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GeekList Item: Item for GeekList "Sentinel Comics RPG - "After Midnight" character list"
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 08:32:58
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 08:32:58
by DoOverAgain
An item RPG: Healer has been added to the geeklist Sentinel Comics RPG - "After Midnight" character list
New comment on Image
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 07:54:04
/pic9507814.jpg)
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 07:54:04
by JugglinDan
Related Item: Ironsworn: Starforged
They look really good! I'm playing a coop game of Starforged at the moment. If it wasn't in Foundry, I'd be all over something like that!
Review: Dungeon Module GG2 1E: Tomb of the Dundel Chief:: A linear long-winded tomb with lots of read-aloud and little interactivity beyond stabbin
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:26:43
GAXLAND
1e
Levels 5-7
The mission: A local elder dwarf has commissioned you to find the long abandoned underground tomb of the legendary Dundel Chief, R?ta V?kara. As no dwarven folk are allowed beyond the South Gate of the city of Sørholde, you have been entrusted to retrieve a long lost and priceless document that your benefactor maintains would free the dwarven folk from their obligation to maintain the city of Sørholde and reinstate the great dwarven mines of the Dundel once again.
This 64 page adventure presents what is essentially a linear tomb with around forty rooms. Very long winded, lots of read-aloud, and no real interactivity beyond traps and combat. It is quite the amateurish effort for $35.
I’m gong to start by saying something nice. “Thieves’ Tools can always be improvised with items from the adventuring packs (i.e. a hammer and piton) but the improvised tools and lock will be destroyed in the process.” I like this kind of framing about thieves tools. I think the natural assumption is thieves tools are lockpics and other delicate instruments. I don’t really like thieves as written in most (all?) systems and this aligns with my view of crowbars and sledgehammers being standard dungeon equipment. One day maybe I’ll work up a thief class in which their find/remove abilities are just rerolls, given anyone can find/remove a traps, open doors, etc. Anyway, thieves tools being higher quality crowbars and sledgehammers make sense to me, lasting more than one attempt, etc.
Otherwise, man, this thing is rough. Lots of read-aloud, mounds of paddings, a mostly linear dungeon and low-powered opponents. I shall assume the best of intentions and these are just enthusiastic amateurs who wrote for, say, 5e, and had Bill localize it to 1e. But that localize was just not done well at all.
The adventure starts off in medias res with the parties wagon train being attacked by five skeletons. Yes, five skeletons. At levels five through seven. This is a recurring problem with the adventure. Very low level enemies, in small quantities, in general, but skeletons in particular. Oh, but these are special skeletons! They have TWO HD!!!!! Level five is an auto-turn and level seven is an auto destroy. So, yes, please, put in five skeletons. Or some giant rats. Yeah, sure, something like a hundred or a thousand skeletons, rats, stirge, et, can become an obstacle for the party, A hazard or environmental feature if not a straight up combat. When you finally make it to the last room of the dungeon you face off against the titular undead Dundel chief himself! Who I’m pretty sure is a 2HD skeleton. The read-aloud says he rises to attack. And that other skeletons nearby rise to attack. And it gives us stats for a 2HD skeleton right there. And no stats for the chieftain. Was there supposed to be stats for the big bad? Did they all fuck this up? Both writers credited? Both editors credited? The conversion person credited? The two proofreaders credited? Or is he supposed to be a 2HD skeleton? I wonder if anyone cared?
It engages in LONG, like, REALLY LONG sections of read-aloud. For everything. Once again, no one wants long read-aloud. Nobody cares about it. The DM doesn’t. The players HATE it. That’s when the phones come out. If you don’t run a shitty shitty game then people will be engaged and the phones will NOT come out. More than two or three sentences of read-aloud, SHORT sentences, is all you can get away with. If half your page is read-aloud text, as it is here in a not uncommon occurrence, then you are CLEARLY FAILING. In many pages there is far FAR less DM text on a page then there is read-aloud.
Second person read-aloud. Don’t do that. Don’t make assumptions about the party. They are all 50’ tall and incorporeal in my game, so your shitty long second-person read-aloud doesn’t fucking apply. This also applies to that shtity in medias res opening. You’re part of a caravan, a wagon train, to the tomb. Earthquakes! Skeleton attacks! “Uh, we flew there.” Uh huh. Unspeakable Oath did an CoC adventure that started with the lights out in the players actual game space, then the DM flicked them on and one of them spat out a piece of hotdog. (His tongue, as it turns out.) THAT was a fucking in medias res fucking openening! For a one shot. If you are not the Unspeakable Oath and doing a one shot then maybe think twice before doing this.
You are on your way to the tomb of the dundel chief. Some dwarves hired you. They want you to go find a deed in it that gives them the right to open a mine and they are not allowed in/through the gateway city. A piece of paper. The dwarves think that a piece of paper is what they need. To coopt a quote, who, exactly, is going to enforce the judiciaries decision? Jesus gonna come down and smite the city elders for not obeying the piece of paper? Emperor Whatits, that maybe both the city and the dwarves pay homage to (If that were the case?) WHo does he like best? Is he trying to curry favor with one or the other party? But, sure, whatever. That’s a dwarf probem, I guess, YOUVE got a piece of paper that lets you go explore the tomb. That doesn’t belong to the dwarves.
Strangely, the dundel people, who still exist and are all around, are ok with you plundering and robbing and desecrating the tomb of their greatest chief. “The Dundel people will be friendly and will answer questions if able.” Like, in ALL ways. Sure thing man, plunder away!
DM text is quite poor. ‘Wait, we just started and we already have earthquakes and are under attack by the undead? Let’s go back a few days for a bit of a flashback.” Wonderful. Conversational. “If gear is left in the tunnel above or a rope is left hanging into the chamber it will be untouched when the time comes to return to the surface.” Is the sun still burning when we return? Is the air outside still breathable when we return? Room names are that cringe stuff that turns punny sometimes like “Encounter 3F: What’s Down Here?”
Mechanics wise get things like a column of text to describe a pit trap. A simple pit trap with a clowning lid. A column of text. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how you used to get away with just drawing an X on the map and saying nothing about it.
“The slabs are extremely heavy and cannot be moved or damaged in any meaningful way.” Uh huh. How about “The padlock cannot be broken, but it may be picked” I think, perhaps, you underestimate my players. One of my proudest moments as a father is when my kids, knowing there was a basement to a house but not being able to find a way in, pulled out their tools and started to work on the wood floor. And those were first level tweens. I think my aging level seven wizard can find a way through, if not the bevy of magic items the level five through sevens carry. It’s fucking absurd. Half the fucking spell lists in 1e are devoted to shit like this.
One room takes three pages to describe.
The dungeon is linear. You come down in to a room with eight doors, one open. You explore that section of the dungeon and at the end of it you can then go explore the next section of the dungeon and so on. IE: linear. Of those eight sections, about halfway through the text, you get an interlude that describes the nomad camp outside the dungeon that you camp in. Seriously. Like, after room twenty, here’s a description of the nomad camp outside, and then it starts in on room 21. No, this was not an editing or layout error. It was intentional. Because just sticking rando shit in the middle of other rando shit is CLEARLY the best way to organize things. That’s my, in my own dictionary, the letters M are placed between the letters Q and D.
Quantum rooms? IE: the dreaded if/then padding? Check. “If the party explores to the North, they will find the walkway leads to a section of bridge that crosses to a door. If they continue North, they find a dead end and the source of the fast- moving stream, emerging through a heavy iron grate from the darkness beyond.”
Dumb ass interactivity/? Check. “The answer to the riddle is: Eye. As soon as the answer is spoken …” No sphynx there. Just a room. Yu’re just saying the answer out loud.
The final insult may be the hyperlink included at the end for downloadable content. It’s broken. Doesn’t work. As in it takes you a page on their website that says “No page found.” I went digging elsewhere on their website for the content. It’s not present.
It’s linear, stuffed with excessive read-aloud, DM notes that are excessive in some places and lacking in other place, to the point I’m questioning if there was a layout/edit error that removed information that was supposed to be present. It is essentially traps and combat with a lot of irrelevant combat encounters and a few 7 HD dudes here and there. This is not a strong showing. For $35.
This is $35 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages with none of the dungeon. A good preview should show a potential buyer what to expect, and the core encounters are a part of that. Still, you get a look at the read-aloud on a couple of the lighter pages.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/446899/tomb-of-the-d...
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:26:43
by bryce0lynch
By Heidi Gygax Garland, Erik Garland, Adapted by Bill SilveyGAXLAND
1e
Levels 5-7
The mission: A local elder dwarf has commissioned you to find the long abandoned underground tomb of the legendary Dundel Chief, R?ta V?kara. As no dwarven folk are allowed beyond the South Gate of the city of Sørholde, you have been entrusted to retrieve a long lost and priceless document that your benefactor maintains would free the dwarven folk from their obligation to maintain the city of Sørholde and reinstate the great dwarven mines of the Dundel once again.
This 64 page adventure presents what is essentially a linear tomb with around forty rooms. Very long winded, lots of read-aloud, and no real interactivity beyond traps and combat. It is quite the amateurish effort for $35.
I’m gong to start by saying something nice. “Thieves’ Tools can always be improvised with items from the adventuring packs (i.e. a hammer and piton) but the improvised tools and lock will be destroyed in the process.” I like this kind of framing about thieves tools. I think the natural assumption is thieves tools are lockpics and other delicate instruments. I don’t really like thieves as written in most (all?) systems and this aligns with my view of crowbars and sledgehammers being standard dungeon equipment. One day maybe I’ll work up a thief class in which their find/remove abilities are just rerolls, given anyone can find/remove a traps, open doors, etc. Anyway, thieves tools being higher quality crowbars and sledgehammers make sense to me, lasting more than one attempt, etc.
Otherwise, man, this thing is rough. Lots of read-aloud, mounds of paddings, a mostly linear dungeon and low-powered opponents. I shall assume the best of intentions and these are just enthusiastic amateurs who wrote for, say, 5e, and had Bill localize it to 1e. But that localize was just not done well at all.
The adventure starts off in medias res with the parties wagon train being attacked by five skeletons. Yes, five skeletons. At levels five through seven. This is a recurring problem with the adventure. Very low level enemies, in small quantities, in general, but skeletons in particular. Oh, but these are special skeletons! They have TWO HD!!!!! Level five is an auto-turn and level seven is an auto destroy. So, yes, please, put in five skeletons. Or some giant rats. Yeah, sure, something like a hundred or a thousand skeletons, rats, stirge, et, can become an obstacle for the party, A hazard or environmental feature if not a straight up combat. When you finally make it to the last room of the dungeon you face off against the titular undead Dundel chief himself! Who I’m pretty sure is a 2HD skeleton. The read-aloud says he rises to attack. And that other skeletons nearby rise to attack. And it gives us stats for a 2HD skeleton right there. And no stats for the chieftain. Was there supposed to be stats for the big bad? Did they all fuck this up? Both writers credited? Both editors credited? The conversion person credited? The two proofreaders credited? Or is he supposed to be a 2HD skeleton? I wonder if anyone cared?
It engages in LONG, like, REALLY LONG sections of read-aloud. For everything. Once again, no one wants long read-aloud. Nobody cares about it. The DM doesn’t. The players HATE it. That’s when the phones come out. If you don’t run a shitty shitty game then people will be engaged and the phones will NOT come out. More than two or three sentences of read-aloud, SHORT sentences, is all you can get away with. If half your page is read-aloud text, as it is here in a not uncommon occurrence, then you are CLEARLY FAILING. In many pages there is far FAR less DM text on a page then there is read-aloud.
Second person read-aloud. Don’t do that. Don’t make assumptions about the party. They are all 50’ tall and incorporeal in my game, so your shitty long second-person read-aloud doesn’t fucking apply. This also applies to that shtity in medias res opening. You’re part of a caravan, a wagon train, to the tomb. Earthquakes! Skeleton attacks! “Uh, we flew there.” Uh huh. Unspeakable Oath did an CoC adventure that started with the lights out in the players actual game space, then the DM flicked them on and one of them spat out a piece of hotdog. (His tongue, as it turns out.) THAT was a fucking in medias res fucking openening! For a one shot. If you are not the Unspeakable Oath and doing a one shot then maybe think twice before doing this.
You are on your way to the tomb of the dundel chief. Some dwarves hired you. They want you to go find a deed in it that gives them the right to open a mine and they are not allowed in/through the gateway city. A piece of paper. The dwarves think that a piece of paper is what they need. To coopt a quote, who, exactly, is going to enforce the judiciaries decision? Jesus gonna come down and smite the city elders for not obeying the piece of paper? Emperor Whatits, that maybe both the city and the dwarves pay homage to (If that were the case?) WHo does he like best? Is he trying to curry favor with one or the other party? But, sure, whatever. That’s a dwarf probem, I guess, YOUVE got a piece of paper that lets you go explore the tomb. That doesn’t belong to the dwarves.
Strangely, the dundel people, who still exist and are all around, are ok with you plundering and robbing and desecrating the tomb of their greatest chief. “The Dundel people will be friendly and will answer questions if able.” Like, in ALL ways. Sure thing man, plunder away!
DM text is quite poor. ‘Wait, we just started and we already have earthquakes and are under attack by the undead? Let’s go back a few days for a bit of a flashback.” Wonderful. Conversational. “If gear is left in the tunnel above or a rope is left hanging into the chamber it will be untouched when the time comes to return to the surface.” Is the sun still burning when we return? Is the air outside still breathable when we return? Room names are that cringe stuff that turns punny sometimes like “Encounter 3F: What’s Down Here?”
Mechanics wise get things like a column of text to describe a pit trap. A simple pit trap with a clowning lid. A column of text. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how you used to get away with just drawing an X on the map and saying nothing about it.
“The slabs are extremely heavy and cannot be moved or damaged in any meaningful way.” Uh huh. How about “The padlock cannot be broken, but it may be picked” I think, perhaps, you underestimate my players. One of my proudest moments as a father is when my kids, knowing there was a basement to a house but not being able to find a way in, pulled out their tools and started to work on the wood floor. And those were first level tweens. I think my aging level seven wizard can find a way through, if not the bevy of magic items the level five through sevens carry. It’s fucking absurd. Half the fucking spell lists in 1e are devoted to shit like this.
One room takes three pages to describe.
The dungeon is linear. You come down in to a room with eight doors, one open. You explore that section of the dungeon and at the end of it you can then go explore the next section of the dungeon and so on. IE: linear. Of those eight sections, about halfway through the text, you get an interlude that describes the nomad camp outside the dungeon that you camp in. Seriously. Like, after room twenty, here’s a description of the nomad camp outside, and then it starts in on room 21. No, this was not an editing or layout error. It was intentional. Because just sticking rando shit in the middle of other rando shit is CLEARLY the best way to organize things. That’s my, in my own dictionary, the letters M are placed between the letters Q and D.
Quantum rooms? IE: the dreaded if/then padding? Check. “If the party explores to the North, they will find the walkway leads to a section of bridge that crosses to a door. If they continue North, they find a dead end and the source of the fast- moving stream, emerging through a heavy iron grate from the darkness beyond.”
Dumb ass interactivity/? Check. “The answer to the riddle is: Eye. As soon as the answer is spoken …” No sphynx there. Just a room. Yu’re just saying the answer out loud.
The final insult may be the hyperlink included at the end for downloadable content. It’s broken. Doesn’t work. As in it takes you a page on their website that says “No page found.” I went digging elsewhere on their website for the content. It’s not present.
It’s linear, stuffed with excessive read-aloud, DM notes that are excessive in some places and lacking in other place, to the point I’m questioning if there was a layout/edit error that removed information that was supposed to be present. It is essentially traps and combat with a lot of irrelevant combat encounters and a few 7 HD dudes here and there. This is not a strong showing. For $35.
This is $35 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages with none of the dungeon. A good preview should show a potential buyer what to expect, and the core encounters are a part of that. Still, you get a look at the read-aloud on a couple of the lighter pages.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/446899/tomb-of-the-d...
Review: OC-1: A Parliament of Owls:: Too small for the gameplay it wants to encourage
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:26:14
Self Published
Dolmenwood
Levels ... 2-3?
No Funkadelics appear in this adventure.
[…] Lately, the witch owls are squabbling about whether to move on to new hunting grounds, or remain to continue preying on travellers. The owls comprise two factions, led by witch owls named Horned Hextus and Nightshade.
This eleven page adventure uses 3.5 pages to present seven locations in and around a small forest temple. It is too small for the gameplay it wants to encourage (intrigue) so instead we;re just gonna have one titanic battle. The formatting is BADLY confusing.
I like the art style in this. All of it, I think. Nicely evocative. So, remember, I said something nice.
I hate this. Do I hate it? Maybe not hate. It’s disappointing to see something fail so hard at what it’s trying to do. Like, so hard that I hate the failure. And the environment that surrounds it to generate it.
There’s this temple in the woods. The chick priestess there makes swords for people. And has no guards so a group of six Witch Owls move in and take over and start eating her memory. And they ambush people coming to the temple and eat their memories and use their shadows as guards. And they have two factions who disagree on what to do, one group wanting to stay and one group wanting to leave.
No level range to be found anywhere, on the cover, in the adventure, in the description. 2-3, I’d guess, based on everyone inside having 2HD. The hooks are the same lame-o getting hired/go find quest-gover nonsense that every adventure has.
I don’t really know where to begin with this. It’s small. Seven rooms and only four of them are interior as in inside the temple. Of those four, which are right on top of each other (there’s no fucking scale on the fucking map! Which means its a fucking art piece and not a fucking map.) The two factions are right next to each other. Three owls and some shadows in one room and three owls and some shadows in the next room. Literally right on top of each other. How do you do faction play like that? “Frank is next door, go stab him. And by ext next door I mean you can see him, 20’ away, right there. Go stab him,” “HEY! I CAN HEAR YOU ASSHOLE! I” STANDING RIGHT HERE!” All six owls, both factions, in two rooms. Why have factions? Why give the owls motivations and wants and pretend that you can appeal to them? Why not just stuff all six in one room? The map/environment is so close in that it doesn’t make sense. At all. If you want some owl intrigue then you need a larger map. You need to put different owls in different places. Divide up all six, give them some shaky allegiances. Put in some dangerous areas not related to the owls. THEN you can play factions and seek things out for one owl and appeal to a different ones sensibilities and so on. It’s clear, with the whole faction thing and the different owls wanting different things, that this is the concept that the designer wanted. And, yet, we got all six owls in two rooms like, I don’t know, twenty feet apart from each other? With no order of battle? The concept, as implemented, is a failure.
And then there’s the writing and formatting. “A strange river of weird aspect” is how room one, a river starts. What does strange mean? It has a waxed moustache, all Poirot style? What does weird aspect mean? Those are conclusions. A well written description will cause the players to think “hmmm, that strange”, but you don’t use those words to describe things because they don’t actually describe anything. I’m down with twisting the english language, stealing words, making up words, using words out of their normal usage, anything, really, to get across a meaning, a vibe of the location in question. But you can’t use weird or strange; those don’t actually describe anything.
As for formatting … something weird is going on. I’m going to copy in a section of the main room description of one of the rooms. I’m not cherry picking they are all have the same issue. But, also, I’m not sure if what I want to talk about it going to come through in this copy/paste: “A stone portico (cracked slabs, spotted with purple guano) holds a promenade of statuary columns (heavily eroded almost smooth, stag and deer headed shapes) leading to carved steps and columns supporting a wide doorway.” The bolding here, I don’t know, it seems, noun-like? Are we just bolding nouns? Features? They are not followed up on elsewhere. And then the mini-description in the parens. I think we can all see what the INTENT was with this. To provide a little more description of those features. But I don’t think this works AT ALL. I think it’s a confusing mess. Either I’m having a stroke (I AM out of velo 9’s. And gin. And coke. And coffee.) or this is a just a muddled mess of a description with the parens, bolding and so on. It’s too much, I think, competing for our attention, including the word usage. It reminds me for al the world of those adventures that try to use color-shaded boxes to color code every section and paragraph of an adventure and in the end their attempts to bring clarity just result in a big ugly confusing mess that you want to burn instead of reading. And its STILL hard to find out which rooms have monsters in them!
There were supposed to be factions. But the place is too small for that. There’s no real interactivity here, once you rid yourself of any possibility of factions. Just long room descriptions with things overly described for no reason.
Someone had an idea. This parliament of owls thing, with factions and birds nests and how that works with deer people and witch owls and so on. I would assert, though, that in spite of all of the additional words, it never got beyond, as a concept or in implementation, what I just typed up there to describe it.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. Good eight page preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558919/parliament-of...
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:26:14
by bryce0lynch
By Dougal CochraneSelf Published
Dolmenwood
Levels ... 2-3?
No Funkadelics appear in this adventure.
[…] Lately, the witch owls are squabbling about whether to move on to new hunting grounds, or remain to continue preying on travellers. The owls comprise two factions, led by witch owls named Horned Hextus and Nightshade.
This eleven page adventure uses 3.5 pages to present seven locations in and around a small forest temple. It is too small for the gameplay it wants to encourage (intrigue) so instead we;re just gonna have one titanic battle. The formatting is BADLY confusing.
I like the art style in this. All of it, I think. Nicely evocative. So, remember, I said something nice.
I hate this. Do I hate it? Maybe not hate. It’s disappointing to see something fail so hard at what it’s trying to do. Like, so hard that I hate the failure. And the environment that surrounds it to generate it.
There’s this temple in the woods. The chick priestess there makes swords for people. And has no guards so a group of six Witch Owls move in and take over and start eating her memory. And they ambush people coming to the temple and eat their memories and use their shadows as guards. And they have two factions who disagree on what to do, one group wanting to stay and one group wanting to leave.
No level range to be found anywhere, on the cover, in the adventure, in the description. 2-3, I’d guess, based on everyone inside having 2HD. The hooks are the same lame-o getting hired/go find quest-gover nonsense that every adventure has.
I don’t really know where to begin with this. It’s small. Seven rooms and only four of them are interior as in inside the temple. Of those four, which are right on top of each other (there’s no fucking scale on the fucking map! Which means its a fucking art piece and not a fucking map.) The two factions are right next to each other. Three owls and some shadows in one room and three owls and some shadows in the next room. Literally right on top of each other. How do you do faction play like that? “Frank is next door, go stab him. And by ext next door I mean you can see him, 20’ away, right there. Go stab him,” “HEY! I CAN HEAR YOU ASSHOLE! I” STANDING RIGHT HERE!” All six owls, both factions, in two rooms. Why have factions? Why give the owls motivations and wants and pretend that you can appeal to them? Why not just stuff all six in one room? The map/environment is so close in that it doesn’t make sense. At all. If you want some owl intrigue then you need a larger map. You need to put different owls in different places. Divide up all six, give them some shaky allegiances. Put in some dangerous areas not related to the owls. THEN you can play factions and seek things out for one owl and appeal to a different ones sensibilities and so on. It’s clear, with the whole faction thing and the different owls wanting different things, that this is the concept that the designer wanted. And, yet, we got all six owls in two rooms like, I don’t know, twenty feet apart from each other? With no order of battle? The concept, as implemented, is a failure.
And then there’s the writing and formatting. “A strange river of weird aspect” is how room one, a river starts. What does strange mean? It has a waxed moustache, all Poirot style? What does weird aspect mean? Those are conclusions. A well written description will cause the players to think “hmmm, that strange”, but you don’t use those words to describe things because they don’t actually describe anything. I’m down with twisting the english language, stealing words, making up words, using words out of their normal usage, anything, really, to get across a meaning, a vibe of the location in question. But you can’t use weird or strange; those don’t actually describe anything.
As for formatting … something weird is going on. I’m going to copy in a section of the main room description of one of the rooms. I’m not cherry picking they are all have the same issue. But, also, I’m not sure if what I want to talk about it going to come through in this copy/paste: “A stone portico (cracked slabs, spotted with purple guano) holds a promenade of statuary columns (heavily eroded almost smooth, stag and deer headed shapes) leading to carved steps and columns supporting a wide doorway.” The bolding here, I don’t know, it seems, noun-like? Are we just bolding nouns? Features? They are not followed up on elsewhere. And then the mini-description in the parens. I think we can all see what the INTENT was with this. To provide a little more description of those features. But I don’t think this works AT ALL. I think it’s a confusing mess. Either I’m having a stroke (I AM out of velo 9’s. And gin. And coke. And coffee.) or this is a just a muddled mess of a description with the parens, bolding and so on. It’s too much, I think, competing for our attention, including the word usage. It reminds me for al the world of those adventures that try to use color-shaded boxes to color code every section and paragraph of an adventure and in the end their attempts to bring clarity just result in a big ugly confusing mess that you want to burn instead of reading. And its STILL hard to find out which rooms have monsters in them!
There were supposed to be factions. But the place is too small for that. There’s no real interactivity here, once you rid yourself of any possibility of factions. Just long room descriptions with things overly described for no reason.
Someone had an idea. This parliament of owls thing, with factions and birds nests and how that works with deer people and witch owls and so on. I would assert, though, that in spite of all of the additional words, it never got beyond, as a concept or in implementation, what I just typed up there to describe it.
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. Good eight page preview.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558919/parliament-of...
/pic9501956.jpg)
New comment on Item for GeekList "Solo RPGs on Your Table - April 2026"
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:25:34
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:25:34
by JugglinDan
Related Item: Public Access
Just looking at that image of the open hatch leading to the crawlspace gives me a chill. No thank you crawlspace!
Review: Trails & Tales: The Crypt of Atan-Thu (C&C):: Long-winded tomb of horrors, at levels 6-8, with impossible puzzles and overpowered opponents
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:24:56
Self Published
OSE
Levels 6-8
Tales of Atan-Thu are told to frighten both the bold and the meek alike. Necromancer without peer. Merciless tyrant of Zahal Keep. His evil stretched across the land like a malignant shadow. Though long dead, his legend persists. Ancient texts speak of a vast sepulcher hidden deep in the Dhar Voromal Mountains, where Atan-Thu and his immeasurable wealth and artifacts of power were entombed. But rumors hint that Atan-Thu yet survives, sustained by his dark necromancy. Protected by hideous guardians and diabolical traps, he waits for the very brave or the very foolish to enter his lair. Do you dare venture into his ancient crypt and explore this testament to Atan-Thu’s power, malice, and madness?
This 68 page adventure uses about twenty two pages to describe about seventy rooms in a tomb/puzzle/challenge dungeon. Long-winded tomb of horrors, at levels 6-8, with impossible puzzles and overpowered opponents.
I knew I was trouble upon first cracking it open. Triple column. Small font. You are free, brothers and sisters, of the constraints of the print publishing world! You can make your product 6,000 pages long! Because it’s a PDF and no one gonna buy the print copy anyway. And if they are then they REALLY want to so you don’t have to cram your product in to some artificial page count constraint.
Lets see here … background information about scary dude, history b lah blah blah, overland area that briefly describes some large general regions with no real mention or support of overlands play, small village generically described with no import … more background information. Bulshit bullshit bullshit, madness and horror throw-away rules cause dungeon is so scary, bullshit bullshit bullshit … Ok, the dungeon starts after ten pages of padding.
Room two: You’ve got seven stone heads. Three face inward from the west wall, three from the east, and a seventh looms at the north end of the hall. Two doors, the one you came in and another one on the far side. The doors are immune to physical damage and are wizard locked at level 18. At the base of each stone head is a small bowl and in the center of the room seven orbs float above a seven pointed star, each inlaid with a different symbol. You put the orbs in correct bowl and the door unlocks. First failure and the doors lock. Second and ichor streams in to the room. Third and everyone takes 3d6 damage per round until you get it right. There are no hints. The symbols on the orbs? There are no corresponding symbols anywhere. It’s the second room of the dungeon (in a line until it opens up later), you’ve learned nothing yet. It is truly random. You’ve level 6-8. How much divination do you truly have?
Did I mention that there’s a level 7 undead dude running around, with dimension door and a wand of lightning bolts? He’s doing hit and runs on your party. Oh, yeah, there are four of them, one in each quadrant of the dungeon. How the room with NINE 8HD AC2 dudes to fight? For your level 6-8’s. At one point you’re potentially attacked by 1d6 wights per turn. Which is fun except you auto-turn those at level 7 and turn on, what, a 4, at level six?
My point here is that this was not playtested. At all. I suspect the designer doesn’t even play D&D. I don’t see how you can and come up with this stuff. No one playtested room two. It can’t be. I don’t see how anyone is living through it. A party of six level eight clerics who filled their spell slots with divinations? Let’s see, from 1e (sorry, My kool aid stained 1e is at hand, not OSE…) that’s 3 3 3 3 2 spells at level eight. That’s three Augery and two Divination per cleric, or eighteen Augury and twelve Divinations. For room two that’s … a seven factorial? About 5,000 combinations?
But, hey man, the treasure rooms has about 16k in gold and a ring with one wish. So, it was the friends we made along that was the real treasure!
Man, fuck this fucking shit!
Worthless fucking garbage.
Did you try? What is the definition of trying? There are words on a page. Someone used a professional map making tool to make the dungeon map. It looks nice. But it clearly wasn’t playtested. And I’m not even sure there’s a basic understanding of what a level six (or eight …) character is capable of. Rocks fall. Everybody dies.All of that fucking preamble bullshit is worthless. All of that appendix shit is worthless. The use of fucking italics is garbage. Long read-aloud is fucking garbage. No fucking treasure. Overpowered fucking combats. I’m supposed to believe that this was lovingly handcrafted?! Backstory in the fucking dungeon rooms.
There is a nice bit. The dungeon map is in four quadrants. A mat surrounds three of them. That’s a nice touch, a little flavor and challenge to leverage for the party. Those 1d6 weights shows up for every 100 feet traveled on it.
Sometimes I come across dungeons that could serve as platonic examples of what NOT to do. This is one of them. Looky there at that cover. And the layout inside. Pretty fucking nice. But I will take a handwritten scrawl over this shit any day of the week. This is the chinese box. Emulation rather than understanding.
I’m sure someone, somewhere, is making a bundle cranking this shit out at Kickstarter. “Look! Just like the olden days! “ Indeed. Fuck nostalgia. And fucking reading shit. D&D is for playing. A high 2E dungeon. Is there a worse insult?
This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, You get to see the map, which is nice, but otherwise it’s just the generic padding shit and little dungeon overview bit. Shitty preview. It needs to show some encounters so we can understand what the core of the writing is about before we make a purchasing decision.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554398/the-crypt-of-...
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:24:56
by bryce0lynch
By The Danger ForgeSelf Published
OSE
Levels 6-8
Tales of Atan-Thu are told to frighten both the bold and the meek alike. Necromancer without peer. Merciless tyrant of Zahal Keep. His evil stretched across the land like a malignant shadow. Though long dead, his legend persists. Ancient texts speak of a vast sepulcher hidden deep in the Dhar Voromal Mountains, where Atan-Thu and his immeasurable wealth and artifacts of power were entombed. But rumors hint that Atan-Thu yet survives, sustained by his dark necromancy. Protected by hideous guardians and diabolical traps, he waits for the very brave or the very foolish to enter his lair. Do you dare venture into his ancient crypt and explore this testament to Atan-Thu’s power, malice, and madness?
This 68 page adventure uses about twenty two pages to describe about seventy rooms in a tomb/puzzle/challenge dungeon. Long-winded tomb of horrors, at levels 6-8, with impossible puzzles and overpowered opponents.
I knew I was trouble upon first cracking it open. Triple column. Small font. You are free, brothers and sisters, of the constraints of the print publishing world! You can make your product 6,000 pages long! Because it’s a PDF and no one gonna buy the print copy anyway. And if they are then they REALLY want to so you don’t have to cram your product in to some artificial page count constraint.
Lets see here … background information about scary dude, history b lah blah blah, overland area that briefly describes some large general regions with no real mention or support of overlands play, small village generically described with no import … more background information. Bulshit bullshit bullshit, madness and horror throw-away rules cause dungeon is so scary, bullshit bullshit bullshit … Ok, the dungeon starts after ten pages of padding.
Room two: You’ve got seven stone heads. Three face inward from the west wall, three from the east, and a seventh looms at the north end of the hall. Two doors, the one you came in and another one on the far side. The doors are immune to physical damage and are wizard locked at level 18. At the base of each stone head is a small bowl and in the center of the room seven orbs float above a seven pointed star, each inlaid with a different symbol. You put the orbs in correct bowl and the door unlocks. First failure and the doors lock. Second and ichor streams in to the room. Third and everyone takes 3d6 damage per round until you get it right. There are no hints. The symbols on the orbs? There are no corresponding symbols anywhere. It’s the second room of the dungeon (in a line until it opens up later), you’ve learned nothing yet. It is truly random. You’ve level 6-8. How much divination do you truly have?
Did I mention that there’s a level 7 undead dude running around, with dimension door and a wand of lightning bolts? He’s doing hit and runs on your party. Oh, yeah, there are four of them, one in each quadrant of the dungeon. How the room with NINE 8HD AC2 dudes to fight? For your level 6-8’s. At one point you’re potentially attacked by 1d6 wights per turn. Which is fun except you auto-turn those at level 7 and turn on, what, a 4, at level six?
My point here is that this was not playtested. At all. I suspect the designer doesn’t even play D&D. I don’t see how you can and come up with this stuff. No one playtested room two. It can’t be. I don’t see how anyone is living through it. A party of six level eight clerics who filled their spell slots with divinations? Let’s see, from 1e (sorry, My kool aid stained 1e is at hand, not OSE…) that’s 3 3 3 3 2 spells at level eight. That’s three Augery and two Divination per cleric, or eighteen Augury and twelve Divinations. For room two that’s … a seven factorial? About 5,000 combinations?
But, hey man, the treasure rooms has about 16k in gold and a ring with one wish. So, it was the friends we made along that was the real treasure!
Man, fuck this fucking shit!
Worthless fucking garbage.
Did you try? What is the definition of trying? There are words on a page. Someone used a professional map making tool to make the dungeon map. It looks nice. But it clearly wasn’t playtested. And I’m not even sure there’s a basic understanding of what a level six (or eight …) character is capable of. Rocks fall. Everybody dies.All of that fucking preamble bullshit is worthless. All of that appendix shit is worthless. The use of fucking italics is garbage. Long read-aloud is fucking garbage. No fucking treasure. Overpowered fucking combats. I’m supposed to believe that this was lovingly handcrafted?! Backstory in the fucking dungeon rooms.
There is a nice bit. The dungeon map is in four quadrants. A mat surrounds three of them. That’s a nice touch, a little flavor and challenge to leverage for the party. Those 1d6 weights shows up for every 100 feet traveled on it.
Sometimes I come across dungeons that could serve as platonic examples of what NOT to do. This is one of them. Looky there at that cover. And the layout inside. Pretty fucking nice. But I will take a handwritten scrawl over this shit any day of the week. This is the chinese box. Emulation rather than understanding.
I’m sure someone, somewhere, is making a bundle cranking this shit out at Kickstarter. “Look! Just like the olden days! “ Indeed. Fuck nostalgia. And fucking reading shit. D&D is for playing. A high 2E dungeon. Is there a worse insult?
This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, You get to see the map, which is nice, but otherwise it’s just the generic padding shit and little dungeon overview bit. Shitty preview. It needs to show some encounters so we can understand what the core of the writing is about before we make a purchasing decision.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554398/the-crypt-of-...
Review: Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Warship:: The Short Version? Flip-mat Warships provides a couple of fun maps for large ships.
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:23:49
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Pathfinder Flip-Mat: Warship is part of the Pathfinder Flip-Mat series. It was released in 2015 by Paizo Publishing. The designer is Stephen Radney-MacFarland and the art is by Jason Engle.
Presentation
This is available in both pdf and print versions. The print version is nine panels of 8" x 10" which folds out to 24" x 30". The product is in full, if muted, color on both sides. The pages are heavy-stock and a special coating makes them reusable even if they are drawn or marked on by permanent, wet, or dry erase markers.
Content
Both sides of the map include a 1" grid overlay which makes them compatible with any game that uses a 1" grid for movement. One side features a slightly smaller ship with two outriders and the other side is a single large ship. The double-outrigger ship is about 40' wide with each outrider adding another 15' of width. The ship is depicted with two companionways leading to the outriggers. There are a number of crossbow mounts depicted on the ship. It also has changes in elevation and structures on the deck.
The second map depicts a ship that looks older and less well-maintained side. It's a broad ship and the sides of it bristle with wooden projections which would likely make boarding difficult. This ship, like the other side, has a number of smaller structures on the deck and various elevations.
Evaluation
Both sides of this map offer a lot of opportunities for characters to gain tactical advantage by moving around the deck; it's easy to imagine a cat and mouse scenario or an ambush playing out on either map. One thing to bear in mind is that the ships have no written details, so the gm may have to work out some rules for unusual situations, like characters jumping from the ship to the outrigger or trying to move around the ship using the projections. Either way, the maps are interesting and provide fodder for the imagination.
Posted: Sat, 04 Apr 06:23:49
by sdonohue
Presentation
This is available in both pdf and print versions. The print version is nine panels of 8" x 10" which folds out to 24" x 30". The product is in full, if muted, color on both sides. The pages are heavy-stock and a special coating makes them reusable even if they are drawn or marked on by permanent, wet, or dry erase markers.
Content
Both sides of the map include a 1" grid overlay which makes them compatible with any game that uses a 1" grid for movement. One side features a slightly smaller ship with two outriders and the other side is a single large ship. The double-outrigger ship is about 40' wide with each outrider adding another 15' of width. The ship is depicted with two companionways leading to the outriggers. There are a number of crossbow mounts depicted on the ship. It also has changes in elevation and structures on the deck.
The second map depicts a ship that looks older and less well-maintained side. It's a broad ship and the sides of it bristle with wooden projections which would likely make boarding difficult. This ship, like the other side, has a number of smaller structures on the deck and various elevations.
Evaluation
Both sides of this map offer a lot of opportunities for characters to gain tactical advantage by moving around the deck; it's easy to imagine a cat and mouse scenario or an ambush playing out on either map. One thing to bear in mind is that the ships have no written details, so the gm may have to work out some rules for unusual situations, like characters jumping from the ship to the outrigger or trying to move around the ship using the projections. Either way, the maps are interesting and provide fodder for the imagination.
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