2025 Retrospective

I started this blog for three primary reasons. 1) To entertain myself and 2) to try and bring attention to what I felt were the best adventures in an unfathomable sea of content and 3) provide a counterpoint to the well-meaning but perhaps overdone positivity that exists in the Shadowdark community around 3rd party adventures. Which is to say, I saw a lot of excitement and promotion for adventures and dungeons that I thought were not very good, and a lot of good adventures were being overlooked.

I was a little worried that it wouldn't be well-received. I think the Shadowdark community is the best in the entire TTRPG hobby, and I wanted to remain in good standing, but I'm also opinionated and in love with the sound of my own voice. So I started writing reviews and held my breath, waiting for people to tell me what a jerk I was.

I was genuinely (and pleasantly) surprised at the positive response. A nice little community formed around the blog over on the Arcane Library discord of people that were enthusiastic about adventure design and interacting with those people, including many creators whose work I criticized, has been the highlight of this whole project. There have been many great discussions, lots of very helpful feedback for designers and a some wonderful projects have been published and shared.

Thank you for reading the blog. Thank you for letting me know what you think about it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on adventure and dungeon design. Thanks for being a part of this community. Meeting good people is the only thing that makes this or any other hobby worth a damn. Please keep it coming, and I will too. 

Furthermore, here are a few of the highlights from this year:

Best Reason to Have to Roll a New PC

Winner: Tie between the dragonpowder casks from Grotto of the River Pirates and the glass doors full of magma from Kaldera of the Sickle Dancer.


Grotto of the River Pirates was one of my favorite adventures I read this year. An absolutely stellar effort for a first-timer. One of it's greatest strengths is that it provides lots of opportunities for hijinks and lots of ways for the PCs to get themselves deep in trouble. This includes a stash of "dragonpowder" casks that do 1d20 damage to everyone in close. Who wouldn't love to go out in a blaze of glory while attempting an ill-advised scheme involving a few of those? If you get through the whole dungeon without anyone blowing themselves up I would consider that a wasted opportunity and a failure. 


Kaldera of the Sickle Dancer is an absolutely brutal dungeon, full of opportunities to suffer a glorious death. But the best way would probably be the glass doors filled with thousands of gallons of magma, just begging to be smashed by over-confident PCs that will soon be forever entombed in obsidian. 


The Vibes Were Immaculate

Winner: The Ardent Convent from Soulblight - Swords and Sorceries


Laurin-David Weggen is one of the best descriptive writers in the biz and The Ardent Convent is one of the most evocative locations I've read all year. It begs you to turn down the lights, put on some creepy ambient sound effects and hold a flashlight under your face. Whether you're interrupting a "smiling nun performing a vivisection on another nun, mad curiosity glazing their eyes." or walking through the cloister where "every step seems to echo like a thunderclap" it creates some of the most vivid imagery I've encountered, while still holding it down as a solid, playable adventure.


Best Map:

Winner: Everyone that didn't use Dyson Logos.


HOTTest Adventure (Hazards Obstacles Tricks and Traps)

Winner: Lovely Jade Necropolis 


First a little explanation: Gelz an illustrious member of the Arcane Library discord, commented "I'm not a fan of 'puzzles' (or the word, I guess) because it implies a Zelda-like puzzle with only one solution. A sudoku is a puzzle. I want hazards, obstacles, tricks and traps." And from that, another illustrious member called The Encyclopedia coined the term "HOTT". These are interactive elements of the dungeon that can be approached and solved in myriad ways, that go beyond a simple fight or a puzzle with a single solution. 


Lovely Jade Necropolis has 100 rooms and just about all of them have some sort of HOTTness. During my review I rolled a d100 a few times to provide examples, so I'm going to do that again. First up - 11: a barghest sleeps under a tower, too weak to fight. Its howl causes petrification but it's golden blood cures it. Next, 32: the "slightly" undead servants of a human regret mistreating their fey allies and seek to make peace with them. 54: Five blind priests surround a table, anything placed on it will be devoured by their god, a giant worm. Finally, 80: glowworms dangle unbreakable, glowing thread, but strangle anyone who approaches. 


These are somewhat simple rooms that can be tackled in a variety of ways, and also offer creative solutions to other problems and hazards the party may face. No goblins standing around waiting to get stabbed by adventurers, no riddles with obscure answers, no gems that must be slotted into the correct holes to open the door. Just HOTT rooms that will bring out the best creative thinking from the players.


Best Use of an '80s Fast Food Icon

Winner: Tomb of the Moon Knight


There were a lot of candidates for this one, but in the end the choice was obvious.


Top art by Gordy Higgins - http://www.gordyh.net/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Delve

Image
Today we're looking at Delve by Robert  “Bob World Builder" Mason and the folks at Eventyr Games. It bills itself as "a complete guide to building and surviving deadly dungeons with 200+ pages of dungeon-building tools and plug-and-play dungeons – and more monsters , treasures , player options, and traps than you can shake a 10-foot pole at!" This is a 5e conversion. The publisher and designers make 5e products. But they changed the cover from color to grayscale so I'm sure they nailed it. I'm going to take a closer look at some of the 12 dungeons included, but I want to address one thing first: "Delve" is a misnomer, in that none of these dungeons is very deep. The room counts are between 5 and 16 and the vast majority have 10 or fewer. I'm going to quote Gus L. again: "To make exploration meaningful the act of moving through dungeon locations needs to create a sense of ‘risk’ - tension and anticipation. In a scene or encounter based ad...
Read more

Review: Sapphire Seas

Image
Update: 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. Today we're looking at Sapphire Seas by Alfie & Charlie Lintzgy and publish...
Read more

Review: The Devoured Labyrinth

Image
Today we are looking at T he Devoured Labyrinth published by Bite-Sized Gaming, with Andrew Bishkinskyi and Zac Goins as lead designers. It is a collection of 46 dungeons, the vast majority being 1-2 pages, spread across a 160-hex region map. Let's address the elephant in the room: The Devoured Labyrinth is not a labyrinth or megadungeon. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it is, given the name. In fact the first two questions of the Kickstarter FAQ address this, where we are told "The 'Labyrinth' is a metaphor for interconnected buried ruins that have sunk underground." Ah, ok. It's a metaphor. So what it is, rather, collection of short 1-2 page dungeons that are loosely connected via themes and the overland hexmap. They are not connected literally. Maybe you shoulda come up with a different title. Since there are 46 dungeons in this thing I'm not going to review of all them, but I will dive into a handful.  First up is Doom Hold, a 12-room romp thr...
Read more