this out of the way: mysteries don’t work in D&D, or most RPG’s. The players have access to just too many ways to get information. At this level {5} we have Augury, Detect Charm, Know Alignment, Speak with Animals and maybe Speak with Dead and Locate Object. And that’s just the clerics list. Druids and Wizards will have their own allotment. The only way past this problem is with a bizarre assortment of customer tailored magic items just to fuck with the players and deny them the powers their characters have earned. So, the adventure sucks. A decent attempt is made at a character-driven story by giving some decent details of a dozen or so key NPC’s, their personalities and how they act and react. It’s like a Poirot mystery: everyone has something to hide. This is ten ruined by providing overly long and uselessly detailed room descriptions in order that they make up the majority of the page count. It would have been REALLY helpful to have had all of the NPC’s detailed on one summary page for the DM to refer to during play.
It occurs to me that much was lost in OD&D between the resource-management of the early game and the plot from the later games. The “Detect Being Fucked With by the DM” spells made sense when you couldn’t refresh any spell at any time, didn’t have your books with you, couldn’t learn any spell at will, and had to manage your wizard slots more. As those limitations were houseruled away, or officially ruled away, the “Detect DM Bullshit” spells became adventure breakers when the entire adventure revolved around them. WOTC should have removed them from the modern era game, or at least publish “genre packs” of appropriateness. {Which they did, 5e Detect Evil does not detect alignment anymore. Zone of Truth has a save.}
The encounter locations are quite terse, generally, and the investigative elements point STRAIGHT at the bandit camp, over and over again. This is the ONLY way to run an investigation: provide an overwhelming number of clues … and this adventure does that.
The format used here, which is the traditional keyed room format, really does not fit this sort of adventure. You get a massive wall of text and need to try and hunt down things which makes running this sort of thing a prep nightmare. Better would be a list of NPC personalities/goals, a timeline, and a minimal room key. IE: reference material.
This is a murder mystery. Someone is killing people in Sharn. It tries to do the right thing. It’s organized in to locations, murder details, and other events. This is a good style for a murder mystery, recognizing that the locations are just a framework for the events to take place in. It’s got a nice NPC summary with names, roles, and rumors about them … but then leaves off their locations and their personalities
Is there a better way to present investigations? The method in this adventure, a search check with the DM then feeding information, seems too abstracted. It reduces an “Ah Ha!” moment to a simple die roll. Room/Key format may be cumbersome for this sort of thing, but just listing the “important” rooms and what someone can find in it would seem to be both better than the die roll and the room/key. It preserves the player agency, eliminates the “all D&D elements are die rolls” nonsense, and can be relatively dense/terse in presentation.
Somethings gotta give here, or should have anyway. Either don’t make it a high-level adventure or don’t make it “investigating the murder of a night watchman.”
This is a pretty classi{c} (IE: shitty) plot based adventure that wants to be an investigation. It contains such wonders as “let the bad guy escape if they catch on too soon” and “even if they use scry, don’t give them the clues”, as well as “the DC to interrogate is 50.” {...} If the party thinks to scry, pushes their odds and makes it then they should be given helpful information. Likewise if they capture people to question the DC should NOT be 50 for a run of mill hired thug. They should be rewarded for their interesting and non-combat/non-linear attempts of actually trying to play D&D instead of a mini’s combat game.
Tower Defense Adventures
Given a ruined fort the party has to hold out against a band of 22 gnolls and a few leader-types. I like these desperate last stand type adventures; {...} For this to work you need an environment dynamic & colorful enough for the party to use their brains to come up with defenses. Given a ruined fort full of stuff, MacGyver/Hannibal your way to survival. To do that you need things to work with.
The party ends up in a fort/manor and a large group of orcs attack and lay siege to it. The party gets to control all of the locals, from lord to peasant, and has access top all of the general supplies in the fort in order to fight off the attackers. There’s a timeline presented, some rough orc battle plans, and general plans of the fort and the surrounding lands. {...} I like these sorts of “heres a location and heres a goal. Make it happen” kinds of adventures. The players are given a very free hand, controlling all of the NPC’s.
The map is relatively simple and probably doesn’t support the kind of hit & run & guerilla tactics that might be wonderful to see in a Dungeon Defender type adventure.
The whole thing is supposed to be a creepy assault with a kind of cramped and claustrophobic atmosphere. The designer says as much in one brief sentence. Unfortunately there’s not enough here to enable the DM to do as much. Zombie assaults are about defending the building with what’s at hand.
Caravan Guard / Travel Adventures
I’s linear, and essentially a series of set pieces with the generally hated “escort mission” tag attached to it.
There’s an allotment of NPC’s to spice things up on board, some generics to die horrible, and some locations to visit along the way. {...} The thing is full of nice little vignettes and encounters on the way to the island. In short, I think it’s a pretty damn good sea/travel adventure, one of the best I’ve seen.
Wilderness Exploration Adventures
One thing I REALLY like about this adventure is the way a decent sized wilderness map is presented, with encounters all over the place, so the party can choose to avoid the swamp, or go through the mountains, or whatever. That’s a good way to support the DM.
Gauntlet Adventures
All spells are on scrolls and all weapons provided, no armor, blah blah blah, which is how it’s an All Levels adventure. This is more X-Crawl then it is old school funhouse. 10 challenges, all of which are really puzzles of one sort of another. It’s hard for me to recognize this as an adventure; it’s more of an evening activity in my mind.
It is SO very hard for me to get past my prejudices. This is a training ground adventure (Duh!) This must be the lowest form of adventure. No pretext of adventure at all, just a bunch of shit that the players have to figure out. Suck it you fucking haters of the metagame, the Training Ground adventure writers know the score! {...} Joy. Why not just open the monster manual to a random page and announce that there are now 7 ogres in the room. At least TRY to come up with an idea!
Adventure Setting Or Theme Specific Advise
Faery Tale Adventures
Danger! Folklore! Danger! I Love this stuff to an unnatural degree! OMG! I LUV this shit. A talking fish, a talking owl, and a talking giant rat are a part of the adventure; {...} It’s the OLD folklore goblins rather than the generic sword-bait goblins that D&D usually presents. {...} Anyway, you have no soul if you don’t like this. I’m just saying.
There’s a nice fairy tale feel here, with injured animals, old wells, haughty warriors blocking a shrine, and a forceful merchant.
Winter, Ice and Snow Adventures
It’s got a decent winter vibe, much more so than most winter adventures. From a village fight to worgs attacking a mastadon to a field of frozen corpses, it does a decent job of bringing in a variety of encounters and options for resolution that don’t just involve combat.
3D Adventures
3D adventures don’t work. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has written a decent one. But in general they don’t work. I’m no historian but I suspect that the underwater and flying rules were meant for players to solve problems in the 2D world. Swim a river in a cave, or fly up to a new location to explore. extended adventures underwater or in the air just don’t fit in the groove well. The DM/adventure has to give the party a bunch of stuff to allow them to fly/breathe, and then everyone gets to have fun with the new movement & encumbrance and environmental rules. Yeah! Bookkeeping!
Underwater Adventures
Underwater? Ha! A million loaned things for the {p}arty, right? Right? No! Nixie kisses! It’s wonderful! All is right in the world, it fits perfectly! {...} And the DM Torture Porn of Underwater Adventuring is toned down to be just the good parts that are fun and enhance the adventure! How is that? Light sources halved … so the descriptions play on that … shadows and chaos suddenly appearing in your (very) restrictive magic 10’ light circle! And not immediately attacking you! Lungs full of water and can’t cast? How about an air pocket under an overturned boat? Or a glob of air stuck to a diving beetle? Perfect!
You get water breathing potions from the captain to explore it. {...} I just hate the underwater portion with the madness of someone prejudiced against underwater adventures.
It wants to provide a magical and wondrous adventure in a strange and alien world under the sea. All it actually does is provide boring combat after combat. As with all crappy underwater adventures, it provides the party with gear to survive.
Sewer Adventures
Fucking. Sewers. I LOATHE sewers.
Fucking god dammit! Sewers! Skulks and ghouls in the sewers. Lots of read-aloud, lots of DM’s text, not much interesting.
This is a linear crawl in a … sewer! Yes, that’s right, it’s a linear sewer crawl, that most exciting of all adventure types. Actually, I’m being unfair. You can select the right or left hand linear room set to go down. Well, before they merge into one and then it’s REALLY linear.
And it has sewers. I can’t do it. I can’t review another sewer adventure. Oh world, I have failed thee. My only charge and I have failed. I just can’t. Pretext to get you in to the sewers and then SEWER DUNGEON. The map does appear to have pools and bridges, so at least there are some tactical options. In the sewers. Spriggan drug dealers in greyhawk sewers. Tonally, D&D is dead.
Museum, Asylum, Circus, and All Thieves Adventures
Joy. An asylum. I’ll put this in the pile of museum and archeology dig adventures I’ve collected. {...} It’s unclear why the party doesn’t just kill everyone they see and burn the place down right after “asylum” and “don’t know anything about it” and “please stay the night to keep out of the weather.” You know the deal.
Masquerade ball. Oasis. Archeological dig. Drugged food. Pretty close to shitty trope bingo!
What is the fascination with the circus and carnival? I get the festivals are an important part of village life but no circus ever appeared in a D&D adventure that did not have something fishy going on. Smart players would just have their characters burn it down and put everyone to the sword summarily. It’s called ‘Risk Mitigation.’ JESES H FUCKING CHRIST WHY THE FUCK ARE PEOPLE OBSESSED WITH PUTTING EVIL CARNIVALS IN D&D? It doesn’t work. It NEVER works. Unless you put festivals in routinely then the party will know something is up when the circus shows up. The smart thing to do is to just burn it down and kill everyone. Especially when you are level 10+, as in this adventure. Who is going to mess with your 10+ party? The local authorities? The party is probably the local law.
Ug! An All thief adventure! All signs point to SUCK, Captain!
Ravenloft Adventures
Transported to Ravenloft, kill the evil vampire Baron. Heard that one before? Ravenloft adventures are a one-trick pony: one is all you get before the party kills all Barons, Mayors, etc, on sight.
The party washes ashore on a misty isle (Ravenloft!) and sees a mansion on the island. (I burn it down.) They are greeted by a distracted doctor. (I stab him in the face.) who offers you each a room for the night. (Uh, fuck you. No. We all sleep in the same room. Also, I kill the doctor.) Weird things happen. (Uh, I burned the house down, remember? I do it again.) Turns out the doctor is evil and salvaging body parts to repair his maimed daughter in the basement.
Dragonlance Adventures
Dragonlance. Tinker gnomes. Gully dwarves. Are you still reading? Why? Why would you keep reading after I disclosed all of that?
That’s right, I enjoy having my 10th level PC laughed at because of some DM bullshit. And of course, they are actually good guys because they fight to capture instead of kill. “Why do you interrupt our dancing?” Because you, Mr Korrad, like all the Kender and Dragonborn and Gnomes before you, deserve death.
A word of advice: when running NPC halfling, tinkers and gully, a little goes a LONG way. It’s often more useful to murder them all and dump the bodies (or display them proudly if you have cool DM.)
I fucking hate the rascally/innocent halfling meme.
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