by Dominic Swan

£12.95 for RPG Item: Occult Mysteries
Condition: New
Location: Germany

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by bryce0lynch

By Paul Wolfe
Mystic Bull Games
OSRIC
Level 5?

Your BRAVOS have ridden far and yet the secret location of Skull Mountain, Evia Alyn’s fortress and final resting place, eludes you. Perhaps in the gloomy town of STREEBOR, hidden in the rugged forests of the MALKOVA WILDS, you’ll find what you seek. Or maybe you can tease it from the WHISPERING SPIRITS lurking in the boggy BLATNISTE MOOR. Somehow you must find the pass through the Ravenyr Mountains and to that storied prize of Skull Mountain.

This 76 page adventure supplement describes a small region and the towns in it as well as a small handful of adventuring sites that are linked together. Intriguing ideas abound but the thing is a fucking mess that is going to be hard to get a payoff out of.

Oh, the original D&D. Those little booklets. Those FUCKING NIGHTMARES of little booklets. You know how I like to say you can be a great DM and shitty at editing and layout? Well, you can have a great idea for a new game and be a disorganized mess in getting the concepts out in a way that makes sense. Iron spikes to the same damage as a halberd. How many times a day can you turn? The very concept of using the word “turn” and all the confusion that one choice has caused over the years. Holmes? The great achievement there was making OD&D comprehensible even with all of the Holmes issues. B/X may be the most comprehensible of the early editions. It hits that sweet spot between “I can understand the game” and “there is just enough here that I don’t feel imprisoned.” But the three book set? Jesus fucking christ. Great history but I wouldn’t want the reality of plague and cholera. You know where this is going. The most common adventure complaint is that they are too hard to run. It’s always the same shit. Too much text, or some minimalistic thing combined with victorian laundry lists. The same issues over and over again. If you avoid those issues you’ll at least have an adventure that is easy to run and you’ll earn the achievement “Did not make everyone’s lives around me a living hellscape.” But, there’s another way, or, perhaps, a different category. A REALLY good adventure that has the shittiest writing and layout possible. “If you are one of the three people on this planet that read esperanto AND love iambic pentameter then you have the ability to run what is likely the greatest adventure ever written.” A confusing mess of an adventure. It makes every mistake possible but it is so full of great things that even I will pull out the highlighter, make two pages of notes and a reference sheet while rereading the adventure eight times. It’s rare but they do happen.

This is not that kind of adventure. But, man, it is intriguing.

This would best be called a regional supplement, I think, or perhaps a sandboxy place. There are a couple of town-like places with a few intrigues going on in them. Then there are a few sites to explore, all based around the intrigues in town. Or, maybe, there are a couple of intrigues going on and then the rest of the supplement is oriented around the town and wilderness areas that the interlinked intrigue sites lie within. There’s this mythology present, a lore, of The Evil One who used to live here, with the locals kind of supporting him. He’s been disposed, there are demons and eldritch entities about who supported him and are trying to regain power/become free from “prisons”, and/or try to defeat the Evil One for good.

What this does REALLY well is present the uniqueness of the eldritch. If you think about Stalker, or Anniliation, there is this kind of overall theme or the weird but also a kind of singularity of each element. Nothing is really similar to anything else, and yet it is. There are some ghosts/spirits running around one area in this. Let us imagine you’re typical “I’ve got unfinished business” spirit. But, also, they are kind of all working, individually, to put down The Evil one for good. So, Beggers Bridge “The spirit of a betrayed workman haunts a wooden bridge that always appears disconnected from the land in a raging river, lake, or other sizable body of water. Attracted by vows to destroy the Hanged Man and its servants” or The Pale Mare “The spirit of a wild horse, the Pale Mare roams the open heath. It can be attracted by music, especially elven songs. The Mare wants to find a path back to the Zherovain Steppe (south) “ And they want things and they will give boons, etc. Not let’s also dump in The Black Pools and, again like the spirits, appear in a variety of forms like “Kneeling Gods. Thirteen black rivulets converge, falling down the face of a crag and into one large black pool. Around the shore kneel thirteen giant hooded stone figures, their strange four-fingered hands extended before them, cupped to collect the oily mist thrown up by the fall. “ or the Slaughter of Eyes – “cluster and quork like ravens, seeming to murmur their devotion to the black pool in a grove of dead trees. Sacrifices lie on its shore. “ Let’s toss in some forest shrines. And then let’s dump in some forest people and entities that have a vaguely folklore element to them. Huge wooly people with antlers or undead that are horrifying in visage. And, of course, some other motifs, like The Hanged Man being a theme to get to or weird totems/symbols, a kind of Evil Eye to protect buildings that have some secrets to uncover. The lore, hinted at, and the environment presents that “Well, this is certainly different” vibe that fights back against the Tolkien Standardadization of fantasy and magick. It’s fucking intriguing. This is present in other areas as well, in its wanderer encounters and hirelings in the towns, terse enough but also with the specify needed for a DM to run with, that inspires a DM to run a great encounter because what has been provided by the designer is just enough to get the DM going in a fantastic direction. You KNOW how to run it.

But, man, you are gonna have to work at it to turn this in to something. It feels like a very loose framework, even though it is 76 pages and even though its contents are more than that. It just feels like so much of the towns are wilderness are exposition, mucking things up. And then the ties that bind, the interconnected sites and adventuring locales, are just kind of tossed in. Yes, there is a site in a town where they kidnap children, and that is linked in to a couple of other sites. But GETTING to that is not really helped in any way by the adventure text. Those vignettes of kidnapping, the rumors and conspiracy, there’s no real bait in to the adventures. The impending threat. The allure of loot. To say that the bait is obscure would be overstating it. In the mountains of text its noted that there is this kidnapping thing and there is a trafficking site in town, but getting the party IN to that isn’t really there in a meaningful way.

And then the adventuring sites proper, including the trafficking warehouse, seem almost like afterthoughts in their presentation. There’s a little overview of a room at the start and then bullets/bolded headers to follow up on items in that. “Black Pool. Reeks of rot, corruption. Dark waters, crowded with bone fragments, devour light. Great rusted chains extend from each stone pillar into the pool. “ That seems, on the surface, like it’s a decent description, with the individual elements then followed up on. But it never comes together as a cohesive whole. The room elements don’t seem to come together to fit an environment and then the rooms don’t seem to come together with each other to present to you things that work together. It SHOULD work, I think, but it just doesn’t. Again, they feel like afterthoughts and that specificity that brought the general elements to greatness just don’t seem to be present in the sites. And yet they still come across as busy, in their layout? Too much bolding maybe? Too much shading? I don’t know, my eyes glaze over and then the spread across pages seems to lose the cohesiveness. Maybe a paragraph or two on how things fit together as a whole, a summary of a potential flow? But it’s hard for me to ask that when there’s just SO MUCH overview padding going on.

I love the critters. The love the lore. The love the general eldritch uniqueness of many of the elements. But the ACTUAL adventure that you have seems likes its an afterthought. Not really tacked on, but just given short shifted?

Think of this as, say, a hundred years after order wins in that Midnight campaign setting, but less rote evil and more mystical. Fucking great. There is absolutely something here, but it’s like the support material got in the way of the adventuring material. Maybe the physical version overcomes this? The designer is the real deal, just having trouble implementing.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There’s no preview but there is a little youtube video in the product description. It needs a pdf preview also. You can get a sense in the video of the layout, which is what is making me question if the physical version works better from a layout standpoint.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/571701/witch-lords-o...

by bryce0lynch

By Arman Bohn
Distropilis Goods
OSE
Levels 1-3

A town, overrun with rabbits and on the brink of starvation, offers its only clue to the source of its suffering: a book known as the Tome of Tog. Locals claim the titular mage has been a nuisance for years. The pages of the book have been torn out, save for a map that leads the party on a winding, hallucinogenic path through a dense wood to the TOMB OF TOG.

This 24 page adventure presents eleven rooms in a wizards Challenge Dungeon. With Grimtoothian machinations the party faces snarky challenges with no rewards. As challenges go they are ok, but I loathe the subgenre and the suspension of pretext so much that it’s hard to say much nice about this.

Yeah, so, arrogant wizard makes a challenge dungeon. You defeat all eight rooms, one for each school of magic. You then face the ninth school of magic. Your reward is a map to another Tog dungeon. That’s the ONLY reward. Good luck leveling. So, this is one of those “have an experience” hippy mork borg dungeon “activities” instead of a D&D adventure. If you’re in to this kind of shit, then, yeah you. I’m not. I want to play a game. A game in a campaign. And I’m using the words game and campaign very explicitly. I acknowledge, though, that a significant number of people DO engage in RPG’s as an activity. So, if you are a l000ser, is this adventure for you?

Yeah, I mean, probably. There’s no real pretext here for adventure other than “the wizard did it”, which is the lame ass meme. [And, as a rant, I would like to mention something here. “What happens when someone is gifted with a wellspring of power but is completely incompetent?” That’s not a fucking wizard. That’s one of those fuckwits who are born with power or make a pact with an entity to get power. Some kind of power fantasy YA novel bullshit crap where you’re A Special Flower. Wizards wrest knowledge from the universe through hard work. Also, wizard is my favorite of the three classes …]

Ok, so, interactivity. You gotta go through each of the nine rooms. They each have some kind of challenge devised by the wizard. The challenges are going to be framed with a certain wryness. So, in the clearest example, to get in to the dungeon you have to answer a couple of riddles. The riddler begins with “ Here, we celebrate the glory of Tog the Inexorable, Tog the Impossible, Tog the Immutable, Tog the Intangible. Who is the greatest wizard of all?” The answer, of course, is Tog. That’s funny. Ok, humor is subjective and _I_ find it funny. There’s a bit of a wink from the designer in this. It never quite falls in to being a joke adventure, which are all shitty as fuck. It instead remains in the realm of those early adventures like Dungeon of the Bear and Grimtooth. Not in a deathtrap way, or punny way, but with a kind of hint toward both.

The first room, “Illusion” is a good example. When you go in you are immediately turned invisible (and, of fucking course, the fucking door slams shut behind you. Fucking challenge dungeon bullshit.) Bound to the room is a VISIBLE stalker. Who is depressed. “Unable to see its victims, the creature has suffered countless humiliating encounters. It now uses small talk as both a form of therapy and a method to pinpoint the location of intruders.” It’s taken the normal encounter and kind of turned it ninety degrees, yes? Is it s a gimmick? Absolutely. But, it’s a challenge dungeon.

The rest of the encounters replicate this kind of obtuse encounter type. Things are more than a bit askew in here. In terms of a challenge dungeon it is certainly in the realm, if we squint hard enough, of Tower of Gygax. The dungeon throws the players off balance in various ways, with a little (snark?) mixed in. I am MUCH more down for this type of challenge dungeon than a simple series of skill checks and combats. There is an air of Grimtooth room traps about the place. Not really traps, but in the setup of the rooms. And this includes a couple of meta things, like “Each player must secretly write down a single word describing their character’s current emotional state, without discussing it with the other players, and pass it to the GM.” Which then builds an Emotions Golem in the room. I always raise my eyebrows at the emo stuff, but this is a decent implementation of it.

Formatting is meh. The background of the pages are a beige parchment color with the text being light grey and the font something with some flourishes and varying stroke weight. This combines to make things harder than it should be to read the thing, but it’s not impossible. When some words show up in italics it’s a pain though, given this combination. There tends to be a little read-aloud section offset in a darker grey, and then a longish section of DM text that explains the room, with several very short paragraphs following that expand on things. It does an ok job, a little subpar, and is on the edge of being a pain but not quite there, especially given the obtuse nature of the rooms.

So it’s a challenge dungeon, maybe most similar to White Plume with just a little meta and snark thrown in. Maybe “the California Style” will be recognizable, and never really goes full on jokey or too meta. I’m allergic to all challenge dungeons, but if I were looking for one for a one shot sort of thing as an activity this one WOULD come to mind, chiefly because of the askew nature of the challenges.

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is eight spread pages (the PDF is spreads also. ARG!) so you get about thirteen pages of content, enough to show a large portion of the dungeon. A brief perusal will show the Grimtooth Rooms as diagrams, and the PDF is more than apt in showing you what to expect, so good preview.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/573505/tomb-of-tog