by bryce0lynch

By Richard Barton
XRP
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

The Green Fang kobolds have existed on the fringes of the human settlements of northern Burdock’s Valley for decades, secure in the strange, thorny thicket surrounding the Broken Knob. Until recently they were content to hunt, forage, and generally avoid human contact. But reports of open assaults on merchants, caravans and travelers using the road from Gosterwick to Deepton are mounting. The formerly timid kobolds seem to have become aggressive and hostile. Why? Eusebia, the Archontean thesmothete in Gosterwick(AV AK-23), has had enough. She has quietly let it be known that she is willing to fund an expedition to cleanse the Thicket of this scourge, once and for all. It should be easy work – after all, how much trouble can kobolds pose?

This 55 page adventure uses about thirty pages to describe about 66 rooms inside of a thorny thicket, and some tunnels underneath it, full of kobolds and plant monsters. I might call it an exercise in self-indulgent backstory and explanations WHY.

This is an expansion of the Arden Vul product, providing some outdoor areas to expand the area around the dungeon proper. In this case it’s a magic thicket with some kobolds living in it, and in some tunnels under it. There’s a druid spirit controlling it and he feels protective of the kobolds so he’ll manifest some plant monsters if you fuck with them. There are a few connections to Arden Vul, like the kobolds sending prisoners to the Beast Men and such.

I do not like it Sam-I-Am. I know a bunch of you like to suck off Arden Vul. I thought it was ok. This is not that though. It’s been awhile since I reviewed Arden Vul, but I can’t imagine giving it any kind of decent grade based on the issues that are all over this thing. I don’t know what’s going on. Same designer. Same editor. But the writing style here just feels COMPLETELY off and different from Arden Vul.

Primarily this comes from a degree of text verbosity achieved through explanations, backstories, whys, for whos. This is present to an absurd degree that seems self indulgent to the extent that we’re paying for fiction rather than an adventure. I really mean this The fucking hooks take up three pages and that’s not because of the specificity provided to help the DM run them memorably.

This thing engages in backstory for just about everything. Worry not, sturdy DM, for if the players ask WHY there’s a rock you just ad-libbed in then the adventure will provide the context! Here’s a rom with a couple of ghouls in it: “Backstory: The ghouls are the corrupted legionaries from a konturbs of the II Legion (Sheepshead Rangers), whom the Archon Adrienic deputed to accompany Ingerikos on his expedition to this area. They employed a local guide called Wulthrith. Told to wait in the cellar while Wulthrith and Ingerikos inspected the barrow doors, they became trapped in the cellar after Wulthrith betrayed and killed their master (see BV1-16, BV1-28, and BV1-35) and then collapsed the upper story of the villa. Abandoned and trapped, the legionaries consumed all their food supplies while waiting fruitlessly for assistance, before some finally turned on the others in desperation; having killed and eaten the others, eight of the twelve killed rose as ghouls.” Whats the fuck man?! What the fuck is the point of any of that? I don’t need to know this shit. Maybe describe the fucking ghouls as legionaires or something, but all of this?




The adventure does this over and over and over and over again. Its favorite hobby is doing this. Here, I pulled out this one in the dungeon below. It runs across two pages, taking up more than a column of space. TO NO FUCKING END. There is absolutely no point to any of this. MAYBE some of this can eek out as a room description. And the “takes a dim view” thing is nice. But the rest of the, the vast majority of over a column of text, is just garbage padding to no end. This is all trivia. It serves no purpose in any way other than a phD paper or maybe a museum exhibit. Hey, did you want to know, in the backstory, that “During her lengthy sojourn at the Knob, Grishia lightly modified the interior of the barrow and added a colossal statue of Phagtro atop the Knob (BV1-36).” That’s not even room backstory, that’s introductory backstory. Who the fuck cares about any of this?! “Oh, I like it!” Fuck you. Fuck you all to hell. This kind of self-indulgent shit is the ruin of tabletop adventures. I could maybe understand more if this were a singular work, but its got an editor attached, Joe Browning. There’s no way he doesn’t know better. What was the effort here, spell checking?I’m just aghast at seeing this in 2026 from XRP. I’m stunned.

And then there are things that just don’t make sense. Yeh yeah, D&D, elves shooting fireballs from their asses. No, in a different way. Those ghouls? They are trapped in like a one room basement. For several hundred years. They didn’t dig out of the fucking basement? And they have tools with them! And are roman soldiers! It’s fucking nuts. Whatever, you wanted ghouls there, got it. And the layout of that room? You have to get to the cellar to learn that the ghouls plead to get out, not in the room above the cellar where the he voices of the ghouls would be heard. “Uh, oh yeah. I guess you heard some people begging to be let out, as you remove the last beam.” It’s fucking maddenning.

The kobolds cover their entrances, their WELL USED entrances with a 2’ thick mat of thicket thorns. This hides them like a secret door. Fuck no. You don’t get to use something in the natural world frequently and remove and replace a 2’ thick mat of thrown frequently and have that remain well hidden, magic thicket or not. And I’m not saying this from a nit-picky standpoint, I’m just giving this as yet another example of shit in this that just don’t make sense. Lots and lots and lots of backstory but for all that explanation there’s just stuff all over the place that just doesn’t make sense from a design standpoint or a suspension of disbelief standpoint.

The spirit in charge of the thicket can manifest up to EIGHT 3HD plant monsters PER HOUR. THREE HD. In a level one to three adventure. And it will do this if you kill four or more kobolds. And any combat with the kobolds is 20% likely to manifest the 3HD plant monsters.

There is no fucking way this was playtested AT ALL. How do I know that? Because there’s no way you can toss a bunch of 3HD plant monsters at the party, along with Tuckers Kobolds hit squads, at a party and not get a TPK. Not at levels one to three. It’s fucking impossible.

The kobolds have cleared the land around the thicket, so you pass through open meadow to approach. They have guard posts up in trees all over the place. They have false entrances. They have ambush spots. They have hit squads. They have trained giant weasel and trained giant fucking boars! At levels one to three! Along with, of course, all of those 3HD plant monsters, eight per hour. If you are gonna put in a 100HD orc in the middle of a bunch of 1HD orcs then you have to telegraph that shit.

I can’t imagine what work there was done on this prior to publication. Not on the fucking map of the thicket, proper, which is a pain in the ass to read. It took me forever to find entry “4” on the fucking map.

Ok, so, the kobolds have some prisoners, one of the hooks says. We’re gonna ignore that. And it’s hard to burn the place out, magic thicket that regrows and all that shit. (it takes FIVE TURNS to chop out on 10×10 area for passage) And, of course, the kobolds and plant monsters. But, still, I think haunted housing this is best. Bring in a hundred hired hands, set up a camp, systematically burn it out with oil, and then flood the underground with the stream in the thicket. Then go pay the cornice to sift the ashes for loot.

Doesn’t that sound like fun? It sounds more like a hex crawl thing to me. Beyond the text padding shit, and that this is mostly a hack, it sets the party up for failure. You’ll have to warn them, very heartily that this one is different and needs to be approached differently.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages., You get to see some backstory. Don’t worry, you’ll get to see a lot more in every room. Poor preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553194/the-thicket

by bryce0lynch

By Dale L Houston
Duck and Crow Press
OSR
Level "Veteran"

A festering swamp steeped in ancient mystery, treasure-hungry lake pirates scouring the region, angry alligator people defending their holy sites, and weird dungeons exuding a sense of impending doom. Seriously – what more do you want from an adventure? Explore and plunder the ruins of the Athenaeum of Ilth before it is too late!

This 48 page adventure presents a faction-laden “alien” complex with an overgrown swamp persona. You can see hints of greatness in the factions, although the room descriptions tend to have a weird lack of overall vibe while noting specifics well. Needs a little shit-stirring with the factions to give the dungeon some pep.

Ok, we got this BIG ass lake with a swamp over on one side of it. Rumor has it there’s loot in them there hills! Or, there was a giant light beam that shot out in to the dark sky, or there are pirates there. The people in town on the west side say that there ARE pirates to the west of the lake. Oh, and to watch out for crocs. Turns out there are some crocodile people living in some ruins in the swamp. Very interesting ruins. A giant ziggurat eventually, but some minor sites before you find the ziggurat. O, and the pirates are there looting (with a pirate town provided !Yo ho ho!) So, you gonna wander around till you find the swamp ruins, go in and out of them, meet pirates and crocodile people and so on. Until the AI in order detects trouble in the alien ruins and beams down some creatures to ‘decontaminate’ the site. AKA: monsters kill absolutely everything in a few hexes. Turns out the croc-people were once far more advanced than they are now. Oh, and maybe they created humans by feeding magic potions to apes. Shades of that last Alien movie I saw with the engineers and black goo and shit.

What this brings to the table is some mini-ruins of a few rooms, a larger ziggurat complex, cros-people with a couple of factions, pirates with maybe a couple of factions, a stranded/captive linguist, and enough room to breathe, for the most part, to let all of this play out. The adventure provides some wandering tables for different regions, to support you travelling to the nearest settlement and then on the adventuring sites, either by boat or foot. And the wandering tables and rumors slot in the adventure well, theming it pretty decently. From there perhaps you discover a ruined campsite, and the ruins nearby. Which MIGHt kick off clues to other sites or start the party on the “decontamination” part of the adventure, the timer to finish things off with. You may find out about the pirate camp, or even the pirate town, opening up new opportunities that are supported by the adventure. Or meet the croc-people, learning they have two factions. And then perhaps they bring out the captured linguist, who can tell you they refer to all humans as “talking food.” Well, that certainly recontextualizes our relationship with the friendly faction … The more you explore ruins the greater the chance the decon protocol gets triggered and monsters start beaming down. Forcing everyone to once again look at their priorities, who they will befriend and what they will allow. Ith hex travel taking a day, and “exploration” rolls revealing multiple levels of information in a hex, maybe four smaller ruin sites, a pirate camp, town, pirate town, croc-people village, the main ziggurat site and the decon process there’s enough room and time for relationships to change. This is the kind of sandbox-type environment, with relationships, that you need to support this more in-depth and complex play style.

The rumors tables are different based on who you are talking to. There’s a pages of DM support checklists to track faction relationships and progress to decontamination, as well as a host of other things. Paying attention leads to clues to other things. For, maybe, fifty rooms total in about fifty pages the hexes and relationships make this a potentially dynamic environment in which the usual “page count to encounter count” ratio I look at breaks down. The support information ALL contributes to the actual adventure and is a part of the adventure rather than just being useless fluff.

The descriptions of the locations are a little hit and miss. Or, rather, they don’t start off strong but their individual elements have that specificity I’m looking for that brings a site to life. There’s a brief offset section at the start of each location that has some descriptive bullets, followed by some DM information. So, for one of the ruin locations, we get this as an “outside” description: “A leaning, 2-story tower in the center of a reedy pool. Crude struts hold it in place.” That’s some good details. Reedy. Struts. And then for the DM information we get “Entrance: The first floor is damp, but not flooded. A rusted iron gate (open with a Standard Strength Check) blocks stairs leading down.” These are ok. Terse, tells you what you need to know. But, also, you don’t really get “ruins in a swamp” out of it very well. And that’s what I mean by the general environment just doesn’t come through very well. The more general atmosphere for each location just isn’t there. Not that it doesn’t hit, it just isn’t there. In another nearby room inside we get “This chamber is rather warm. Horse-sized stones with flat tops scattered evenly.” The chamber, proper, isn’t present in that description. There are some general notes about “Inside the ruins all surfaces are metal. Corridors are 10’ wide and the ceiling in all areas, unless otherwise noted, is 12’ high.” But, again, those general notes don’t hit in combination with the room description.

And this weirdly continues in areas like treasure. I think it’s quite low. Yeah yeah, compatible with all OSR systems. It’s Veteran level, we need some cash. And yet when we look at the Power Cores, looting central to the adventure, “Each core is a cone 8” long. The base

is a 5” diameter circle stamped with cuneiform of the station name (Adap, Kish, or Lagash) or a numerical code. Each core is worth 1500$.” As a curio? “A pillar displaying a golden mesh.” How much for the gold? No clue.

So, for the croc-people we get some great specificity like “Even basic and failed attempts speaking their Ilthtori will be well received.” That’s great! But time and again it feels like there is just a little bit missing, in almost every aspect. One room will have waist-high water leaking from the ceiling, or unidentifiable shapes scurry away under the water. Another will have “An enormous corpse covered in scavenging creatures” and nothing else about it. The factions are laid out well, and you can get very excited them. But they lack dynamism. Great overviews. Long term plans. But the short to mid term plans of them are missing a few ideas to get the DM going.

Blarg. Duck & Crow, and Dale, are doing some great things here. There’s just a little bit missing, a little bit out of place, keeping these from being some of the best

This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages. You get to see those referee tools, the factions, some overland, pretty much everything EXCEPT a few rooms. It really need to include a few of those to be a great preview. Still, I think the preview is enough to get you excited, just not enough to let you know what to expect.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540651/plundering-th...

by bryce0lynch

By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

A village deep within the steaming marshlands is experiencing strange phenomena. More and more villagers rise from their beds at night in a mindless stupor, wandering out into the bog never to be seen again. The desperate villagers have promised a great reward to anyone who can find their loved ones and stop whatever dark magick stole them away.

This eight page adventure uses three pages to present six rooms inside of a small dugout/ruined basement. It is trying to do the right things, generally, but confuses form over function, resulting in a muddled mess of rooms in which you generally just stab things.

My complaints here seem familiar to me. Which must mean that I have reviewed this publisher/designer before and then picked something else out to give them another chance and see if the issues I had were a trend or a fluke. And then forgot what I was doing when I rolled back around a couple of weeks later and ended up thinking “wow, this seems familiar.”

Only three of the five pages are actually used for the adventure. Meaning that all of that effort from the other five pages could have reasonably been put in the actual dungeon instead of the support material for the dungeon. THE ADVENTURE IS THE MAIN THING. Spend your fucking effort on the actual adventure. THEN, after you have created a masterpiece, you can add in some support material.

At the start of each room is a little sentence of two in italics. Is it read-aloud? Is it a room summary? Fuck if I know. Sometimes it seems like read-aloud and sometimes it reads like a room summary for the DM. “You spy a ruined tower behind a curtain of willow leaves, naught

more than a collection of crumbling stone walls.” That seems like read-aloud, right? I mean, it’s in italics and thats shity and it’s in second person and that’s shitty and it’s got that folksy shit and that’s shitty. But, it seems like read-aloud? But then in other places it seems more like a DM room summary? “Behind the gate, a long rectangular room holds a pool of thick,

oozing mud in the middle.” If the room had people screaming in it, or was brightly lit with a broadway show going on, or had an obvious huge ancient red dragon in it then that little summary section would not tell you. But it seems like in read-aloud it should? So … I’m confused. What the fuck is the point of the the italics text that kicks off every encounter/location? I don’t get it. Not read-aloud. Not a DM summary. I don’t know, REALLY bad read aloud?

Because, again, there can be a shit load going on in the room that the read-aloud/summary text just does NOT cover. The description up there is just fucking weird.

After that comes a lit of bullets. Yes, this is the “we use bullets for everything” kind of adventure formatting. That’s not necessarily a good thing and does NOT always lead to better idea presentation. Anything, used too much, becomes cover. If everything is a bullet then nothing is, right? And therefore nothing is emphasized for presentation to the DM? The same with the bolding that occurs INSIDE each bullet. It’s not that all information needs to be bulleted and each noun or whatever in each bullet needs bolded. The use of formatting is for emphasizing and highlighting, calling out to the DM certain things that are important or that they may need to find quickly or something like that. “Hey, this thing here is more important than some of the rest so pay attention to it. “ And you can’t do that if you use the techniques for EVERYTHING.

The random tables here are weird. Here’s a six entry random table on alternate names for swamp. Fen, mire, bog, etc. Why do that? Why not just present the data if you want to do that? There are, I don’t know, half a dozen of these sorts of tables taking up space. A waste of space, IMO, And in other places, like the wandering table, the entries are doing something. Yeah! But it’s so mundane that they might as well not be. “Crocodiles, laying in wait,” Ok … “Carcass crawler, digesting its last meal.” Sure. There’s no specificity there. A body half sticking out if its mouth? Ok, I’m down with that. “Laying in wait.” B O R I N G. What put it in at all?Bt, then, in a work of genius, on the map page there’s a little three-entry table for “who is held prisoner. “ Things like “pox-riddled peasant sobbing quietly.” ey! Great! War veteran missing limbs. Great! Thief trying to pick the lock. Great! Each has specificity. And that makes them worth putting in. Likewise the “random gore” table on the same page is great. It’s like those two tables were done by someone else because they are the only two that really stand out as interesting and actually adding value to the adventure.

“Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” That’s one o the bulleted items in the DM text. Background. Telling us what once was. And the adventure is full of this. The entries are full of nonsense. “How to make an entry seem long but not actually add any value” Window dressing effects. “It glows blue” Backstory. “Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” Shit like that. But, ultimately, all you do in the rooms is stab something. As one would expect, I guess, in a six room adventure. “I remember a time in America when an eight page adventure contained the Steading of the Hill Giant chief, with two dungeon levels and a gazillion rooms that made sense together!” Nostalgia is a terrible thing. We remember Steading, one of the best adventures ever from many standpoints, but forget the hundreds of shitpiles that existed also. There have always been shitty adventures and this is just the latest version of them.

I did, however, find this HILARIOUS. “Thelich cast a ritual to reach out into weak-willed minds nearby.” Yeah yeah, there’s a lich, a weak one, and it’s summoning weak willed people to its lair to like suck the life out of them. (Hey baby …) But, then, also in the hooks section: “A random party member begins hearing the lich’s call and is driven towards its lair.” BURN! Your character is weak-willed! Suck it Galdalf!

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There’s no pREEEEEVIIIEEEEWWWWW! You gotta put in a preview man, so we can tell if we want to buy it or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555050/the-lair-of-t...

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