A new article has been added to the database: The Primal Order, an Introduction

A new article has been added to the database: The Primal Order, an Introduction

by bryce0lynch

By Patrick Stuart
False Machine Publishing
Tunnels & Trolls

A mysterious Inn at the end of the world, an evil sorcerer, a talking shadow on the wall, a door down into the dark. The world must be saved and only this particular group of weirdoes (who happened to be staying overnight), can do it! They have until the Doom of the Dark is fulfilled! (Roughly six hours real-time, but you should be able to get it done in two). They also have a Turne-Spytte Dogge, his utility so far unknown.

This 35 page one-shot adventure details a twelve room fucked up dark fairy-tale save the world adventure in a … weird inn basement? T&T is light, and it matches for the adventure. Great ideas and everything that filthy casual crowd wants out of their D&D clone systems and games.

Man, I always forget about Tunnels and Trolls, even though some of my favorite of the original era adventures were written for it. T&T is great for the same reason B/X is great. They are simple and don’t get in the way of actually playing the game with all that min/max rules lawyer shit. It;s got that beer & pretzels vibe that makes it great for a game with filthy casuals. Con games. A one shot at the game store. All your stoner friends coming over for game night. I don’t know if you can do more with T&T, but just like classic CoC, it’s perfect for one-shots. And the actual content of this adventure, man, it’s like Pan’s Labyrinth mashed up with some of those “core” AI fantasy TikToks. Stuart knows how to bring a vibe.

It’s not a traditional adventure, he states up front. More of a storybook kind of thing. I might call it original old world fair tales, with arms falling down chimneys and shit. There are some cutesy LOOKING things, but everything here is ready to fuck you up in a weird way that is just so thematically appropriate to them/their setting.

You’re staying at an inn, in the attic or in the barn nearby. You wake up in the middle of the night. “Now you awaken to the distant sound of laughter, counting, and the

clattering of coins.” There is no light. NONE. Like, bottom of a cave no light. EXCEPT you can see some coming from the inn/downstairs. Your own light sources, WHATEVER they are, don’t shed any light at all. That’s not good. The main room of the inn has a lamp anging from the rafters, shedding the light you’ve seen, the innkeeper frozen in solid bronze, a pair of green eyes in an ash tray, the skin of a man draped over a chair whimpering, and a mangy dog licking the bloody hem of the skin. ““Ignore it.” Whispers a voice. This is the Shadow-Man.” The shadow man flits from shadow to shadow in the room, cast by the light. He tells you he’s the shadow of a wizard who came to the innThe sorcerer is trying to steal the 13,000 coins that the original True Night originally was bribed with to sleep forever. His shadow disagreed wit him so he cut it away with a silver knife. His eyes disagreed with him so he cut them out and replaced them with silver coins. His very flesh protested so it cut it away and there it hags now. Uh, yeah, so that’s why wizards rule. None of the rest of you fucks have that kind of dedication.

I don’t even know how to describe that. Storybook? Fable? I think it hits that Mythic Underworld thing; things are certainly different. Cutting away the shadow with a silver knife. Plucking out eyes. Silver coins. How many culturally significant things can you load on to something? This is the vibe you are getting with this adventure.

Yo, did you pick up that the shadow, skin, and eyes could be your allies, if you take them along? I mean, they must have really disliked him for him to cut off his skin, right? Anyway, you make your way in to the dungeon under the inn. All the while you can get the clatter of coins and an ominous countdown, from like 13,000. There’s a handy dandy chart that says something like “four hours of game time has elapsed, so the countdown is now about 4,600 is the players ask” and so on. Thusly, a real-time game limit. When it hits 0 the robbery is complete and, the True Night, finding the bargain broken, makes sure there is never light again. This is all handled wel, is easy to follow to add colour to the game.

The encounters here fanciful as well. We’ve got moon goblins out of some art deco nightmare, and their heads can be squeezed for juice which will shrink you. This there are a couple of ways to handle rooms, either full size of shrunk, which can last six hours or so, the length of this adventure. Adding to this are challenges easier is shrunk, or impacts that are different. The Mice Knights are running around and set against the Black Rats … who don’t necessarily need to be your enemy and could even be your ally. The environments, scenes and interactivity here is fanciful, and is of that perfect type of you being able to interact or just stab the fuck out people.

The descriptions here get a little long. It’s not a typical formatting, it’s communicating the vibe and feeling of the place through text meant for the DM. There are bullets in the right places, along with italic and such, but this is not the typical room/key layout. It can work but its more of a read-ahead and really understand what the room is trying to do sort of thing, that tries to remain sticky in your head. Some portions could be communicated directly to the pliers while others are more an overall kind of feeling of the place. Not literally, but that’s what the text is trying to communicate. Thee are places where the text falls down as well, I’m looking at you “large rectangular stone room”, but those are minimal and don’t really detract from the situation going on in the room.

This is a good one shot. It’s everything a casual one-shot, that we see so often for sale for minor OSR systems, are trying to do. Its got solid theming. The rooms hit, room after room and challenge after challenge. It’s not one dimensional and presents alternate paths for resolution. The non-traditional formatting (which those familiar with Stuart’s style should recognize) does mean that you’re going to have to do a little more prep work up front, but it certainly a memorable piece and reminds me of one of my favorite one-shots, In Media Res, for CoC in Unspeakable Oath.

This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview here is seven pages. It more of the intro and lead in to the adventure, and because of that it has a style that is not the same as the rooms, proper. I would not be scared off by it but would have liked to see a room as well, to get a better read on how the core content is presented.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/578297/doom-of-the-d...

by bryce0lynch

By Ian Hickey
Gravity Realms
2e
Levels 1-2

Do you dare venture into the Stronghold of the Mad Dwarf? Its dark corridors and forgotten halls hold horrors beyond your mind’s comprehension. For centuries the Tome of Many Verses has been locked away, along with the horrors it has created.

This 44 page adventure uses 22 pages to describe four small dungeon levels and one larger one, the larger one having about 23 rooms. It is padded out and tries to theme areas, to no great advantage, but has several classic elements to it that help it rise above the typical dreck. Its heart is in the right place, even though it doesn’t succeed very well.

This one falls in to the “classic dungeon” category. There’s a small outside area, a small antechamber level, a larger “main” dungeon of 23 rooms, a couple of very small levels under that, and then a map in the classic megadungeon side-view noting other are levels yet to be detailed/left for the DM. The main theme here is an old dwarf complex, dug too far, and the main treasure being a book of demon summoning guarded by a kind of gibbering mouther made of dwarf parts. The vibe here is classic dungeon, with spiders, mad dwarves, and a few oddball creatures in a mix of “empty” dungeon rooms and some larger spaces with more interesting things going on. It’s also “kill based” XP, as it’s 2e Not gold=xp here, with coinage limited as a result. We’re going to ignore the hooks as well since they are just the usual “you’re hired” couple of lines and this is, in the end, a site based adventure in the classic dungeon style.

There’s a small outside area right in front of the doors, which you can think of a much smaller version of the Stonehell outside. A few ruins and a couple of monsters. You’ll get to a small antechamber level of a couple of rooms, and then down in to the core dungeon of 23 rooms. Under that is a small cavern level of a few rooms and the dwarf spider pens level.

The entry in to the core dungeon is the lift shaft. The platform having failed a long time ago, you’re faced with a pit, 180 feet deep, to navigate your way down. No solution is give, nor should there one be! The adventurers are left to tie those ropes together and go in through thepit, classic style. The dungeon does this sort of classic element stuff in a few places, with another standing out being a locked door with an open window grate in it. The key is in the keyhole on the other side. That’s it, nothing else suggested. Again, the adventurers are left to their own solution, as they should be. I love these sort of classic obstacles, without spoon feeding the DM on solutions. When the adventure is doing this is channeling those classic dungeons of old; twelve in one blow!

There are, at times, some decent room descriptions as well. “The roof to the common room has collapsed and is blocking the entrance. Inside chunks of broken furniture, tables and chairs are half buried in rubble.” Another environmental obstacle! Rubble, half buried furniture, all turning an otherwise empty room in to something a little more interesting. When the adventure is hitting on all cylinders it does a pretty decent job. That main room you descend in to from the pit has sixteen pillars and a 15 foot vaulted ceiling, with rubble under the pit from the platform and mechanism which has collapsed from above. And a floor covered in guano. Ought oh! 1-100 bats! Hope you’re not making a lot of noise! In another large cavern we’ve got the classic flowstone and mite/tite situation, along with a giant cave clam blending in surrounded by treasure it has coughed up. Does it make sense? No. But it sure recalls those classic D&D exploration of caverns illustrations.

Let us not get attached though. The padding is hard with this one. Not to an excessive degree, but it is present in nearly every passage. This room once served as. The main entryway is open for business. This used to be. These phrases do nothing for the adventure and clog up the DMs ability to scan the text to find the entries they actually need. “The locked door at which the adventurers stand is the old entrance to the stronghold before the new additions were added above.” That is a perfect example. It is irrelevant. It is trivia. It adds nothing.

It also gets weird about the creatures in places. In one room there is a small amount of read aloud that describes one of the mad dwarves attacking. Another room has a full on room description and no description of occupants, except it then stat blocks two of the ad dwarves. Elsewhere the adventure “might” encounter a giant rat nest in this room. The spider pens level simply notes, at the beginning, that there are 3-30 spiders on the level, with no further mention of them. This is maddening. There CAN be a place for creatures sometimes being present, or for a level having a total number of creatures on it, but this is not how you do that. Boxed text is not present everywhere, which is fine either way, but it can get long in places, causing the players to lose interest and pull out phones.

And then there are the mad dwarves. Not undead, just maddened. And when you’re close to them you need to make a save vs spalls or be paralyzed for 1d6 rounds. Ouch. Area attack. Multiple dwarves in an encounter. OSR. Run away. But, also, i feel like Fear and Paralysis are some HEFTY shit to be throwing at a party at level one. I remember several near TPKs from level four to six parties who fear’d away or got paralyzed. Those are some BAD. ASS. EFFECTS. I’m not sure about this in a level one, but we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

The adventure is a little slow. Some of the rooms are memorable, and there’s a decent number of things to poke and prod at, but it feels a little drab. The descriptions could be better, more consistent, and the environment feels quite static. But, other than the padding, it’s not really doing much wrong. I just don’t think that the classic elements, when they appear, are enough to carry it.

This is $13 at DriveThru. There is no preview. How are you gonna have your pudding if you don’t have a preview?! Put in a preview, show some rooms, let us get an idea of the content we are purchasing before we push the buy button.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/572215/stronghold-of...

by bryce0lynch

By Dylan Hyatt
Rampaging Snail
Shadowdark
Level 1

It’s Sunday and I try to watch a detective mystery on Sundays. So you’re getting a detective adventure review.

In ‘The Swan Hollow Intrigue’, the adventuring party must solve the mystery of the murder of a monk from the Silverhelm Monasteey. The village’s two inns are close to open confrontation, and what has the haunted ruin of Tamwoth Manor to do with mystery?

This 52 page adventure presents a small murder mystery in a halfling village. It understands what a traditional D&D mystery is, its various parts and aspects, and it gets there in spite of leaning heavily on mechanics and exposition. Lot of classic village/inn tropes are present to lean on.

Hey, charming cover! I don’t do bonus points, but if I did I’d give you one for it.

So, Brother Lothario, up at the monastery, comes in to town A LOT to flirt with the innkeepers daughter. One night he comes in to the village to flirt with her and then ends up dead in an alley. Lothario’s brother runs the other inn in town, and is calling for justice! He wants the barkeep/dad hung! He obviously did it! Mayor McCheese wants you to gather evidence. Turns out the barkeep/dad run out after Loathrio when chasing him out on the night in question. And had a big cudgel in his hand when he did it. And someone say him in the area and throwing the cudgel over a wall to get rid of it. Oh, and Lotharios brother seems to have hated him. And Lotharios throat was cut. And he stinks of fish. And he gave waitress Cocktease a note about an abandoned ruin nearby. And … you get the picture. In reality this is a Name of the Rose situation. Lothario stumbled upon the secret bookshelves, learned something about the abbey, and the abbot has the librarian hire a lowlife fisherman to kill Lothario. Also, the secret is that the last group of human monks in the monastery made a deal with the devil, literally, to stave of the plague from themselves and now the old abbot from 300 years ago is a ghoul in the basement. So, you know, pretty please?

There are some classic elements at play here in the events going on. There’s a drinking contest in a bar, and a bar fight, and someone wants a drink paid for to talk, and there’s a chase scene and there’s a village mob. All of the things one would expect to see in a village inn. And this extends a bit in to the adventure as well, a minor haunting can be resolved by placing a child’s ragdoll on her childhood bed. You know ol Bryce is a big softie, so I’m down for all of these classic elements. The overall mystery investigation is not a bad one. A couple of things to discover and leads to follow up on. It’s not really complex in ANY way. It is supported by a coupe of events, like a village mob and a chase of a suspect through the village. Both of these are good in concept to add, just handled rather poorly in execution.

Alas, the implementation of all of this is not great. If it WERE great then it would simply be Yet Another Mystery adventure.

There’s A LOT of text here for such a simple adventure. There is a long background, most of which is unneeded. There are long stretches of read-aloud, in italics. Read-aloud should never be long and italics should never be long. Long read-aloud causes players to loose focus and pull out their phones. They don’t pay attention. Long italics is hard to read, cognitively. Together they are a nightmare for both the DM and players.

There are long bouts of exposition in here, everywhere. A lot of explaining and detail that just s not relevant to what’s going on. Well, I mean, it is, but only in a tangential way. You want to include things that are directly related to the adventure, to play at the table. More is not better. That shit, that trivia, it gets in the way of the DM finding the information they need to run the adventure. Further, instead of including that shit and spending time on it you COULD be making the core of the adventure, the actual things relevant to play at the table, better. The same goes for mechanics. We’ve got mechanics for a bar fight, mechanics for drinking contests, mechanics for a chase scene, mechanics for … and, yes, this is to be expected to some extent. But there is an appropriate level of detail to mechanics. You don’t want to drone on and on and on and be prescriptive about them. You’re not in charge of the game. You don’t know the specifics of the table. You want to give the DM some guidelines and let them run the thing.

There is, I think, often great confusion about details vs specifics. In this context detail is bad. It is trivia. It explains why’s or how’s that we don’t need to know, or almost certainly don’t need to know. Specificity, though, are those things that inspire us to greatness in running the game. It is terse, meaning it doesn’t get in the way of scanning an adventure and it doesn’t require a long pause to read while in the midst of running a game. It is the sort of thing that once you read it it stays with you. You grok it immediately. If a picture is worth a thousand words then one well written specific sentence is worth more than a page of details. It communicates exactly the vibe the DM should be going for.

In this adventure there is a wandering traveller table for one of the inns. One of the entries is for a Quack selling (dubious) portion of healing. That’s the entry on the table. That (dubious) in parens tells us a lot. There’s a decent sized paragraph expanding upon this one liner, which adds little of value except perhaps “Vagdoran” is his name and he’s got a wooden case with six vials in it and that by the time the party discovers the scam he’ll be far away. Not nearly enough snake oil in D&D games, ya know? Anyway, we’ve got something specific here. Still far too long for what it is, but this in the same neighborhood. Compared with “generic pilgrims” or “generic travelling merchants” it’s the spice of life.This is why something like those quick adjectives/adverbs used to describe NPCs hit so well. And it’s why putting in a long section of italics read-aloud for each NPC that is supposed to communicate their personality fails. I need to know Kylo Rens personality in half a second, not struggle through a bunch of second person dialog in italics. I get that they both get us to the same place, but one is much more effective during gameplay.

Mechanically the thing falls down a bit also. In one place we need to make a DC check to tell the innkeeps wife is not being exactly honest with us. However, with regards to the innkeep proper, there is no such opportunity to detect his honesty/dishonesty. I’m not arguing for either case to be correct, but noting that the inconsistency here is the issue. Are we rolling for this shit or not? And this is not an isolated example. There might be another example with the ghost of a child, that I mentioned earlier. We’ve got some specific (convoluted) say a prayer/perform a rite shit that is detailed, and noted about replacing a specific doll on her bed. Rather than the specifics of a rite that the party has absolutely no fucking chance of figuring out, all that mechanical detail can be removed with just some advice to let a party that seems to be doing the right thing/making an effort succeed. (Hmmm, does a Bless need to be sincere, or can you just Constantine the thing?)

The dungeon, proper, is quite small. Just a few rooms with a few undead, and, in fact, may not actually be a part of the adventure. Do you go underneath and kill the old abbot/ghoul? Well, maybe. If things play out the right way I guess so. So, right to handle it as a kind of an aside but the detail, again, gets in the way of anything memorable happening.

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages so you get to see miles of backstory. The preview should show us some of the actual adventure text so we, as potential buyers and DMs, can judge if the writing is something we can hack or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/574699/the-swan-holl...

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