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by bryce0lynch

By Operant Game Lab
Self Published
OSR/Rovers & Riches
Level ??

Even the most ignorant children know the realm is divided by a massive, transparent wall. Everything outside the wall is “normal.” Everything that lies inside is “wrong.” The “wrong” lands are called Zu. Today, we take a field trip into strangest Zu…

This 35 page decently-sized hexcrawl adventure presents a bunch of hexes in Zu, a weirdo land full of bizarre things going on in a fantasy/post-apoc/PoMo mashup. The hexes can be interesting and are certainly creative, but they lack tension.

Let’s call this a farcical Rifts setting. A giant glass wall separates the Normal lands from the Weirdo place beyond the wall, which everyone calls Zu. There’s a break in the wall at Happy Town, to let you in. Tonally, a giant mecha made of junk is on the wanderers table and is described as “It powered by a dozen subjects running on human treadwheels. Six troopers (p. 24) with scoped rifles float from balloons lashed to the giant’s shoulders, poised to rain down leaden death.”

This thing has a niche audience and it’s not me. And I mean this in two regards. First, the setting. It might be closest to that 4e D&D version of Gamma World, the Paranoia Zap of gamma worlds. Those things like Troika and Mork Borg come to mind as well.There is a strong element of absurdity here, maybe even Theater of the Absurd if I get a little meta. There’s an old school with a janitor in it and a teddy bear that needs stories read to it. Or, a water slide aqueduct trickling water to an empty pool where cleric chicks covered in sponge suits dole out the water to bedraggled people standing in line ala Fury Road. Happy Town itself is ruled by a little twilight zone Anthony with a wand of transmutation who turns people in to stuff if she doesn’t get her way, so the people there only make candy and cakes and force smiles here in Peaksville. Tonally, you’re going to have to be ok with this kind of content being your game if you want to use this, and I suspect the more niche sides of the OSR are where this is aimed. You not gonna be happy with this if you don’t like zaniness.

I’m struggling to find a way to frame this second point. There is, in my mind, a difference in game play in certain systems. D&D, of the classic OSR style, leans more towards a game. You are typing to stay alive and level. There’s an inherent tension in that, and staying alive and leveling is ‘winning’ at D&D. It lends itself to campaign play well since there is continuity, your character. This is one of the reasons that ‘museum adventures’ are so frustrating to me; you are actively discouraged to interact, which works against what you are playing. Other RPGs fall more in to an Activity. Baron Muchausen is the classic example. Your enjoyment comes from something different. And that, I think, is where this adventure lies.

The hexes in this have two general types of encounters. First there are some filler hexes, making up about half of the hexes. Short, with only two-three sentences, they provide some flavor. A hex full of wines, walking through them wakes them up, and they feel the party members and pat them on the back before opening up to allow them to pass. Freaky? Absolutely. But nothing else going on.

The second type of hex, representing the other half of the hexes, take about a page or so each. There is more text and whats happening is more involved. But, i would assert, to the same end. There’s nothing really TO DO. Oh, you can get involved, but why? Touching things and getting involved brings trouble. And there’s not really anything to exploit, as one might in a traditional hex crawl game. If you were just trying to interact to have a good time then you’re chill, yeah, freaky things will happen. But no one is going out out their way to gack you (other than perhaps the wanderers) and there’s not really treasure to loot to exploit, at least in a traditional sense. Some of the hooks DO send you on the hunt for something. Happy Town wants you to go get a candle. Ok, so, I guess we can explore and look for that. SOme hexes ARE mentioned in other hexes, but they are not really interconnected, either explicitly or, I would assert, implicitly, in that you can, say, break the dam in hex X to flood the orc caves in hex Y, or some other wacky scheme that the party were to come up with. You enter a hex, have a wacky encounter, and move on to repeat.

For the more Activity-based RPG”s this is going to be a great adventure. I think it serves everything they need to get in to wacky situations. But for a more campaign/game based game I’m not sure its overly useful. (Not that you can’t campaign Mork Borg or Troika or DCC, but I don’t think it works out that way in practice.)

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. PWYW and then preview is the entire thing, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/483434/field-trip-to...

by bryce0lynch

By Jason Youngdale
Youngdale Productions
DCC/OSR
Levels 1-2

Long ago, beneath the fertile valleys south of Castle Dragonwater, a minor baron swore fealty to the Starved King, a demonic entity of hunger. In exchange, the baron’s land flourished with endless crops and fattened livestock. When the baron died, his descendants sealed the King’s shrine in terror—but the hunger below never ended. Now, farmers near Horndale report crops rotting overnight and livestock turning feral. Strange lights flicker in the old Granary Hill Mound, and the smell of roasted meat fills the night air. The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic banquet once and for all.

This twenty page adventure uses about four pages to describe twelve boring rooms of boringness using single-column formatting. Here are words that should be a contradiction: it’s a boring DCC adventure.

The turn of the millennia was an exciting time in RPG’s.the 3.0 explosion, indie RPG’s everywhere. I remember Polaris. Or, rather Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North. Conflict can be ended by someone saying “Thou are but a warrior …” Yeah, that’s tragedy all right. Your force of arms can do nothing here to resolve things. Noice! You know ol Brycy Bryce loves some human relatability and complexity in his game. Not to punish the party for wrong choices but to muddle the affairs of the way the word REALLY works in to an RPG and still have it be fun. Let us imaging, though, after saying this the party then stabs the NPC. And then they go all Lancelot-at-the-wedding and stab the king, queen, prince, half-brother, wedding guests, and everyone else in a ten mile radius. Ha! Damn skippy I’m a warrior biatch! I’m not sure that one is playing Polaris then, even though you might be using the Polaris rules. Blah blah blah its art is the creator calls it art blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s lost the point of Polaris.

And thusly this adventure and DCC. Let us imagine a DCC adventure with three 30×30 rooms in a row. No doors. 4 orcs in each room. Each room is otherwise empty. Is this DCC? It’s stat’d for DCC. Does that make it DCC? Sure. But it has lost the point of what a DCC game is. What is it, Mighty Deeds or something, where you can describe using what’s in the room to do cool shit? That’s the point of DCC. It makes cool shit happen. The halfling, the thief, the mage, the fighter, they are all built around making cool shit happen ORGANICALLY. The person has an ability, but the environment and set up is there for the party to riff on. The designer takes us to the McDonalds PlayPlace and the fighter drowns someone in the ball pit. Except. What if there is no ball pit? Or slide. Or anything else. It’s just an empty room. I’ve played in DCC games like this at cons and the difference is marked.

Examining this adventure, room 1 save or vomit. Room 2 save or eat dirt. Room 3 is a ghost kitchen with nothing to use to fight in. Room 4 has a banquet table to fight in. Room 5, finally, is larder is hanging hooks to fight in. Room 6, pantry of jars to fight in. Room 7 had a bed to fight in. Rooms 8 and 9 have nothing but saves. You get it. There’s is little to build on here. What the fuck am I supposed to Might Deed in a ghost kitchen in which nothing is real? The banquet table isnt fucking stupendious but at least it has a table, and the same goes for the larder, at least there are hooks with shit hanging on them. Not exactly a complex environment but at least its SOMETHING.

And the save rooms. Ug. Save or vomit. Save or eat some dirt. These have no meaningful impact on the game. It’s window dressing. Just a reason to roll dice. It’s fucking lame.

The locals are starving, crops withering, livestock fading away. “The locals beg the adventurers to descend into the forgotten vault and end the demonic …” WHat about them? DId they try and fail? No? We don’t care about them? Because we don’t care about the adventure? It’s just a flimsy pretext for a VERY lightly themed “hunger” dungeon? Yeah, I know, because it comes off like that. There’s no immersion here. All these pages. Nothing.

“Giant rats could also be in this room, waiting to attack any intruders.” Wonderful. “Four ghouls here jerk their heads sharply as you approach.” Great, embedded tenses in the summaries. “This appears to be a” Padded out wording. It’s only four fucking pages rooms and it’s still padded out.

Nothing to see. Move along. Move along.

This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is the first three pages and shows you nothing but the credit and table of contents. You can’t make a purchasing decision based on that, so it fails at being a preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555500/the-banquet-o...

by bryce0lynch

By Dale Houston
Duck & Crow Press
OSR
Levels: Low/"Rookies"

Under a raging river of turbulent, caustic water that melts organic material in moments lies the decrepit remains of a nefarious wizard’s lair. Opening a passage under the river would mean commerce and prosperity, and every brave adventurer worth their salt knows that a wizard’s den is guaranteed to have some reality-bending magical loot! Get ready for some liquefactive necrosis.

This 32 page adventure uses about eight pages to describe seventeen rooms in a wizard lair/passage under a river. Great specificity. Good challenges. Good formatting. A good and solid basic adventure that, white not exactly the most memorable, is setting everything up for success.

This is the first adventure in Dale’s Undying Expanse series. It’s not Thundarr, or even gonzo, but there are absolutely hints of it, at least in this adventure. The premise here is that there was once this fortress spanning a river. The river is caustic, like, full on acid. Up and down the river for ten miles along both banks is a prismatic wall. One of the former fortress dwellers was a wizard who hated the locals, it seems. Anyway, time passes, wizard dies, fortress collapses, and now there are just some crumbling remains, a passage UNDER the river. Trade routes anyone? And, as usual, there are some bandits hole up and some wizard leftovers.

The rumors here are interesting. You get about a page of them, sixty, arrayed in ten tables of six each, by topic. So, each village, the bandits, the river, etc. That’s a nice way to zero in on various topics the party may be asking about. The villages in the surrounding area map are tied in to the hooks and half about a column each; a couple of notable businesses that an adventurer might visit and a couple of people, all don in a manner that’s easy to follow, terse, and full of flavor. “Big Hierome: Always laughing, compulsively eats sweets; this brute manages the bulls when they get a bit too feisty” The hooks, likewise, are short but have that specificity to them that helps a DM bring them alive. “Magistrate Yeldo of Flont will pay the crew six month’s wage to open the passage.” or “Jane Blood, local crime boss in Rockton, will forgive your incredible debt if you open the passage. She wants it to be a toll road.” One of these is exactly a “pay the party” thing, but its founded in something realistic, wanting to open a trade road. This helps elevate it beyond the normal old “someone hires you” hook that people toss out. And the crime boss one is grounded in her entry in the village, “Unassuming and simply dressed local business woman; rumored to be a heartless psychopath in charge of a criminal gang, has a large number of ‘cousins’ always nearby. “ There is MORE than enough there to make Jane a mainstay of the adventurers life, both in this adventure and in future ones. You can really riff on that and yet it’s terse. That’s good writing. It’s specific. Cousins. The rumor. Dale hits these very well and is certainly in the top tier of folks when it comes to that part of the adventure.

Each room entry is offset in a little light green box with an entry that could be read-aloud or room details to summarize to the players, and then some well formatted bullets, starting with a bolded keyword, to help focus the DMs attention in on the things of import in the room. There are little embedded tables or “tracker boxes” present as well, where appropriate. Nothing goes on for more than a couple of sentences, making it easy to scan and parse information at the table during play. A little “modern” in terms of generous whitespace, with rooms taking between a third of a page or a full page to describe, but it’s all easy to use.

The text does a decent job of being evocative as well. “Low oily fires giving little light” or “Cauldron: A mess of “villager stew” is thickening in the cauldron. “ or “Tarp: Made of human skin leather, faces and hair still intact. It is recently made and still a bit damp. “ Still intact. A bit damp. It’s a tarp. Good word choices to really bring these things to life.

Interactivity is decent as well, both in terms of individual rooms and in the larger context. One room has a trapped demon in it. Pulling a lever in an earlier room releases the demon and he starts to move throughout the dungeon. Peepholes show you other places. An initial room has a bunch of skeletons on stakes in it … it’s full of crude traps (think jugs of river water and sharp sticks) … but the skeletons face the individual traps, so you can use them to help navigate across the room. Of course that’s how the bandits inside navigate it. There are consequences for your actions. It’s not world ending, but you can feel them. You could do enough damage to collapse the ceiling and flood the place. Oops. No trade route. And if the demon gets loose then there are some notes on what happens in the game world; not the end of the world but trouble for a while. Coming out of the dungeon on the other side of the river “This is where some of the “bad” kids from Rockton come to smoke, drink, and make out.” and you freak the kids out. Drunk bandits. Stripping magic inlaid circles of their inlaid silver. The rooms have consequences, many of which are telegraphed in subtle ways for those paying attention. A rubble filled room with gold braziers stuck in the rubble. Dig em out? What about those crumbling walls, signs of impending collapse? Prisoners of the bandits to free, connected to the town (and, potentially, hooks.) You’ve got the dungeon environment to interact with, the walls and rubble and leaks and such. You’ve got the bandits and their ogre boss at the beginning. You’ve got old wizard shit. Lots to do.

Things are also supported well. There are a couple of art handouts, one of which cleverly conceals some imps hiding that negates surprise if you notice them in the drawing. Handwritten notes. A good hex map, new monsters, notes on the dungeon map about “always on” things like the leaking walls, so the DM can emphasize them

The dungeon map, proper, is a little busy and not the easiest to read. While the use of color to highlight text is done well through the rest of the adventure, the dark maroon keying blends in a bit much, and the “art” use of shading on the map, with rubble, makes things a little less clear then I would prefer. It’s not a disaster in any sense, just not as clear as I would prefer. And, we get a little sloppy with the use of the word “turns.” That skeleton/trap room “Following the paths takes 3 Turns to get to any other wall, 4 turns if moving cautiously” Thirty to forty minutes, or three to four actions, you think?

These are just nits. This is a solid adventure. Easy to use, evocative, interactive, with lots of fun specificity. There’s a 4HD ogre and an 8HD demon, so, challenging for a level one group, but it does a solid job.

This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages, showing you the intro, hooks, rumors, villages, and numerous dungeon rooms. Great preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540645/under-the-cau...

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