TOMB OF ANNIHILATION - A Review

WIZARDS CAN STILL SURPRISE ME - TOMB OF ANNIHILATION REVIEW

Another 203 page behemoth from Wizards of the Coast.  I’ve read Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, even Hoard of the Dragon Queen and more, and everything from WotC these days is over 200 pages.  They aren’t all entirely bad, but they all contain the same grievous failings, failings that one can guess from the fact that the teams writing them often appear to have little experience doing professional writing for editions of Dungeons & Dragons prior to 3.5. Even with 5E adventures that have stronger open world elements, such as Out of the Abyss and Curse of Strahd (both also headed by Chris Perkins) have a devotion to scene based adventure design, excessive backstory, muddled text lacking evocative detail, a focus on set-piece combat as the default solution/climax of any scenario, a disdain for both player critical thinking ability and GM choice.  You end up with a huge volume that’s so optimized for a GM to read it like a novel that it is almost unusable at the table, and when used, focused on dragging the players along a specific story and campaign arc in a largely predetermined way.

This and all other art appears to be promotional imagery for the adventure or related (videogames, boardgames) products.

A first sign of hope is that the writing team wasn’t entirely the same with Tomb of Annihilation.  Steve Winter was involved and has a long history with earlier games: Star Frontiers, early Dragon and as the writer of Ruins of Adventure (The basis for Pool of Radiance).  Even Chris Perkins who has been a lead writer for Wizard’s later editions and 5E products provided an adventure to Dungeon Magazine Issue #11, that Bryce of 10-Foot Pole describes as “A tournament module, with scoring. It revolves around a four-level keep/castle with about fifty rooms in it. The party has to make their through it to the end. The two major occupants are betting on the parties outcome and if they’ll make it, with the adventure eventually ending with the party fighting both of them. It’s not terrible for a tournament adventure: it’s self-contained and there’s a decent amount of variety in the encounters as well as options available to the players in navigating the keep.”  Pretty high praise from him for anything published in Dungeon.  WIll Doyle and Adam Lee are newer game writers who seem to mostly have worked on 5e product.

Despite having some writers who might understand how location based adventure design works, and presumably have run games where the most important use of a written product was providing a skeleton and overview of a location or set of locations for players to adventure in rather than providing pages of boxed text to read aloud as justification for moving from complex tactical combat to complex tactical combat, Tomb of Annihilation doesn’t start with much promise.

Like every other Wizard’s product Tomb of Annihilation promises epic adventure that will raise a party from low level (1st) to high level (11th). Using 5th Edition’s default experience points for bloody handed killing this means a lot of dead monsters. The book that follows includes its share of the rest of WotC’s big design flaws (copious read aloud text, promise to adhere to larger underlying story, dense writing that conceals important location aspects/elements, requirements for the Monster Manual to determine enemy strength and assumptions of PC morality).  More hopefully Tomb of Annihilation is a throwback and an intentional re-framing of Tomb of Horrors (It includes the infamous Acererak) and Dwellers of the Forbidden City. Like the unofficial marketing for Tomb of Horrors, Tomb of Annihilation claims to be exceptionally deadly to characters - with the suggestion of an optional “meat grinder” mode (which amounts to a harder death save), and a story mechanic that makes character death more or less permanent.  There are even a few words on providing replacement characters for the dead. 

Despite my initial foreboding Tomb of Annihilation won me over - it's by no means a great adventure, but it's solid, interesting and usable in a way that prior 5th edition products haven't been.

The Oldest of Old School (part III) - G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief

GYGAX RISES AGAIN

G1 - Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
Original Cover Art

Recently I reviewed both Tomb of Horrors (Gary Gygax - 1975/1978) and Temple of the Frog (Dave Arneson - 1975) and found them both interesting from a historical perspective and as iconic representations of styles of location based adventure.  Steading of the Hill Giant Chief (G1) (1978) is another of the oldest adventure modules and unlike Tomb of Horrors (which had some contribution from Alan Lucien) appears to be purely the work of Gygax. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is also a very different sort of adventure from Tomb of Horrors and doesn't appear to have been written solely with tournament play in mind, though it certainly has elements of Gygax's tournament style. Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is for ‘experienced characters’  - though it’s unclear if this is only raw levels of if Gygax (rightfully) suspects that the adventure might be tricky for players that are unfamiliar with some of the more sneaky options available to their characters in AD&D.

Steading of the Hill Giant Chief is short (13 pages or so) and densely written.  It’s much clearer then the writing in Temple of the Frog, but is similar in construction - with the now standard introduction, hooks, and note for the game master followed by keyed locations (52 on two levels) and a single page of pre-generated (tournament) characters.  The writing is Gygaxian, though far less descriptive than that and without the illustration booklet provided in Tomb of Horrors it still has some of his unique phrasing.  The adventure is a simpleattack on a hill giant stronghold, but set up specifically to build tension and encourage infiltration and character creativity due to the enormity of that task.  

A first level details the giant’s huge wooden hall and palisade, a sort of cliched barbarian/Viking/Celtic chief’s hall or even inbred backwoods family compound, built on a giant’s scale and filled with details that repeatedly hammer on the giants’ themes of squalor, debauchery and sloth.  While individually keyed most of the rooms on this upper level are empty, as the inhabitants feast endlessly in their great hall they do offer plenty of clues and interesting spaces to explore.  A secret stair leads down to a lower level much closer to a traditional ‘dungeon adventure’, though a rather tightly wound one, in the Giant’s cellar (slave cells, weapon manufacturing area and secret treasury, insane manticore garbage disposal), caverns with orcish rebels and several other factions, and a secret tentacle god temple.  The upper level is a tightly written adventure locale that inspires plans and schemes in the players while giving the GM the tools to make them fail or succeed interestingly, the lower level is a bit of a jumble.  Yes it has useful faction and a few neat set pieces, but it also very densely packed and small with a bit of the 'monster hotel' feeling, especially in the cave portion.

The Oldest of the Old School (part II) - Temple of the Frog - The First Module?

THE MIRE OF HISTORY
The review previous to this one is an in depth review of the adventure module S1 - Tomb of Horrors.  Tomb of Horrors was written in 1975 as a tournament adventure for the first Origin's Conference of July 1975.  It was not published until 1978, when S1 - Tomb of Horrors appeared.  This means that Tomb of Horrors is not the first published piece of adventure content for tabletop roll playing.  The first is likely to be "Temple of the Frog", included in the Second Supplement to the original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D) box set - Blackmoor by Dave Arneson.  In the introduction to Blackmoor Gygax credits Arneson as the "innovator of the 'dungeon adventure' concept."

Yup that's Blackmoor

So 1975 - the first published adventure (it's unclear to me if the very different Tomb of Horrors was written first) and one that fundamentally sets the style for published adventure content - but "Temple of the Frog" is a strange thing, 19 pages long and filling the center of Blackmoor.  Most of the supplement is a scattering of house rules (stupidly complex combat rules based on hit location and height, the fragmentary Monk and Assassin classes, a monster manual very close to the Monster Manual largely focusing on aquatic foes, some rules for underwater adventure, diseases and hiring specialists), but there in the middle is "Temple of the Frog". 

I happen to have a copy of Blackmoor, so I can suggest picking up a PDF (even if it's one of the simpler Little Brown Books to find) because the type is tiny (9 point maybe) and written densely to the margins in large blocks of text.  The information design is not good...even by the standards of the OD&D box set.

Still this is apparently the first "Dungeon Adventure" which I take to mean a location based exploration adventure as opposed to a siege, battle or a campaign of sieges and battles.  This is very interesting from a historical prospective, even if I don't really find much use in game history, and in thinking about writing this review I was somewhat excited to see what is in "Temple of the Frog" that one might style recognize as the ancestor for standards, mechanics and ways for playing and producing location based adventures today.

I read the thing, all 19 pages of confusing, poorly mapped, weirdness and while "Temple of the Frog" is 'interesting' and it really does appear to have set the standard for the way adventures are designed and written, it's a mess.  "Temple of the Frog" is not the worst adventure ever written (it's not a linear combat based railroad for one), certainly it's not a good one - especially not today - but it's bad largely in the same way that a Model T Ford is bad compared to a Porsche 911 or a Prius.  Most of the right parts are included and one can see that a game could be run from "Temple of the Frog", but it might be clunky and fairly uncomfortable.  The pattern that Temple of the Frog creates invites comparison with Tomb of Horrors and a curiosity about what the original, pre-publication 1975 version of Tomb of Horrors looked like.It invites curiousity because while the adventures are practically compatriots they are so very different in mood, theme, scope and approach that they are entirely different species of adventure.

The Oldest of the Old School (Part I) S1 Tomb of Horrors - Gygax at his most Gygaxian

TOMB OF HORRORS - RECENT INTEREST

Tomb of Horrors is a high level (8th -14th) AD&D adventure written in 1975 (published in 1978) by Gary Gygax.  In the past several years gotten a bit of press, being the D&D dungeon cited in Ernest Cline's novel "Ready Player One" and a while back the subject of a highly critical blog post over at John Wick Presents. The Alexandrian strongly disagrees with the Wick assessment, pointing out inaccuracies in the initial review.  Even more recently Tomb Of Horrors is one of the old adventures adapted (apparently without much change) to Fifth Edition. For me the question remains...

That's the first Tomb of Horrors cover.

"Is Tomb of Horrors useful and how?"

I want to address the standard complaint about Tomb of Horrors - the mythology that it is the most terrible and unfair killer of characters ever written. I don't think this is true, I'm sure plenty an antagonistic GM has made worse, but complaints aren't in a vacuum, and in general they are likely based on experience with the adventure.  Complaints about what some GM's will do to their players and how well Tomb of Horrors allows them to do it. Imagine one played Tomb of Horrors in some retro-nostalgic 80's suburban rec room, eating pizza combos and drinking grape Shasta soda into the nights of a long summer weekend - and the game went wrong ... that beloved dwarf fighter you'd raised from level one to twelve dies to some stupid trap that the GM totally encouraged you to test, even withholding key description. Then the rest of the party dies as well, picked off by traps and ultimately the lich thing at the end that they can't seem to harm. Some punches might have been thrown and the latent sadism and martinet pettifoggery of that kid who always wanted GM was to blame.  Now imagine how your 80's rec room child GM likely ran things, it was likely antagonistic, and more then normal on those particular nights - because you were playing Tomb of Horrors, the baddest dungeon penned by Gary Gygax, the game's inventor, designed for tournament play.   Imagine this with the gullibilty of an early 80's youth, with a conviction that one's hobbies have heights of virtuosity and heroes - that tabletop games aren't quite a game but an entire world of imagination.  This sort of scenario seems to me less justification for a loathing of Tomb of Horrors then a cautionary tale with the moral that playing games in a mean manner tends to annoy one's friends and that 12 year-olds are cruel.  There still remains a more objective question about the module however, does Tomb of Horrors encourage antagonistic GMing, and even if it doesn't is it interesting?

Tomb of Horrors is of course an early D&D module, written by Gary Gygax for characters levels 9-14 (there are some lower leveled demi-human characters provided as well, but they are dual, or even triple classed).  With 33 keyed areas it's not a huge adventure by old school standards, and the areas are generally more carefully described then in many modules of its era, likely due to the number of traps within.  Originally designed as a tournament module in 1975 it seems clearly targeted as a 'one-shot' adventure.

The upshot of all this?  Tomb of Horrors can be run as a terrible adventure lacking in fun.  The  real question is can it be run in some other way or is there something inherently badly designed about the adventure?

Mortzengerstrum the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak - Review

MORTZENGERSTRUM THE MAD MANTICORE OF THE PRISMATIC PEAK

A few days ago Trey of Sorcerer’s Skull and Hydra Collective released their first site based adventure for Causey’s gonzo fantasy setting “The Lands of Azuth”. Mortzengerstrum the Mad Manticore of Prismatic Peak is a forty page PDF with an adventure and a few extras designed for Fifth Edition D&D and a jolly, bright presentation.  It’s packed with great, cartoony art that compliments the setting by Jeff Call who also seems to have enjoyed himself and added a few special treats (like a centerfold ‘board game’ version of the adventure). I should mention that a map I drew some time ago is included as extra setting material in the PDF version, but I promise I’m not self-promoting as all I got for the map (and all I wanted) was a copy of the adventure PDF to read and review.

Two things come to mind when looking at Prismatic Peak, and thinking about the current ‘OSR’ or ‘DIY D&D’ subculture.  First is the problem or question of ‘personalities’ and second the perennial issue of fidelity to the implied setting of D&D.  Trey and Sorcerer’s Skull are not a ‘personality’ in the DIY D&D scene, but they should be a presence - Sorcerer’s Skull has been one of the most consistently updated blogs about fun and strange imaginative table-top games since I started playing again in 2011, and Trey’s published works (most recently Strange Stars, but most notably for me Weird Adventures) are consistently high quality, and consistently approachable.  They aren’t complexly written, difficult and literary like some other authors, but they are written with verve, humor and a deep well of pop cultural appreciation.  None of these products or their author courts controversy, either to stir up sales or out of some personal need for drama, but the product is still well-crafted with a unique authorial voice.  I think Trey’s attitude is well paired with the Hydra CoOp, who have consistently produced high quality location based adventure books that remain playful and unique while not abandoning the traditional ‘mood’ or play-forms of classic D&D.

Veins of the Earth - A Review

The Underdark

I was reading and reviewing Wizard of the Coast’s Out of the Abyss, which is fundamentally a decent campaign book about the Underdark.  It’s likely the best that Wizard’s has produced for 5E, but that means that compared to the recently, long rumored and carefully produced Veins of the Earth by Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess (with production by Jez Gordon) published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess it’s 255 pages of flabby, dead writing, dull illustration and unimaginative dross.  This isn’t to say Out of the Abyss is bad, it’s got some great bits, and tries hard to bring the weird and evocatively wonderful to 5th edition D&D, it’s just that it’s written by a committee of people with worse vocabularies, weaker minds, lesser imaginations and far far less love for their creation then the author and artist of Veins of the Earth.  Out of the Abyss isn’t a waste, but it won’t make you think, feel and want to run an Underdark game the way Veins of the Earth will.

This just seems appropriate

I am unsure about the quality of the physical book, though knowing the work that Lamentations of the Flame Princess puts into its physical products I suspect it’s very good.  The PDF is serviceable, though displaying as a double page spread and using a clear, but somewhat degraded typeface means one has to enlarge it a fair bit to read, scrolling about in a 350 plus page PDF.  I appreciate that unlike many DIY projects Veins of the Earth doesn’t use giant lettering and a few paragraphs per page and even though it's dense, Veins' layout is clear and breaks the text up into nice manageable chunks.  The real hero here appears to be Jez Gordon, who has consistently provided both excellent art (he is not the artist for Veins) and stellar layout on everything he’s been involved in.  Scrap Princess’ art in Veins of the Earth is also excellent, and it’s consistency and volume is a fine compliment to the text, with gestural, primal boldness that conceals details of Veins’ dark underworld while inspiring the reader with shapes and an overall sense of frenzied, jagged, contrast.

Strange Stars - OSR - A REVIEW

So a while back Trey Causey of Sorcerer's Skull Released "Strange Stars" a " setting for any game where modern transhuman science fiction meets classic 70s space opera." It was a pretty good all purpose supplement about a very "Star Wars" (or perhaps more "Ice Pirates") meets Ian Banks' Culture Novels or Lecke's Ancillary universe and it was followed shortly by a FATE mechanics book for the setting written by John Till. I know nothing about FATE so I can't comment on that one, but recently Trey and Hydra Cooperative put out Strange Stars OSR.  I think I know OSR and I even know Stars Without Numbers, which is a slightly crunchy (Optional DM facing crunch - it's fine) version of space Dungeons & Dragons using the contentions of the 1980's Basic & Expert books ('B/X' or Red and Blue Box).

Interior Sample of Strange Stars OSR

I also know Trey, in an internet acquaintance way, and think he's one of the best people working in the OSR gaming scene (though I don't think he'd consider himself OSR exactly, even if I think he's running a Wizard of OZesque 5e campaign or maybe a B/X Planet of the Apes game these days), who doesn't get nearly the credit he deserves.  Not only is Mr. Causey's blog always updating with something interesting to say (though often about comics or sci-fi movies, and usually fairly short), but it has been for years.  Mr. Causey's earlier works regarding "The City" are a phenomenal setting that was one of the early departures in the tabletop revival blogging scene from vintage rules recreation.  "The City" is detailed in "Weird Adventures" and is a 1920's weird fantasy New York attached to a Weird fantasy America and world.  It is amazingly well done, pulling from a rich well of popular culture and geek culture to create a truly inspiring and darkly humorous setting.  The folks at Hydra Cooperative are also pretty excellent, and produce high quality works, so I have a great deal of fondness for both author and publisher - but still I bought this PDF ($5.55) with my own money and so I promise to be critical of it where it's deserved.

BlackSun DeathCrawl - A Review

BlackSun DeathCrawl was published in 2015 by James MacGeorge.  It’s a pay what you want PDF

and I’d call it one of those great free (or nearly so) products of the OSR that are made with heart and singular vision.  The book itself is 64 pages, though much of that is made up of ominous prophetic statements in large fonts and lovely full page etchings from the common domain (I recognize a lot of Gustav Dore’s illustrations from Dante’s Divine Comedy) that really add to the setting feel.  Actual, game ready content takes up far fewer pages, but that’s okay, because the Deathcrawl at its best is less of a module or adventure then setting for playing very grim survival based dungeon crawl. The adventure part of the books is actually its weakest, a set of scene based encounters that while unrelentingly bleak and open-ended provide a bare skeleton of an adventure that doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the setting.  That promise though and the horrifically spare setting itself are wonderful and make up for the minor weaknesses of other areas.

One such minor issue is that Deathcrawl uses DCC as it’s basis, which makes for some rules kludge that needs to be converted for most, but this is minimal and Deathcrawl generally avoids the fidgety nature of the DCC system by eliminating all classes except fighters.

OMINOUS STATEMENTS AS SETTING

“And yet the Cursed dig...because they have forgotten what it means to do anything but dig, fight and flee.”

That’s typical of the somewhat lyrical, somewhat overwrought declarations that MacGeorge  uses as the main setting vehicle.  Even setting rules (all players begin as a level 1 warrior) are communicated in this way, and it makes for an effective enough system to communicate setting and feel.  It’s rather evocative really, and allows justifies Deathcrawl’s interesting rules changes (Death occurs by burning up a character’s ‘hope’ - formerly Luck in the DCC rules and by the steady accumulation of terrible mutations).  More than anything Blacksun DeathCrawl feels bleak and allegorical, a mystery play from some religion based on Black Metal Album covers rather than normal tabletop fantasy or the series of evocative vignettes that the module sets out to promote ‘moral’ play (in the sense that more of the play derives from making moral decisions, not that it forces players into having a specific moral stance).  Yet I suspect it’s best played as a dungeon crawl where finding a way deeper to escape the Black Sun’s torturous light and unstoppable minions while discovering food and water are the only goals.

I6 - RAVENLOFT - Review

OH THE CREATURES OF THE NIGHT...

I'm not sure if this is a review or a mediation on adventure design principles, but I've recently been thinking a bit about the horror genre and tabletop adventures - while running a location based wilderness point-crawl with a post-apocalyptic high fantasy setting.  My long running game set aboard the HMS Apollyon attempted to have horror elements, though perhaps failed in that regard, and with that in mind I find myself looking at the first really successful horror themed D&D module - I6 Ravenloft, -written in 1983 by Tracy and Laura Hickman, a few years after two other modules I've reviewed here (somewhat unfavorably): Rahasia (1979 republished/rewritten 1984) and Pharaoh (1980), but before the couple launched into Dragonlance.

To understand Ravenloft, and perhaps to give my critique of it a more appreciative cast I think it's first important to look at the Hickman's adventure design in general.  If Gygax's adventures can be identified by a certain actuarial abundance and callously fair mercilessness (The deadly but entirely rational traps of S1-Tomb of Horrors, or the highly detailed Keep in B2-Keep on the Borderlands), the Hickmans' adventures are about: storytelling and heroic narrative.  They may be the creators of this school of adventure design.  If one should thank Jennell Jaquays for interesting non-linear map design, the Hickmans stand tall in the annals of game design by offering an alternative to the location based adventure and approaching tabletop games with a novelistic eye rather then that of a wargammer.  That is to say that even Rahasia, written at the same time as Keep on the Borderlands, wants to tell a specific story where the player characters are heroes of an epic fantasy struggle and does so with set piece encounters that flow logically into one another.  Of course this "story path" style of play can lead to the sort of awful excesses that deny player choice and freedom to have a say in the story of their characters - the railroads, forced decisions, coercive encounters and  quantum ogres that mark 00's and 10's mainstream tabletop products. The Hickmans' own work isn't usually as bad as all this, it's not even as bad as a contemporary OSR influenced WOTC product like Lost Mines of Phandelver, and the saccharine vanilla fantasy flavor of most of the Hickmans' work is done earnestly, with a certain unique flair and in general far more forgivable in 1979 or 1983 than 2016. Ravenloft is likely the best of their adventure design work, and it contains a lot of interesting ideas that sometimes fall flat or are two big for the module they're in, but are generally not boring. It's a novel and useful effort at design - one that I personally wouldn't run expect under certain circumstances, but would be tempted to steal some ideas from.

Yup, That's Pretty Gonzo

Lost Mines of Phandelver - Review

THE WORST THING ABOUT D&D

Forgotten Realms was the worst thing to happen to D&D, a terrible setting that reeks of bathos and takes itself far too seriously.  It plunders everything cliched and overused from Tolkien but abandons all the strange sadness and the mythological references. It fills the land with huge civilized bastions of good/order like Waterdeep and exhaustively defines their systems of governance, but allows these nations to be plagued by trifling enemies like goblin tribes. Forgotten Realms embraces a pedantic faux-medievalism, but then uses a contemporary positivist understanding to explain magic that allows for cutesy magical technology to gloss over the inconvenient aspects of the pre-modern.  Most offensively, most objectionably, Forgotten Realms is a dense, full, world - so steeped in cliched lore and laid out so extensively in dull gazetteers that there is no room for a GM's creativity without excising some of the existing setting and map.

I'm not here to talk about Forgotten Realms, except as a symptom, it will always be terrible.  I'm here because I've been reading the 5th edition's introductory module Lost Mines of Phandelver.  I start with my objections to Forgotten Realms, because I think they are the root of the module's considerable problems.  That and a player coddling, computer role-playing game derived game design ethos that limits player choice and insults player intelligence in the name of providing a consistent play experience. Many people love this module, I do not.  It's not the worst thing I've ever read, it's not even close to as bad as Dragons of Flame, but its positive design and structure elements are mired in a pablum of fantasy cliche so bland that it makes for one wish for even Dragonlance's feeble gestures towards the weird and the wonderful.  Fifth Edition has a certain promise to players of older editions with a step back from grid based complex combat as the center of the game, towards exploration and roleplay, and Lost Mines could be intended to be an introduction to this style of play.  However, as a 'teaching' module Lost Mines is confused wreck, giving good advice about avoiding railroads one moment and then on the next page making every effort to railroad the characters. As a tool for Dungeons & Dragons pedagogy its never more then half decent and for every time it says the right words it demonstrates the concepts very badly.

LOST MINES OF PHANDELVER

Hey look a Dragon

A glossy and sometimes lovely book with maps and art that are both inoffensive and excellently drafted.  The art is relatively sparse and frequently seems designed for reuse, not showing actual events or NPC from the adventure, but rather generic fantasy monsters and vanilla fantasy adventuring archetypes engaging in non-specific adventuring tasks. In fact not a single art piece within depicts an actual event from the adventure - it's as if everything was designed to be recycled in later publications.  Even the cover is a generic adventurers and dragon sort of image, yet the art and layout are inviting,simple and certainly professional looking - more digital watercolor, bland but with a bit less of the shiny over sized shoulder armor or 'dungeon punk' aesthetic of some other editions.  Something a bit more characterful would be nice, but everything in its soft pastels, greys and browns is readable, clean and offers no challenges for the reader.

The adventure itself is fairly long, broken into four episodes, some with multiple small keyed locations.  These sections begin to feel rushed and more poorly designed as the adventure progresses, but none are unusable.  First there is a section of general advice and plot overview, followed by a goblin ambush and lair, then a town with bandit trouble.  Finally some other small locations, one with a dragon, a castle of goblins, and ultimately a cave complex with the regional evil mastermind hard at work exploring within.

PLAY ADVICE AND INTRODUCTION

In a way this short section of advice and suggestions for playing Lost Mine and D&D more generally is one of the most interesting parts of the adventure.  The advice in introductory modules is always a window into the game designer's mind and the system's preferred play style.  In general I have enjoyed the 5th Edition of D&D's expressions of support for less structured, non-adversarial play, with more GM control and a focus on rulings and creative solutions to in game problems.  The advice in Lost Mine follows this pattern with explicit and early cautions against adversarial play and encouragement towards fairness and adjudication rather then rules mastery.

There is little specific advice in this section, and while it's friendlier then the introduction to something like Keep on the Borderlands (a pure expression of that Gygaxian impartial actuary of death play style) it also has less advice on running the game, running monsters and thinking about the world - in many more pages.  What advice Phandelver offers however is refreshingly positive and encourages the sort of creative group story telling that only table top role playing games can deliver.  It just fails to give many practical examples of this, or worse, when it does the actual adventure provided tramples all over its ideals in favor of a squishy railroad, moral judgment of player goals and forced novelistic pacing.

The hooks and background of Lost Mine uninteresting - ancient mine, pact between gnomes and dwarves, and a magical forge that produced wondrous enchanted items. Of course orcs smashed it up at some point and it was forgotten. People keep trying to find the rumored treasure mine, but no one has in hundreds of years, until now - all despite its convenient location. This whole hook makes my skin itch, but worse is the disheartening level of vanilla fantasy, rulebook obsessing detail it's described with.  The invading evil army is of course orcs, and of course Lost Mines has to add that 'evil mercenary wizards' were also involved.  Dwarves and Gnomes are of course the original owners of the cave, and somehow lost all their maps when the mine was overrun. Why do only dwarves and gnomes ever have mines, why do ancient NPC orcs need human wizards, and why must it always be orcs destroying things. First rewrite.

"The ancient rock spirits of the Wave Echo Cave produced marvelous magical gems, occasionally trading them to the primitive tribal peoples of the Coast, but as civilization grew the spirits retreated into their wondrous mine and traded less and less.  The folly of civilization is to believe it can overpower the world, and enraged by the end of trade, armies from the growing city states banded together to seize the spirits' mine and enslave it's diminutive fey workers. A great battle was fought and both mines and armies destroyed, the land around them called cursed. The surviving kings and leaders destroyed the knowledge of their defeat and the mines' sealed entrances soon became a legend. A local sage claims to have rediscovered an entrance to the caves."

This is really the first example of the core problem with Lost Mine, every situation, encounter or description that could be drained of weirdness, mystery and wonder has been and most have instead been remade with the dullest versions of standard fantasy tropes the designers could find.  This problem becomes worse as the quality of the encounters and dungeons decrease in the adventure's later half. Another example of this lethal blandness is the way Lost Mines uses names.  They are terrible fantasy names for the most part.  The initial player hook comes from a Dwarf named "Gundrun Rockseeker" - seriously?  Sure this is a fantasy cliche, but worse it's incredibly unmemorable and everyone else in here has similar terrible fantasy names - the villains "Irno 'Glassstaff' Alberk" and "Nezznar the Black Spider" as well as heroes like "Silldar Hallwinter".  Gad, these are just hard to remember and overflowing with gratuitous fake Tolkien flavor.

NPC names are important, but they should be memorable, as players will need to remember a lot of them to keep the story straight - especially if the adventure doesn't provide them with any memorable features (The dwarf merchant with the eye-patch is a lot easier to distinguish from other dwarves of business then "Gundrun Rockseeker").  The names provided aren't without some virtue - they tend to have good, simple, memorable elements sandwiched between nonsense fantasy sounds.  "The Black Spider" is a fine name for a villain as is "Glasstaff" - no need to add names that are impossible to remember and obey grammatical rules for fictional languages not involved in the adventure. Tolkien, as a linguist and obsessive world builder could get away with strange fantasy names because they were: A) In a novel, and not important to the reader's immediate understanding or the way the story evolved. B) Part of an entire structure of fantasy languages, so they made sense in a way with an internal fantasy logic. The worst offenders, Tolkien's elven names, were mitigated through the use of a large amount of elven poetry and loan words throughout the text.  Lost Mines does not create an entire fictional language, and as such it should keep its names fairly close to real world names or as rough translations. The cultural importance of names (what naming conventions say about different cultures) can be preserved without resort to piles of funny consonants, for example if you want your dwarves to be business obsessed and orderly each dwarven name is structured [inherited profession] [Employer] [Serial Number] followed by a nickname, like "Rockseeker, Blue Mine, 1251, but everyone calls me One Eye." A dwarf adventurer might be named "Axegrinder, Solo, 000" and nicknamed "Cutter" or whatever.  Simple names used in a way that imply a strange world are better then strange names that imply a cliched world.

On a more positive note, the mechanical design of Lost Mine is generally decent.  For example the background of the adventure is relatively concise and doesn't go into a great deal of detail (about that of the paragraph above) about unnecessary ancient events that have no impact on the adventure itself.  There's about a page and a half detailing the regional present, and the situation that the players will get themselves into, but not ancient history and pointless storytelling.I note this because it is rare in WotC's never products which tend to be like Dicken's novels, giving the feeling of having been packed with pointless superfluous data to reach a specific page count.

Fever Dreaming Marlinko - A Review

The good art starts on the cover

Vornhiem is almost universally acknowledged as a great city supplement, and it is, but the new city supplement from Hydra Press, Fever Dreaming Marilinko, set in Chris Kutalik’s Hill Cantons (what the Grand Duchy of Karameikos should have been) is an entirely different kind of great city supplement.  Where Vornheim, and the old Judge’s Guild city supplements, aspire to offer means of creating ‘a’ fantasy city, Marlinko seeks only to create ‘the’ city of Marlinko, and does so in the form of a set of adventures, personalities and factional rivalries that create a city ready for conflict and picaresque shenanigans.

In some superficial way Fever Dreaming Marlinko resembles the classic B-Series Module “The Veiled Society”, in that it presents a series of small urban adventures focused around the factions within an urban environment.  Marlinko is far better than Veiled Society in that it is not overly proud of its cleverness (nor does it’s cleverness consist of gimmicky cut-out buildings), and it takes the time to make a city that isn’t simply a dull pastiche of fantasy cities.  Marlinko does follow Veiled Society’s lead in making the city a place for adventure far more than it is place for resupply, investment or carousing between adventures, focused on faction conflict that offers opportunity and danger,  but it does so without the B-series stalwart’s dependence on a railroad, or mechanics that force certain outcomes.  

Mr. Kutalik is a good Game Master (I speak from one experience playing in Marlinko with a one handed elderly thief who really didn’t appreciate the murder-hobo nature of the standard adventure, but his written material is uniformly excellent) of the “OSR” or perhaps “open-world” variety: focused on player driven narrative, emergent world-building, random setting enhancing events and the creation of a game world that offers a wealth of potential adventures without any pre-judgment of character and player ability, goals or morality.  Fever Dreaming Marlinko is a worthy product of this mindset, and written with this style of play in mind - there are no overarching plots, but rather plots aplenty, fomented by a variety of factions and ripe for player character participation, and best none are pressing.  This lack of a pressing timeline and the abundance of other potential adventure hooks are what separate Marlinko from a city themed adventure and allow it to be a city supplement, in that these hooks, complications, NPCs and small adventures await multiple visits and returns by the players.  

BACKSTORY AND CITY ADVENTURE

Memorable NPC Art

Fever Dreaming Marlinko is a setting book in many ways, it lays out the city of Marlinko, a small walled city that acts as a cantonal capital for one of the Hill Cantons and is relatively near to the Ursine Dunes (of Hydra Collective’s recent project).  There is little historical detail in the product, and none of the sort of history and setting backstory that one finds in many older gazetteer style game books.  This isn’t to say that Marlinko  lacks backstory, only that it’s lightly sketched in the basic setting material and only really comes out through random encounters rumors and detail.

  Each of the quarters takes its general feel and purpose from its god: a wealthy enclave (where the characters can frequent bathhouses or engage in tiger wrestling matches), a business district, an industrial slum and the residential district.  Each district has its own important NPCs (usually faction leaders), random encounters and carousing table.  These features, which link well together with rumors, chance meetings and carousing events naturally leading to encounters with, grudges against and commissions from the city’s various important NPCs and ultimately into one of the two smaller adventure locales in Marlinko or out into one of the Hill Canton’s other published (or soon to be published adventures).  All of this detail is very flavorful, eclectically so in the charming, off-kilter quasi Slavic weird-fantasy way that seems the mark of Hill Cantons products. Wizards all have a bit of the insane and preposterous rather than a grave bathos about them, and the random encounters tend to be less dangerous and more charmingly absurd (pedants potentially about theology arguing with an escaped, drugged tiger) but with potential cascades of consequences (killing the sleepy tiger will lead to making an enemy of its owner who runs a tiger wrestling dome).

Thoughts on Fantasy Africa

SOUL & SORCERY - CHARLES R. SAUNDERS "IMARO"

A Current Cover of Saunders' Imaro - Pretty Swords & Sorcery

I recently had a chance to discuss 'bad fantasy novels' with a friend and he mentioned that he was interested in the Soul & Sorcery genre of fantasy, something I had no idea even existed.  Soul & Sorcery is a genre of Sword & Sorcery pulp fiction written by black authors starting in the late 1970's as an alternative to "Western" Fantasy with it's use of Celtic, Norse and Arthurian mythology as world-building tools, and also as a way to counter some of the retrograde racial attitudes and depictions found in Sword's & Sorcery - like those in Conan (which was written mostly in the eugenics obsessed 1930's).  Soul & Sorcery, or at least the Imaro stories I read, doesn't really feel, or perhaps it shouldn't really feel, like a genre of it's own - it's simply a Sword & Sorcery tale set in a mythical Africa, rather then a mythical Europe. 

Soul & Sorcery is an interesting sub-genre of fantasy in that it is both very different from standard Sword & Sorcery and very much the same.  I picked up "Imaro" by Charles R. Saunders - a collection of the first Imaro stories available for kindle and fairly cheap. Imaro seems to have been the birth of the genre, with the first Imaro story published in 1975.  Imaro the character and the stories involving him are very much a homage, reworking or retelling of Conan stories.  The title hero, Imaro, is in the Conan mold - "massively thewed" and a dangerous fighter with a somewhat gloomy outlook and tendency towards anger. Imaro battles sorcerers, their necromantic creations and dangerous animals, but the savannahs and jungles he wanders are very different then Conan's forests and icy plains.  Saunders has taken effort to make Imaro's world distinctly African, and this provides the interest in what would otherwise be fairly formulaic (though quite readable) Swords & Sorcery stories.  Imaro represents a "reskinning" (perhaps that's not the best term here) of Howard and his imitators that is pretty charming because it is different.  I also suspect Imaro is as light on historical/mythological fidelity to it's East African source material as Conan is to it's Northern European, but that's likely for the best given that Imaro is a straightforward set of stories about triumphing over evil wizards.

Imaro is set entirely in a fictitious fantasy Africa, about as closely linked to the real world as Howard's fictionalized Fantasy Europe/Hyboria, where the hero begins in a fictional Southern or Eastern African (seemingly a fictionalized fantasy Masai/Bantu/Zulu) and moves Northward though various African biomes and broadly sketched fantasy version of historical African cultures.  It is interesting to compare Saunder's fantasy Africa to Burrough's fantasy Africa, and note how much more alive Saunders' feels.  Burroughs' Africa is a set-piece jungle and occasional set-piece savannah inhabited by cookie cutter 'savages' of the noble and good or cannibal and evil variety.  Ignoring how these stereotypical depictions are a mark of the era of Burroughs writing and how this aspect of the Tarzan stories might be off-putting to modern readers, I think there's a useful lesson about world building here.  Saunders clearly had more knowledge about Africa the place and historical African peoples then Burroughs did, and it shows to his advantage in depicting a fantastic version of the place (or part of it - part of Burroughs problem is imagining an 'Africa' that is a single jungle filled expanse rather then a huge continent).  Now I'm not suggesting that Imaro can be looked at for any historical facts, any more then Conan will tell you about the Celts, but having taken the time to look at the technology and culture of the ancient peoples he is modelling his fantasy on, Saunders can add context and details that makes sense - the savannah folks are nomadic hunters and herders who live in easy to transport hide domes and value cattle greatly while the jungle people live mostly by fishing and gardening along the riverbanks and reside in conical houses of clay and thatch.  These details, seemingly pulled from historical sources, make sense and so can be readily understood without having to remember a great deal of fantastic vocabulary or world specific oddness. They are also details, and so give the reader a better understanding of Saunders' world building then Burroughs endless villages of huts built around a giant cooking pot.

REVIEW - DCC 67 - Sailors of the Starless Sea

CONFLICTED ABOUT ZIGGURATS

DCC has pretty sweet cover art.

I have a conflicted relationship with Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) ... I've never really played it, except for a couple funnel games that felt like B/X D&D, and trying to deal with its absurd magic system in a couple of Google+ games.  While DCC seems like a darling of the OSR community for good reasons, I did not have a pleasant experience with my exposure to it, at best it felt like a decent retro-clone that Morgan Ironwolf would be at home in, but at worst it seemed like it had too many finicky and overly complex magic rules and relied on some of my least favorite skill mechanics borrowed from 3e.  Now as regular readers of this blog know I myself am a purveyor of overly complex house rules, and perhaps because of that truism about always hating the things that remind one of one's worst self, I have stayed clear of DCC.  Yet I just keep hearing such good things about it, and really the art, the ideas and the feel of the products seems like it would fit with my personal ethos about table top game play.

In the likely case that I am wrong about being DCC shy I've decided to pick up one of the DCC adventures and read it.  Sailors of the Sunless Sea comes highly recommended, lets see if it makes me as cranky as taking fifteen minutes to figure out how some PC's magic missile works while they hold up the rest of the players flipping through some kind of tome of magic tables. I should mention that I've also played in a couple of games of Perils of the Purple Planet which seems fairly a straightforward Sword and Planet style romp tinged with Carcosa.  I've enjoyed these games, but they have so far been funnel games with little of DCC's complexity involved.

The adventure I purchased is a twenty page PDF that promises "100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you remember, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere."  Now I both like and hate this sentiment - a lack of long winded speeches and NPCs that aren't some kind of indestructible Dragonlance Mary-Sue GM pawn sound good, but "no weird settings ... with monsters you know, traps you remember" sounds a bit pedestrian.  The question then becomes, what part of this opening rhetoric is overblown if any?  Will this be an "Orcs in a Hole" pastiche of early D&D adventures for the sack of nostalgia?  Thankfully the answer to that question is no - despite feeling like an old school style dungeon crawl (Really it's short and linear) from ruined keep to underground temple (a small one) Sailors on the Starless Sea does take some effort to distinguish itself by having unique monsters and interesting content.

THE ADVENTURE

The local village has been losing citizens to nighttime abductions and correctly blames these tragedies on a nearby ancient and abandoned keep.  The keep is home to a cult of chaos aligned beastmen and vegetable zombie horrors.  Worse, beneath the keep is an underground lake with temple of chaos at the center, where the beast cult is reviving their ancient patron.

The keep itself is only  a few areas, most of which contain a deadly puzzle.  The design here is clearly in the vein of "the only way to win is not to play" as there are no rewards for negotiating the chaos sinkhole or messing with the chaos well.  The three entrance aspect of the ruined keep is an excellent effort to provide variety and enable player agency, though given the size of the keep these entrances represent about half the content.  The major enemy within the keep are beastmen - yes these are orcs, but they are well done and a table provides a great deal of varied disturbing appearances for the small number of beastmen within the ruined keep.

After rescuing some captives and recovering a small bit of treasure the adventurers - likely fewer and wiser. Can descend into the depths of the keep and quickly find themselves on the shores of a huge underground lake.  A boat floats offshore to cross, but the lake is haunted by some kind of terrible chaos squid with lovely evocative texture.  There are several ways to get to the boat, suborn the chaos leviathan or otherwise interact with the lake, but the adventure still only goes one way - across the lake, up a beast-man invested ziggurat and to a lava pit to fight a reborn chaos champion. The fight over the party gets some chaos armor and flees the collapsing cavern.

REVIEW - Bonespur Glacier and Tomb of Bashyr

Looks Pretty Slick for a Charity Product

Erik Jensen is one of the first GM’s who I played with online and I have always enjoyed his games, set in Wampus Country, a tall tale version of the frontier, but only vaguely American.  He’s a great GM, who runs a very free form game, short on maps or metrics but long on NPCs and unique situations.  I don’t know Jason Paul McCartan except as a G+ poster and the author of the OSR today blog - a well designed blog aggregator and curation site.  Still, I was excited to see that the pair of them had produced a “double feature” set of adventure locals and were offering them as pay what you want on RPGnow with the proceeds going to charity (St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital).

Bonespur Glacier & The Tomb of Bashyr

The product is a 23 page PDF but at least 5 or six pages are filled with art, content pages, an ad for a talented mapper and the OGL.  Nothing wrong here – the product is a fine example of independent game publishing and the art and layout is very professional and decently done, if often in the somewhat forgettable way of post 2000 WOTC product. The two maps are also rather exceptional, being the work of Monkeyblood Design (Glynn Seal) who is one of my favorite mappers working today.

Review - Bloodsoaked Boudoir of Velkis the Vile

Why am I reviewing this tiny module, lacking in slick art and a name brand pedigree? 

I am reviewing it for a couple of reasons, the first is that I know and like the author, but more importantly, The Bloodsoaked Boudoir of Velkis the Vile is the sort of hobby product that I have come to appreciate the most about DIY tabletop - it's produced out of a joy in playing tabletop games and with creativity and an esoteric view of the game rather then as part of a product line for sale and consumption.  Even the DIY products I like are often fairly expensive today, and I see egos growing behind the success of these more ambitious products, a success that seems to fuel greed and cattiness among other would be creators. RPGnow is filled with short, derivative and generally awful vanilla fantasy  blather that has the audacity to ask for money.  One of the key joys of tabletop has always been that it asks the consumer to create - from the empty 1/2 of B4 Lost City on the best tabletop RPG products have encouraged GMs and players to build their own fantasy worlds.  As such any published product will always be ancillary, and when a creator asks consumers to use their setting materials and modules they are asking them to do more then hand over a few dollars, they are asking to hand over a chunk of their creativity and imagination as well, which is not something one should do with arrogance.  Bloodsoaked Boudoir is not an arrogant product, it's small and can fit into another game with some ease, while still being interesting enough to give an evocative sense of it's authors sort of game and game world that is different enough from the standard 'orcs in a hole' fantasy adventure to provide interesting ideas, and leave a reader with the sense that maybe they wouldn't have thought of it themselves. With all these advantages the author is happy enough to simply publish his work as a pay what you want PDF, rather then promote it and clamber for your cash.

Manifesto done, on to the review.  I've played with Nick Whelan a bunch of times, and rather enjoyed his Dungeon Moon setting of which the Boudoir of Velkis was a part - Velkis was one of the two sub-deities that the Dungeon Moon party managed to eliminate during a year or so of games.  I will say it was a fun game when run by Nick, and would likely be a fun setting run by anyone. The party encountered Velkis (the titular villain) numerous times, and thought of him as an annoying random encounter that was far less dangerous than most. Only the warnings of a friendly kobald tribe revealed the true danger of Velkis and the adventurers decided to assassinate him - leading to one of the more psychedelic sessions of D&D that I have played.

The Bloodsoaked Boudoir of Velkis the Vile is a ten page PDF using Lamentations of the Flame Princess stat lines (essentially any OSR/retro-clone system should work) published as a pay what you want adventure on RPGnow.  It's a small five area dungeon with a few functional pieces of art that fits well on a more gonzo random encounter table - drop in Velkis and place his extra-dimensional grave/lair somewhere nearby, and you've laid a potential one session adventure that's pretty good and plenty bizarre. 

Velkis is described as Cato the Elder ...

THE ADVENTURE
A short romp through a pocket dimension inhabited by a rather benign seeming lich/wizard named
Velkis.  Velkis is rather insane and utterly lacking in the skeletal majesty of most liches, passing himself as a doddering grandfatherly figure rather then a puissant undead immortal.  Yet, Velkis is dangerous and perverse despite his appearance - perverse in the manner of an 70's shlock horror movie, and this is what makes him fun. The module bills itself as "horror-comedy" and that's how I'd run it.

Velkis is a creep who lurks at the bottom of the random encounter table and has the power of persuasion.  He's a good villain because it's unlikely that he can kill or injure party members on the first encounter, he really seems pretty harmless - but he's effectively immortal and he's damn inconvenient.  He's also terrifying, effectively designed with powers that could be very, very dangerous but which are badly used. Velkis can steal away and murder a party member or two and if he's ignored and laughed at (exactly what he wants I think) he may become a real nemesis for the party.