2d6 Stingbats

  Today we're looking at Lovely Jade Necropolis by Joseph R. Lewis.  After tackling 5e and then OSE, Mr. Lewis has added Shadowdark to his repertoire. This is a 100 location adventure for level 3-5 PCs. It's inspired by the works of Clark Ashton Smith and that is exactly my jam. The eponymous necropolis was once the site of a beautiful garden built by the fey for their human friends. The humans betrayed the fey, were summarily killed, and now the garden is a place where the dead cannot rest. A couple of necromancers have moved in and now they're fighting. Plus the fey aren't thrilled about the new tenants so they're trying to kick them both out. It's a nice whirlwind of intrigue and violence for the party to get mixed up in. We get some nice hooks and rumors and we're off! Okay, one more thing and then we're off. The fey and undead are given a few little twists from how they're usually presented. Rather than mindless fodder, we're told that the ...

Today we are looking at Inside the Everflowing Curtain , designed by Anthony J. Zinni  and published by Revivify Games. It's a level 3-4 dungeon with 16 rooms where the PCs are tasked with recovering the second half of a magical staff from a goat demon's lair. Everflowing Curtain   pulls double-duty, being written for both Mörk Borg and Shadowdark. We've seen 5e/Shadowdark and DCC/Shadowdark, but this is my first time for this particular combo. The two systems have very little mechanical similarity, but when has that ever stopped anyone? It has one of the most bizarre setups I've ever seen for. It assumes that a bunch of stuff directly related to the adventure itself has already happened and hinges on the PCs finding a very particular set of items to summon the demonic questgiver. "The GM must place the crystal ball, copper brazier, and lower piece of the staff where the characters can find them. Once a character touches the crystal ball, the scene described on the...

Today we're looking at Tower of Hapshut by Fenris-77. It consists of a small 5-hex region and a 29-room dungeon for levels 6-8 and was written for their Shadows of Empire setting. It could easily be dropped into other settings, even if you just take the dungeon. The primary adventure site is a temple currently occupied by an undead warlord. We aren't given any particularly compelling reason to go there - he doesn't have any nefarious plans that are about to come to fruition and no local leaders are offering a reward for his extermination. But there's reputedly some treasure inside, and in a game where gold = xp, perhaps that's enough. The layout is exemplary. Clear, attractive and informative. It smacks of effort and care. It can't have been easy to fit everything together this well, but sweating the details paid off and I wouldn't feel terribly intimidated running this sight-unseen. The text gets a little verbose in places and the writing overall has a very...

  Today we're looking at Kaldera of the Sickle Dancer by Sersa Victory. This is a level 3 adventure with a 21-room dungeon inside of an active volcano. There have been a lot of volcanoes around here lately. Maybe this is my sixth sense's way of telling my to keep a watchful eye on Mt. Rainier. The setup is that long ago a belly-dancer turned tyrant was buried inside during an eruption. The volcano stirs once more and threatens to release her again into the world. "The characters’ motivations are to put the Sickle-Dancer to the sword, plunder her volcanic jewels, and claim her cruel magical treasure." Hell yeah! Typical of a Sersa Victory joint there is a meta-mechanic to keep things interesting. In this case, rather than random encounters we have eruption rolls. These occur every hour of real time and represent the ever-increasing volatility of the volcano, possible culminating in an eruption and a swift end to the adventure (and the PCs). Although there are a few p...

In my initial review of The Sapphire Seas , one of my biggest gripes was with the layout. Menagerie Press has gone through and revised the entire ~400 page document to make it much more navigable and reader-friendly. The table of contents has been pared down, formatting is much improved and the whole thing just looks much nicer. They also added a hex overlay to the individual islands. I still have a few nits to pick but I would also say it is a huge improvement.  They also added a campaign guide that delivers on the kickstarter promise of a full 1-10 campaign. And even if you don't plan to follow it exactly, it also contains many details and plot hooks that were a bit difficult to find and piece together before. This will make running any kind of cohesive campaign much easier. If my initial review put you off of The Sapphire Seas, I think the latest update makes it worth another look. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534134/sapphire-seas-for-shadowdark-rpg

Today we are looking at Isle of the Ancients written by Nick Agan & Darin Elm, and published by Twin Magi Games. It's a pointcrawl across a tropical island ruled by a mad wizard and full of dinosaurs, jungles, a volcano, etc etc. The setup is that a wizard named Sibarin has set up shop on the island to make weird dinosaur experiments. Meanwhile the local lizardfolk are being terrorized. I'm not sure why the PCs would care to get involved but it doesn't matter because the background tells us "They have acquired a small boat and set out towards the Isle." Don't need to create a reason to go there if you don't give the players a choice. We start with the typical background and rumors. Some of the rumors are false, and not the good kind of false. If you say "A magic gem lies at the heart of the volcano" and don't put anything in there, or any way to explore inside the volcano, that's just a setup for disappointment. False rumors are fine...

Today we're looking at River of Night by Kelsey Dionne and published by Arcane Library. This is the first release from the Western Reaches  kickstarter and the fourth entry in the Cursed Scroll series of zines. As is tradition with the Cursed Scrolls series, River of Night is 68 pages and contains a couple of new classes, some new spells and new weapons. And as is tradition with this blog I'm not really gonna talk about that stuff. The best part is the hexcrawl - here with twice as many hexes (352!) as before, with about 1 out of 10 getting a description vs 1:7, 1:8 and 1:12 respectively for Scrolls 1-3. So there is more to do in this region than ever before.  Besides size there is another big difference from the previous zines - rather than a big 30ish room dungeon as the centerpiece, River of Night has 9 smaller dungeons. I was a little disappointed at this initially, but I think the intent was to provide more gameable content to fill out the hexcrawl. Was it worth the trad...