2d6 Stingbats

  Today we're looking at Lair of the Forgotten Queen by Caleb Paulson.  The premise of this four-part adventure is that the PCs are looking for three keystones (found in each of the first three dungeons) needed to unlock the fourth dungeon, the titular Lair of the Forgotten Queen. In the first dungeon, Grotto of Gelid Flame, rooms and hazards feel somewhat disjointed. Quicksand sort of makes sense in an underground sea grotto, but fire spouts don't. There's a sense that the dungeons are randomly generated. This is not a bad thing per se, but it's sometimes difficult to take randomly generated results and mold them into a cohesive location. So you end up with a bunch of rooms that feel separate from the others. Sean McCoy (creator of Mothership) wrote an excellent blog post earlier this year called Writing Rooms in Pairs . You should go read it. Then go read the rest of the blog because it's extremely helpful in many different ways. Anyways, Mr. McCoy proposes to con...

  Today we're looking at the Kickstarter page for Battlezoo from Roll For Combat. Yeah, this one's a little different. Work's been rough and I'm traveling this week so I'm being lazy. Battlezoo is a collection of 3 books that includes a bunch of new monsters, some new player options and rules for harvesting monster parts. At least two of the books, "Strange and Unusual" and "Elemental Storm" appear to be converted from D&D 5e and Pathfinder 2e. ♬One of these things is not like the other♬ The Kickstarter page tells us "All three books are guaranteed to follow all existing Shadowdark rules and themes and have been designed by legendary third-party Shadowdark designer Michael Putlack!" We also get an endorsement from Kelsey Dionne herself: "Roll For Combat pulls out all the stops with their production values and has the design chops to back it up." Let's see how those statements hold up! I really don't care about new...

Today we are looking at The Zircon Zephyr by Cameron Maas & Jason Terry. Full disclosure: I have done some Shadowdark adventure editing for Jason Terry, although I was not involved in the creation of this adventure in any way.  This 9-room crystal on the back of a giant crab was written for the Appendix N game jam and is limited to four pages (including cover). Despite the limited space and time, it comes across as a very polished work, including beautiful original art and maps, and a clear, functional layout. The goal is to wrest control of the Zephyr away from a chaotic wizard and his bandit allies.  The dungeon is essentially a two-floor tower and towers are tricky. Despite being a popular adventure location they are somewhat limited when it comes to possible layouts and navigation options. There's only so much you can do within the confines of a tall, narrow building. One solution, employed to great effect in Sision Tower , is to do a side-elevation rather than an...

Today we're looking at The Lost People by Nick Campbell. It's the 3rd in a series of underdark adventures and although it has some ties to the previous entries, could easily be played as a one-off. It is lacking any explicit hooks, though. A few of the rumors could serve that purpose (protip: they're in the back of the book). The 14-room dungeon is the remains of an ancient creator race, rife with foul, stagnating magic and inscrutable machines. Along with art and layout that breaks away boldly from the Shadowdark template, the aesthetics are a breath of fresh air. It vividly communicates the vibe of the adventure before you even read the words.  And those words begin with "this is a puzzle dungeon."  There's a lot going on here. In addition to most rooms having some kind of puzzle, the players can sacrifice 1 hp to boost their rolls by 1d4. Once they do this 7 times, a leyline bursts and creates some kind of wild magic effect like "A fedora appears on y...

Today we're looking at  Righteous Vow Vol. 2: The Whispers of Minh , the second in a series of adventures by Bill Harvat. This one centers around a conflict between a kingdom of ratkin and an evil empire of lizardmen. As with Vol 1, the production value here is very high. There is a buttload of original art and it is beautiful. Reminds me of the old Palladium RPG books. Layout is clean, maps are abundant and legible. There was clearly a tremendous effort made by several people to bring this book to fruition. We are told "this adventure is a sandbox" and "whatever your destiny, make it your own." Then we get a 4-page, beat by beat breakdown of how the adventure will go. It has a 3-act structure. The party will travel here where they will discover this but they won't know this until later. Then the party will be sent here  to do this and discover that .  The home base settlement is keyed, but no one there provides any information to the PCs about possible clue...

  Today we are looking at Tomb of the Moon Knight by Aaron Botter, a short 11-room adventure for levels 1-2. The party will explore the tomb of a long-dead Robin Hood type figure while contending with Sky Pirates and other hazards. It's pretty straightforward but also has some nice bursts of creativity and weirdness that set it apart from your typical graverobbing adventure. The layout and structure of the room keys pretty closely hews to the Arcane Library default. No points for originality but it's nicely organized and easy to parse. There's also a beautiful piece of full-page original art.   The adventure makes the most of it's low room count by providing a nice mix of interactivity - social challenges, environmental hazards, combat and a few light puzzles. No wasted space here. It also provides clear mechanics for running everything. A potential cave-in gives us the chance of causing it intentionally, the chance of it happening randomly, a DC for escaping and a DC ...

Today we are looking at Soulblight: The Dying Vale by Laurin-David Weggen. This is a smallish hexcrawl and hefty dungeon for his Soulblight setting, but also works as a standalone adventure and does not require any other books besides the Shadowdark core rules to run. The premise of this setting is compelling to say the least. "Rulakham is doomed. There is no saving it. No matter how many monsters you slay, even if you bring down the sovereign within the machine heart of the capital city, the dark eye sun will descend, the Chasm will open and on the ninth day, this land will be gone. Will you vanish along with it?" The PCs have 8 days to escape the blighted vale before the whole place sinks into a chasm, contending with desperate survivors, blighted knights and monstrous beasts across the desperate landscape of a ruined world. If Dark Sun has ever appealed to you, this is Dark Sun vibes cranked up to 11.  The driving force behind the hexcrawl is the "glimmer of...

  Today we're looking at  Shadows of Camelot by William Harshman. Mr. Harshman also has a Youtube channel called Runeforged Tabletop gaming. D ungeontubers have a pretty spotty record when it comes to writing adventures. Will we buck the trend?!  It's tempting to say that Shadows of Camelot is similar to the Cursed Scrolls, but that's not exactly fair. Camelot dispenses with the addition of new classes and focuses on the hexcrawl and adventure. What we get in return for skipping the player options are beefier hex descriptions and more structure overall to hang a campaign on.  A welcome tradeoff, in this author's opinion.  The setting is "post-Arthurian" with a dash of Robinhood. Important to note that there was no filing of serial numbers here. The figures of those legends loom large, including specific names, events and places. Folks that spend a lot of time playing TTRPGs are like to have at least a passing familiarity with these stories. Some might be surpr...