2d6 Stingbats

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...

Today we are looking at Righteous Vow Vol. 3: The Mountain Dragon's Brood. This is a 176 page regional adventure with a hexmap and a few keyed dungeons, similar to volumes 1 and 2. It sits somewhere between a 5e/Pathfinder style adventure path and a sandbox like the Cursed Scrolls, although closer to the former than the latter. The setup is that some orcs and also a dragon and its attendant cult are attacking a couple of kingdoms - one human and one dwarven. The kings of both appeal to the party for aid. A possible and likely start to the adventure is the first dungeon: Scorched Tower - the hideout of an orc warband. Random encounters have taken a step backwards even from the meager tables we got in Righteous Vow Vol 1. Here we only get 2 entries: 1: 2d6 orcs (SD p.240) charge towards you. 2-6:  Safe...for now. Look if you can't think of 5 things to put on the random encounter table maybe adventure writing isn't for you. The tower consists of 3 levels, is full of orcs and ...

  Today we're looking at Curse of the Velvet Morning by Dave Silberstein. It is a small region-based adventure for levels 1-3, focused around investigation and mystery. This one's a bit different from the usual fare. For one thing, it doesn't have any dungeons. surprisedpikachu.gif  For another thing, we are told right off the bat that it's inspired by Lee Hazlewood’s song “Some Velvet Morning”, but actually it goes a step further as Lee Hazlewood, a singer-songwriter from The Real World™ features heavily in the adventure. More on that later. The setup is that a shadow demon is using a dryad to lure mortals and feed on their dreams. This includes Lee Hazlewood from 20th-century Earth, whom the dryad has summoned and fallen in love with. Every morning after the demon feeds, the sky turns crimson, crops fail, birds die, etc. The provided hooks all center on getting to the bottom of this apparent curse. The adventure begins with an optional encounter on the road to the vi...

Today we're looking at The Shadow of Sharad by Michael Benoit. It is a crawl through a 14-room cultist hideout aimed at level 1 PCs. Full disclosure: I provided some design feedback to the author early on. So if there's something I don't like it's partially my own dumb fault. The setup is brief and sticks to what will be relevant to the PCs. There's a nice sort of multi-layered setup where we have a cult that's made it's hideout in the shrine of a legendary assassin and his legendary knife. That gives us a few reasons why the party might want to go poking around and lends a nice history to the location.  The random encounter table provides a few words of action and flavor for the bad guys that should be enough for a creative GM to improvise something beyond a pitched hallway battle. And we don't have any spots on the table wasted on entries like "you get some bad vibes" or "a random PC remembers something uncomfortable".  And then we...