2d6 Stingbats

Today we’re looking at Bloodstones - The Crown of Blood and Ice by Legend of Talik. This is the third published adventure in the “Bloodstones campaign”, for levels 3-4. I haven’t read any of the others but this one had neat cover art so here we go. As near as I can tell after reading it, there aren’t a lot of references to the previous chapters. The upshot is that the party is trying to track down a powerful artifact called the Bloodstone of Ice Blast. There’s three ways to kick things off - 1) someone just tells them where it is, 2) they pass a DC 20 INT check to translate a journal or 3) you give the party the journal entry and ask them to complete a 2,000 character substitution cipher to translate it themselves. None of these seem like terribly engaging or fun options. Above the 20-room dungeon there is a four-level watchtower. Two pages are devoted to the map although each room is just a square. Contents are randomized. “Something else could be nesting here? Refer to the d10 chart...

Today we are looking at Soulblight - Hamartia by Laurin-David Weggen. Hamartia is billed as a “hexcrawl setting” and also includes a 40-room dungeon, all wrapped up in the vibes of Reconquista-era Spain. The region is a collection of islands that serve as a penal colony for the nearby kingdom of Verocia. I hope you like words because Hamartia has, like, all of them in a huge pile before the adventure starts. Hex descriptions don’t start until page 102 . I’m not complaining that the author included too much content, but I think it would be better organized by importance to gameplay, and certain sections like “Cultures in Verocia” and “Gods of Verocia” could probably be relegated to the appendices. On top of that there are 31 NPCs with a half-page description each and 24 factions with leaders, goals, allies, etc. That’s just scratching the surface of all that’s provided from black powder weapons to holidays to diseases. It’s all very well done but a bit intimidating, and your tolerance o...

Adventure Link Stingbat Score (2–12) A Haunting in Glass review — A Haunting in Glass 7 Adventure Anthology for Shadowdark review — Adventure Anthology for Shadowdark 5 Bloodstones - The Crown of Blood and Ice review — Bloodstones - The Crown of Blood and Ice 4 Crownphage Vol. #1 – Stone Tears review — Crownphage Vol. #1 6 Curse of the Velvet Morning review — Curse of the Velvet Morning 6 Cursed Scroll IV – River of Night review — Cursed Scroll IV 9 Delve review — Delve 4 Final Torch Issue #2 – Pirates of Barnacle Bay review — Final Torch #2 8 Grotto of the River Pirates review — Grotto of the River Pirates 10 Inside the Everflowing Curtain review — Insi...

Today we are looking at Take the Tower , a level 0 gauntlet adventure by Alex Dworman. It takes place in a 33-room wizard’s tower where the players will command a horde of would-be heroes dying gruesome and often hilarious deaths as they try to make it to the top or at least steal everything that isn’t nailed down.  The setup is that the local wizard, normally a chill dude, has been kidnapping people and bringing them to his tower. Now folks (including the PCs) are rioting and storming the tower, looking for answers and revenge. Unbeknownst to them, the wizard has died and his troupe of homunculi are gathering body parts to frankenstein him a new body.  There’s a clock on the whole affair - every 30 minutes in real time, lightning strikes the tower and charges one of six capacitors. Once they are all charged, the Frankenmage is animated and starts to lay waste to anyone in the tower. This is a good mechanic, reminiscent of the bells from The Waking of Willowby Hall with a som...

Today we're looking at  Crownphage Vol. #1: Stone Tears , a city supplement and level 2-3 investigation adventure by Arthur Marques. It's got a basilisk right on the cover, so I'm in. The first impressions are that the designer approached this with thoughtfulness and intentionality. They did their homework and read some of the classics and sought the best advice on structuring this type of adventure. Maybe it sounds strange that I’m excited about that. Maybe you assume that most adventure designers perform a similar amount of due diligence before they start writing. I don’t think they do, and I think a lot of common mistakes could be avoided if they did. The author posits that the reason city campaigns are difficult is a lack of digestible adventures. I agree. You can grab a great resource like Fever Dreaming Marlinko and you get a wonderful sandbox, but not much in the way of a discrete adventure that takes place in the setting. And the same is true for most other city su...

Today we are looking at The Breeding Pools by Nick Campbell aka Cri aka Made by Idle Hands. At least I think it’s by Nick. He didn’t put his name on it anywhere but I downloaded it from his itch.io so that’s what we’re going with. Regardless of authorship it's a 12-room dungeon for "low" levels in an abbreviated 2-page format. Here’s the setup: “The floor collapses under foot, revealing a strange series of caverns. Find a way out.” Sometimes that’s all you need. By way of background, “Cultist geckofolk trapped Princess Pinchy in the pools & caves when she was young so they could harvest her eggs. They feed the eggs to snakes for a ritual to summon their god.” In case you ever thought you needed pages of backstory and history, I find these two sentences pretty compelling. I love the weirdness of it. No orcs or bandits here. With a oneish-page dungeon like this, you need to be economical with words. A lot of the interactions are implied rather than spelled out, but we...