2d6 Stingbats

Today we're looking at Sanctum of the Undertoad Queen - a 3rd level adventure by Ross Mahler and Matthew Mahler. This one checks a lot of boxes on my personal "would I run this?" checklist. New and interesting monsters, creative environmental puzzles and hazards, a general competency in writing and layout, original art (just look at that gorgeous cover), a map with plenty of navigation options, A CUSTOM SOUNDTRACK, etc etc. Yes, there is room for improvement in a few areas but this is among the best 3rd party Shadowdark adventures I've seen. The setup is simple - the party is asked to retrieve the Lost Eye of the Jaguar Sentinel that is believed to be in the possession of the titular undertoads. Loot the place, bring back the eye, you know the drill. The dungeon has 20 rooms and a strong swampy vibe. We begin with a short hexcrawl with... 25' hexes? Yeah, 25' hexes. This section is labeled "optional" and I'm going to recommend you consider leavi...

Today we are looking at Righteous Vow Vol. 1 by Bill Horvat.  It consists of 6 dungeons meant to take the PCs from levels 1-5. Did ya ever notice how everything is a zine now? Let me start off by saying the production value is very good. Art is abundant and excellent. Layout is pretty much copied from Arcane Library but is done well. The writing itself has a competency that goes beyond most indie Shadowdark books. Diving in: the hook is kind of lazy. The party is sitting in a tavern when the noble of a fallen dwarf kingdom hands them a map and key tells them to help themselves to their treasure. I guess this band of level 1 murderhobos looks particularly capable and trustworthy. So it's pretty much "Hey gang, this is D&D tonight. Take it or leave it." Then we get a hex map. There's 80 hexes but only 8 are keyed, and 6 of those are the adventure sites. That's an awful lot of blanks for the GM to fill in. Turns out there's more to a hexcrawl than putting a ...

Today we're looking at The Frozen Ascent by JP Coovert. This adventure was also reviewed on the excellent Between Two Cairns podcast. Though I'm a regular listener I have avoided that particular episode in advance of this review. Maybe it will turn out that we have similar thoughts. Maybe I will find myself at odds with two of the most well-liked personalities in the OSR/NSR. Let's find out! The premise is mythic. Every 1,000 years the Frozen King shows up and the whole land is frozen over. Someone needs to climb up Orn Mountain and set things right. Let's get this out of the way. The art is superb. You want to own a print copy of this just so you can leave it on the coffee table as a sign of your good taste. You want to put a poster of the cover up in your gaming room. You want a tattoo of a Frostbitten Cave Crab. The art is also a nice break from the de rigueur black and white fare that you typically find in Shadowdark adventures. Our adventure begins with some over...

Today we're looking at Adventure Anthology for Shadowdark by Stephen Grodzicki. It is a collection of 22 adventures first written for Low Fantasy Gaming (which became Tales of Argosa) and "converted to Shadowdark" by William Murakami-Brundage (of Menagerie Press fame). I'm not going to review all 22, but let's take a peek at the first two: Call of the Colossus This is a 10-room, level 0 gauntlet. The setup is that you are the survivors of an ambushed caravan and you need to infiltrate a giant sexy statue to rescue those that were taken prisoner. There's a pretty cool 1d6 table for reasons that your PC survived, and if the PCs can manage to bring down a level 6 ogre there's a salvage/loot table of stuff they can find in the wreckage. That table is d66, which is not mentioned anywhere and might be confusing to some unfamiliar with that particular convention. After that we're off and running. The adventure tells us that the players can decide to go to the...