Agains the Horselord

Posted on March 28, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Brad Kerr
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 5-7

A cruel warlord hoards horses and power at the edge of the wilds. His castle brims with treasure, terror, and twisted secrets. Can players infiltrate the Horselord’s stronghold, overcome its treacherous occupants, and liberate the borderlands from this tyrant’s reign?

This 20 page adventure is focused tightly  the 27 location motte-and-bailey compound of The Horselord … and looting it. Clear maps, great focus on interactivity and what makes a good raid adventure and memorable NPC’s serve the adventure well.  A premise pushed not quite to being a farce, it provides everything you need for a good night or so of gaming. 

As with some other Kerr adventures, there’s a bit of absurdity here, or perhaps, dark farce. It’s not as absurd as the Temple of 1000 Swords, but it does use it to give us a solid foundation to adventure on and build from. The horselord REALLY likes horses. He’s confiscated the horses from the locals. His kitchen prepares them for meals. He keeps some live ones in cages suspended in his great hall. His petulant wife rides around on a toy one. He’s got a taxidermist that stuffs them and mounts them all over the place. And, he’s working on a giant sculpture of one. For he, gentle reader, is a true artist and lover of horses! Just ask him …

Local adventurer makes good! He and his men set of a motte-and-bailey on the edge of the wilderlands to bring order. Also, he really appreciates horses. It’s nice to see the use of an former adventurer here, in the villain role. I guess he’s the villain? He’s cruel, as is one of his sons and some of his men. And a bit despotic. But we’re not full on slaughtering the locals and s on. But, he does have some loot. Also, the local Farmers guild, suffering without horses, he having confiscated them all, would like to have a word with you about a potential regime change. Not quite the questionable full on Loot The Keep from B2, but perhaps some more nuance in realpolitik in the feudal ages. 

The motte-and-bailey here is an interesting addition, something you don’t normally see. Situated in grasslands, The Horselord has, of course, centaurs patrolling outside of it. There are archers on the roof of the bailey, surveying the lands around for trouble/intruders/horses. There’s a system of bugle/trumpet calls to indicate danger/all clear and so on, that the party can learn if the watch closely. And, in fact, there’s a nice little surveillance table of things the party can learn if they scope the place out for a bit. The usual “lie to people, use a cart, climb te walls” stuff are all well handled in a terse but meaningful way to give the DM guidance. 

And this is not a one-sided affair with everything arrayed against the party. The centaurs are utterly demoralized, subjugated and believe themselves “loathsome creatures un-

deserving of His Excellency’s charity.” The archers can’t really distinguish friend from foe in the main compound, with the people milling about, and don’t generally have good shots once you are inside. The soldiers inside, his former men, are without leadership and while they will run for help they are leaderless, not reacting well, given their confusion about their lords current pursuits. (horses …) While the older son is cruel the younger one is more sensitive, and locked in his room by dad, giving the party and out for a line of succession if they take it. The servants are beaten, terrified, sometime executed over minor matters, hate the older son and sometimes look sympathetically on the younger one. The castellan, a fine and experienced man, is tasked with pulling around the petulant wife’s toy pony while she rides it. 

I talk sometimes about writing neutrally and this adventure is a good example of that. We start with this motte-and-bailey and the retired adventurer in charge. Sone, wife, servants, soldiers, an outer patrol. This is all great. But there is no such thing as perfect. Given a group then someone is a drunk and someone is lazy and someone is fucked up crazy and so on. Thus we add in the Horselord and then move on to Ok, so what are the consequences of this? His men are leaderless and a little confused. The castallen, a good man, is given dumb tasks to do, personally, by the vapid princess that the Horselord got in marriage. The servants are beaten, as are the outer patrol, demoralized. A cruel son and a emp son. We have all followed on to these natural consequences and perhaps pushed them some to heightened reality of an RPG setting and that creates this more dynamic, and realistic if hyper-realistic, environment for adventuring in.

There’s a taxidermist in this place. He’s really in to it, since the horselord loves his taxidermied horses. He’s the only one here that the Horselord really might respect, um, as a fellow artist lets say. Dude is totally dedicated to his art. He’s got things to tell you if you can tolerate him. Wanna see the special collection in his closet? Local farmers. Are you gonna judge him? That will not get you the info you need. Memorable NPC’s, with something present in them that you can hang your ha on as a DM. You know how to run them all, instantly. 

Formatting is solid, not the normal OSE house style but a more free-flowing summary/read-aloud maybe, that is followed by highlighted section headings and bullets. It’s easy to follow and does a great job helping the DM locate information during play. 

Given the levels here, 5-7, there are interesting possibilities. As we enter domain play this could be your nutso neighbor next door. (What do you think of those zoning laws now?!) The petulant wife the daughter of your liege. He’s stealing your horses, maybe. And the local farmers guild is upset, crops are coming in low because he’s bought all yours up. A minor recurring nuisance that turns in to a problem for your domain. So, beyond tactical issues, a good political situation, or the potential to be, as well. I mean, he IS blocking the orcs hordes to the North from coming through. 

Obviously, I love it. The extra potential domain issues. The slight force here from the premise. The tactical situation. The interpersonal stuff inside. This is absolutely the kind of D&D stuff I’m fond of. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages. More than enough to show yu the preamble and a decent selection of the rooms. Did I mention how tight this thing is? Nary an appendix of fluff or background/intro information that doesn’t contribute. It’s great!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558357/quick-delve-3-against-the-horselord?1892600

Posted in Level 6, Reviews, The Best | 5 Comments

The Mysterious Island

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Pedro Gil
La Marco del Este
OSR
Levels 4-6

Beyond the Pirate Islands, in the southern seas, there is said to be a mysterious island, eternally shrouded in a thick fog, as cold as a corpse’s shroud, where monstrous creatures, strange artifacts, and relics of the ancient world await. Who will be brave enough to explore it and uncover its secrets?

This 23 page adventure presents a jungle island with an old temple on it and seven-ish other locations presented in about twelve pages. It’s yet another poor and confusing Dread knockoff, with even less going on than usual, described in a poor manner.

Hey, this is, I think, an EASL adventure. There is a decent amount of awkwardness that comes from the language, but none of it is all together too indecipherable. For example, it uses “voyages” for “nights at sea.” So, three voyages is three nights at sea. It’s nothing you can’t handle though. On to the review!

For some reason you are going to the Isle of Mystery. You pull up and find a rock formation that looks like a skull. Inside you find three rooms and it MIGHT have some pirates. Yeah! Fun! You can find a village of natives! You can go fight some giant apes! There’s a rope bridge over a chasm! And, of course, there’s the ancient ruins at the end with the fabulous treasure! One room. “Note to the Narrator: We recommend you compile a comprehensive list of treasures and artifacts to be found here.”

What, I wonder, do designers believe that the purpose of an adventure actually is? 

About eight locations, about twelve pages used to describe them out of the adventures 23 or so pages. Each of them is described quite … loosely. An ancient ruins/temple that is barely a column long, with three paragraphs of that being read aloud! Very loosy goosy stuff. There could be pirates here. The pirates might be friendly. You are attacked by giant apes. Or might be. 

They are all written in this weird manner. It looks for all the world like it might just be a standard encounter that you might find anywhere. But then it is kind of zoomed out, abstracted, in something more generic. It’s like the adventure is afraid to get tied down in specifics for fear of ever treading on the DM. “You might make friends with them.” Uh, sure? That’s true for every adventure, right? That you might make friends with the star-eating chthonic monster? Instead of responding with the specifics of how that might happen, what happens, or what opportunities are there to make THIS friendship-is-magic thing special, instead we just get a generic “you can maybe be friends if the DM wants them to be!”

Hey man, for a wandering encounter with humpback whales you get this as the first line “It is a group of humpback whales, or humpbacks, as they are known in Cyrinea.” Yup. This is a pattern. The encounters take up too much space for what they are. It’s padded out. And yet anything that could be useful or interesting is just not present. “Once the characters access this accessory cavern, we can read or paraphrase the following paragraph:” Yes. That IS how read-aloud works.

Read-aloud that is all in the second person. “You arrive at the beach, and you cannot help but be amazed by its wild beauty.” I’m blind you insensitive clod! Seriously, don’t do second person writing. Nothing is worse. Yes, it’s even worse than italics.

Oh, hey, look, here’s a peaceful beach locale! “There is nothing of interest here” Well, hey, that’s nice! Oh, wait, “, except that the characters will be attacked by a huge crab that emerges from the water and comes ashore as the adventurers pass by.” Ok, so, I guess there is something there.

So, very generic, ideas? As locations. And then weirdly specific read-aloud with the second person thing. But then offloading all of the location stuff on to the DM with that hated word “possabilities.” Overly long, padded out, weirdly specific in non-useful ways and then not specific at all in the ways that matter. Dread was far from a masterpiece, but at least it knew what it wanted to do. This, I think, had no concept of what it wanted to be.

This is $5 at DriveThru. Alas, no preview. Bad designer! 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/536769/the-mysterious-island?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 2 Comments

Journey Under the Rock

Posted on March 23, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Marco Fischer
Savvy Thief Studios
OSR
"Low Levels"

[No Marketing Blurb]

This fourteen page adventure uses four pages to describe seven areas in a big rock. It’s verbose, which is weird since it just describes “possabilities.” There is little to no value or things of interest here, mostly because there’s very little specific here. 

The lack of a marketing blurb here is, in retrospect, telling. There’s no overview, no setup. Just some shit about this being a one-shot, exciting, etc. It falls in to a kind of abstraction in its descriptions, a kind of abstraction, needless, that makes the entire thing feel generic and more than a little hollow inside. Get it?! Get it?! Hollow inside!

We start with what The Rock is. It is “The hideout of a long-defunct mages’ guild. Its

last disciple is lost in the astral plane.” Oh, no, maybe it is “Part of what remains of an ancient lost civilization in the mountains, which hid its structures within the stone to protect itself from its enemies.” Oh, or maybe it is … *sigh* Yes, indeed, it is a d6 table. A d6 table to suggest what The Rock is. I LOATHE this shit. Why would you do this? Why would you make this decision? Just pick a fucking backgrund and THEN THEME THE FUCKING DUNGEON TO IT!!!! You know, mages lost on the astral or lost civ or whatever the fuck else. Why would you just put in a fucking table? Somehow six throw-away choices, with none of the fucking rooms themed to any of them, makes the fucking adventure better? This fucking PLAGUE of designers not knowing what the actual fucking purpose of randomness is. Instead of getting an environment designed around something you instead inevitably get content that is more than a little generically themed. And thus it is here as well.

“A village near the Rock is inhabited by descendants of its old occupiers, who want to recover some artifacts with historic value to their people before they are ruined by the current occupiers, goblins, or stolen by greedy adventurers.” Yes. Absolutely. Magnificently themed. I am enthralled. Just fucking pick something already and go with it!!!!

So, I’m not exactly, but I THINK, from the description, that this place is a giant rock that is kind of balanced on a number of boulders, like they are holding or suspending it in a cradle. There’s no real diagram or art piece or anything and the description is not exactly clear. Whatever,. Goblins live inside. How many? “There are a total of 5d6 goblins and 1d6 giant geckos in the caves, as well as a chief of excavation (king) goblin with 1d6 bodyguards.” Yup, that’s what you’re getting. And that’s not even in a room description or two. That count is in some long-winded page long overview of the dungeon. So, you just enjoy splitting up the goblins and deciding which room they are in and so on.

How about a typical room? “Warehouse: This dark chamber with a dry and dusty air houses the materials the goblins retrieve from the Rock. It also serves as a kitchen and pantry, where a pair of goblins trusted by the chief are responsible for preparing and delivering the meals to the dens. In addition to the grub goblins, there may be 1d6-2 additional goblins carrying or bringing in a load every hour. With the exception of water, which is stored in clay jugs, everything is stored inside wooden barrels, suitable for tying to the backs of giant geckos. There will be a total of 4d6 barrels when this room is first visited.” What the fuck is the point of this room? There are six fucking rooms inside The Rock and you selected this to be one of them. This garbage room. Dark chamber. Dry * Dusty. With some crates. There’s a remarkable description of a goblin kitchen for you!

There’s nothing in this place. The entire dungeon is written as if you could hack the goblins or talk to them. It’s all abstracted content with very little specificity. You got one room with some skeletons in it, and brief shadow puzzle. This is not an exciting or interesting place to be. The encounters are not good. They are not well written. They are abstracted. They are not interesting. The entire place, from start to finish, is both overwritten in terms of word count and completely under-described in terms of bringing it alive and under-designed in terms of making the place either interesting or making the rooms work together.

It’s just more grist coming out of the published adventure pipeline. 

This is $5 at DriveThru. The review is six pages. You get to see the linear dungeon, and many of the “possabilities”, but none of the rooms. A decent preview needs to show us a dungeon room or three. How else do we know what to expect when we buy the product?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/530644/journey-under-the-rock?1892600

Posted in Reviews | 6 Comments

Eldritch Borderlands

Posted on March 21, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Stephen J. Jones
Unsound Methods
OSE
Levels 4-6

Twenty years ago the denizens of Faerie poured forth from the Circle of Mehriz and fell upon the sleeping town of Harpagus. Men, women and children were killed indiscriminately, and the town was burnt. The invaders moved eastwards, driving refugees from villages before them. King Sardis sent his elite legions and the Scholar-Priests of Khordesh to stop the planar invaders, and succeeded in halting their advance. Now, after years of grinding war later, the eastern provinces are a wasteland which remain under occupation by the invaders. The motives of the aggressors remains a mystery. Rapidly-abandoned mansions may still hold riches. Some even say the King’s youngest son has recently gone missing behind enemy lines.

This 31 page adventure presents a kind of regional sandbox/hexcrawl with about sixteen locations. Set on and behind “the front lines” of a fantasy invasion, it does a decent job of conveying horrors of war without getting TOO gruesome. A puzzle to learn and unlock, for the party to end the war. It’s a decent crawl.

So, a bunch of Unseelie Wights have come screaming out of somewhere and are laying waste to the countryside, killing and burning. Like, an army or four of them. Warty goblins, sidhe mages elfin with white hair and dragonfly wings, gnome recaps as murderous berserkers, and brownies as 4 foot tall wizened humanoids with a mastery of shape changing. Nobody speaks common and they are just going to town, killing and burning everything. The human kingdom fights back, and gets help from clerics; it seems the fey have no religion to help them. Front lines are established along a Looooong front of about sixteen 6-mile hexes. Patrols from both sides, a dike and palisade. The fey HATE the humans and the humans are embittered by the atrocities of the fey and are paying them back in kind.

It’s stated explicitly that the designer wants to bring out some of the horrors of war. The humans are taking trophies, ears. At one point you find a large fey patrol, dead from combat. Except for one, a gnome, you has been badly beaten and has had every bone in his body broken over a long period. You find burnt refugee wagons full of human women and children, and human soldiers, prisoners, driven off of cliff sides. Soldiers wound tight, or gone all lone wolf vengeful hunter/scout mode, collecting trophies. Or an old man, in the war zone, hiding in his cabin, not leaving cause his dead wife is buried there. I probably could have gone just a bit farther with some of this, but it’s also a balancing act to be respectful as you get closer and closer to the actual realities of war … in a game. 

The prince of the human kingdom has joined up to the army. There’s a draft, it’s unpopular, and he’s joined to show common cause with the people. And then his patrol got killed. Other patrols, and maybe the party, are out looking for him. He and one other man escaped the ambush. Then the other soldier tied the prince up and hid him and tried to sell him to the fey. The fey don’t care and are now torturing the other guy in a location. The prince is locked in the basement of a building in a destroyed/burnt village. When the party comes upon this place they will find a pit in the middle with some human prisoners in it, in miserable condition. Trying to save them will trigger some web shit that it HARD to cut them out of. Also, some brownies, shapeshifted in to eagles fly over a few times a day to check on things and see if they’ve caught anyone new in their trap. And can call in a patrol. All of this the party is balancing in this one hex. Let’s hope they don’t get distracted by the pit and look in the other buildings and thus find the prince! But also, if they do, then he will INSIST on freeing the captives. This is hard. The captives ARE a trap. The prince IS important. And, correctly, the adventure doesn’t moralize about this. You are not penalized or rewarded in some way for a choice (other, of course, than for saving the prince.) 

There are hints of other things in this that really hit. There are noble estates behind enemy lines. One daughter, her father dead, needs money. She goes to the underworld for a loan. In return, she tells them of treasure in her family’s estate. Again, behind enemy lines. That is one of the potential hooks, and not a bad one. This hook, deserters, criminals freed to war, growing up in the shadow on the front line city of a twenty year war; the desperation is present in nearly all of the hooks. This is a better Midnight adventure than anything Isaw for Midnight (although I didn’t see much of it.)

You’re playing on a hex map, six mile hexes, 16×18 hexes or so. The action is going to start three or so hexes from the front lines. The hexes are loosely connected with some hints/roads/trails/etc that can lead from one to another, along with wandering patrols and other encounters for the “empty” hexes. It’s ok, but, as always, I would really like to see a standard set of “what you can see/travel” rules in hex crawl based adventures. Hey man, who wants to pick up a loyal zombie horse that eventually falls apart? This IS a higher level adventure, levels four to six, so while individual enemies are low HD, maybe 2 HD or so, there can be A LOT of them. Like, thirty in some cases. This is a warzone with smaller patrols, larger patrols, and larger units running around, human (mostly rogue elements or looking for the prince behind enemy lines) or fey. And, other things, besides the zombie horse you can discover some primitive weevil men, death;y afraid of fire, gorging themselves on flour. Who might also know a few things … 

So, there are these ‘evil’ dwarves that have totally conquered the underworld. Wiped everyone out. But, they now have no women. So they stole a magic flower from the fey plane, while has turned the fey realm to glacial ice. The fey are PISSED. Oh, and they framed humans, leaving a dead human behind. They are growing new wives with the flower. Put they pissed off a lot of people in their genocidal conquering of the underland. Maugrim, the Night Witch, has had her people wiped out and has captured the flower/growth complex and put in it a giant guardian, aided by another ‘last of his people’ intelligent giant spider. So, beyond rescuing the prince, the initial theme, you can also discover the dwarves, their lies about the witch, the witch, the flower, and even take it back to the fey to end the war, possibly. These are some nice tie ins. 

Pretty good overall. A little more specificity in the human encounters, their personalities, ravaged by war, would have been nice. And the religious element isn’t really covered at all. That specificity for the soldiers could have been in to that a little more. It just needed a little more in the way of, I don’t know, despair, especially in the terrain, perhaps? But, also, it has to walk that line of knowing it is a D&D game, and not going too deep. Overall, it doesn’t a decent job, but just comes off a little flat in places, maybe because you can tell with a little more work it COULD have been the best rendition of the grimness of actual war life. Well, it probably still is the best at that have been achieved yet, and I’m not sure it COULD have done more and still be Just A Game.

This is free at DriveThru.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/539491/eldritch-borderlands?1892600

Posted in Level 5, Reviews, The Best | 6 Comments

Into the Many-Towered Twilight

Posted on March 18, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Nikoline
Self Published
OSR
Levels 2-6

Kurhan has three hills: Tell Os and Tell Hyr and Tell Kur. Of these, it is Tell Kur who is oldest and most feared. She is mother to the rest; it is on her windswept summit, girt with castles of black stone, that the dead are left for excarnation. Many are her towers, product of pre-human hands; and many are her pits, where in silence the dead of former days await dissolution. Of all these tombs, greatest is the New Necropolis. The veil is thin here; things watch hungrily as it wanes. Even a careless breath could tear it down. And then all would be washed away, into the many-towered twilight . .

Hey, go check out the preview and get excited by it.

This 75 page adventure presents a mound/barrow/graveyard/necropolis complex with, oh, 150 or so areas. It’s dong a pretty decent job of the whole “melting of the afterlife in to this one” thing, and dumps in some other factions, in camps, to spruce up the living element. The situation is complex, the factions complex, the environment complex … there’s a lot going on.  Needs more focus, but absolutely something worth checking out.

“Oh, Bruce would give Thracia threshing!” Yes, I would. And I would also say that you should check it out. And I’m gonna do the same here. I suspect this is everything that we all hoped in our hearts that Bree and The Narrow Downs would be. It’s also wrapped in a degree of obscure that does little to help the DM out, in spite of an obvious attempt having been made to do so.

The map here is quite interesting. Let’s imagine a barren hilltop. Arrayed on and around it are a variety of barrows, monoliths, towers, and earthworks and mounds. There’s a kind of three-tiered works here, with the earthworks having some gates in them. This results in some large open-air areas surrounded by towers and doors/entryways in to mounds. Maybe three dozen mounds and towers in all. This results in an interesting way to approach, fro an adventuring standpoint, with many of the areas almost being stand-alone little endeavors. Once, that is, you can negotiate the various factions who have made camp and are running around. Each little section is almost like a stand-along tomb, with a few chambers to explore. Shades of that tower adventure by Gillspie. And then there’s the underground section where things get weird, maybe half the size, in locations, but made up of (among other things) massive corridors and areas. 

The individual environments are interesting. A tower, with no entrance, gaining the top shows yo stairs choked with rubble and urns. A collapsed dome you can enter through. Do some drugs and have the world twist and leer at you a little and see new doorways to explore. A combination of mundane entrances excavations and climbing, and hidden paths opened through mystical means. You’re not handicapped here, at all, by a designer imposing their will. It’s just an environment you can explore, and sus out how to get where you want to go. Including shovels and sledgehammers. You are, literally, tomb robbers, and will be well-rewarded with things like skulls whos eye sockets have been filled with molten lead. A lance, in a corpse, pulled out you can dig out the spearhead from the cavity, and the still gooey intestines. That then crumble to crust. Hmmm, wonder what is going on there? And, of course, noise has consequences in many places. There’s a lot of hidden depth here, from the easy nd obvious to the obscure. All waiting to be exploited by a smart party. IN room 3, “If the gleaming spear-point ( 0c ) is driven into the crack in the east door, …” well … that’s a stretch?

The rooms are dense. Treasure, noise, environmental things, barriers, creatures. It’s extensively cross-referenced, thank god, given the interconnections. And it’s also pushing the line of what is and isn’t easy to dig through. The writing doesn’t help much, with padding words. Not the usual over-description, but rather A LOT of if statements, like the “if the gleaming spearpoint” and so on. That could all be reworked to be more direct and to the point and ease the cognitive load. It’s also leaning a bit purple in places, with phrases like “A ring of standing stones made crooked by time, A round tower, black against the sky..”  or, for our clauses “If one of the flagstones is removed (STR 40 total), underneath is a skeleton bedecked in finery of soapstone , jade , and gold ( 600c ). In its ribcage is a live, warm liver. It crumbles to ash if removed.” Not the most evocative writing but there has clearly been an effort at trying to bring some life to the environment. 

There’s a timeline for the factions, they want things and will pursue them and are not generally hostile, at least in the beginning, to the party. And then also there’s a major point of the various gates in the complex being opened. As you do so the description of some rooms change, based on how many gates have been opened. “I The e?gies sway and creak; bones weft through them rattle. The branches above block the light. ? If shone with torchlight, they cast back lifelike shapes on the far walls. After 1 turn, these begin to move as 1d6 shadows , seeking blood.” (Imagine an offset bullet point there) That’s the effect after one gate is opened. You get little vignettes in some places, and  real effects in others, hidden passages and so on. Delving too deep may require sealing the gates again, temporarily with blood and wax seals or through human sacrifice for a permanent deal. Ouch. Nice consequences for those shamelessly plundering tombs. 

I’m a big fan of this. It’s relatively rare to see something with both this breadth and depth to it. You can come back to places for more. The factions add even more. There are shades of here of classic adventures, and the exploration element is front and center while still containing those moments of terror from the monsters … and people. Every time you go to buy something large THIS is what you are hoping to find and which you seldom see. The faction elements could be a little stronger with perhaps reinforcements to keep them fresher, and the writing is a little too dense to be immediately scannable. But it absolutely rewards play. This is a good adventure. And to think, it keeps a tomb-filled adventure from getting stale! Thisis 100% going in to my Dungeonland game tomorrow.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2.50. The preview is eighteen pages. It shows you the aboveground map and several encounters. Great preview! And, worth more than the $2.50 of PWYW. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/557063/into-the-many-towered-twilight?1892600

Posted in Reviews, The Best | 7 Comments

Orestruck

Posted on March 16, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Amanda P.
Weird Wonder
Cairn/OSR

Orestruck is an adventure module for Cairn and other adventure role playing games. Adventurers arrive in Pact, a village in the Tannic Forest, and discover multiple problems: a corpse thief, a cruel gang leader hunting a privateer and her crew, and a miner rescue mission into the nearby Capellia Cavern where a monstrosity gnashes victims with pincers made of stone and bone.  Within the Forest lurk two minor gods, the Dreamers, who seek mortal servants to enact their bloody wills. 

This 44 page adventure presents a three-level mine/cavern with about seventeen rooms, supported by a small overland area and town. It leverages several situations going on to create sine factions play and has a decent amount of interactivity for its small main dungeon size. Evocative writing could be a bit better, but a solid adventure that is, perhaps, just a little off with its timings.

The crux of the adventure is this line in a backstory: “Captain Enid raided a smuggler’s ship and stole something precious from the city lord Melchior.” This puts Enid on the run, having letters of marque retroactively revoked. Power comes from your ability to enforce your will, and Melchior (offscreen) has hired a mercenary band to bring in her bounty. She’s fled to known ground, a place she grew up, a place where her sister still is, and where her former lover now rules as a lord. A lord who is still in love with her, in a way; ala “I’ve always got a thing for the chick I was infatuated with in high school. Oh, and my spouse is now dead …” Thus the mercs are in town trying to find Enid, and will kidnap her sister eventually to serve as leverage, as well as being generally a rough group of almost-outlaws. The Lady in charge has an issue also, with her mine nearby having been overrun and miners now in town lamenting and licking their wounds and she needs that mine problem solved. Oh, and, as a sideline, it would be great if you found Enid for me. Which is a delicate matter she dances around. And then there’s a huckster who has dug up a local grave to see the finger bones as charms of protection against the mine monster. And, the mine/surrounding area has a history and the recent bloodletting has reawakened an old god/spirit who’s got an agenda also. This is the backdrop for the party getting to the mine, meeting pirates, mercs, miners, god-servents, and the rest along the way in the mine and on the way to it. This is all supported by a little timeline to help the mercs, in particular, drive things forward with their kidnapping of the sister, etc.

This is the way you do factions and complex environments. People want things, they are running around with their own goals, and you stick the party into a dungeoncrawl that is enhanced but the party’s navigation of the social aspect to it. These are enhance with little snippets of specificity. So, the miners are motivated by making money to send back home to their families. Historically accurate, very relatable, and lets you run them with their worry and angst. The guy who had his dad dug up? “Symon is a boatman but his father was a musician who left him debts and a tuning fork.” Well, we can see from that how he probably talks about his dad. A “non-hostile) troll lives under a remote bridge in the forest, a bridge that has been destroyed and he is rebuilding. “but runs, cursing his if attacked or menaced. He has many petty grievances.” Gonna help him rebuild his bridge? Or at least commiserate with him on his petty grievances? The villagers include this snippet: “No villager will spend a night in the forest if it can be avoided due to half-remembered superstitions. Locals often utter sayings like “Tricky as a Dreamer”””. A hint to the forest spirit/godlings. This is all great specificity and adds to the fun. It’s relatable, and when an adventure is relatable it helps both the DM in running the encounter and in the party relating to it. The town and overland are mostly going to be opportunities for the party to learn, make friends, enemies, and so on. You can get in to trouble but the bend of the encounters tend to be a trigger happy party getting in trouble and a calmer one picking up a side-quest or getting some kind of advantage. Mamma spider wants someone to carry her (fist-sized) babies out of the swamp to dry land. She doesn’t SAY that, but the way the encounter plays out is that way if you are cautious and don’t start stabbin. And if you can figure this all out you’ll get a decent magic item from mamma. There is A LOT of fun to be had in the town and overland ,and it’s one of those things where you, as the DM, can just SEE how things are, gleefully, going to play out. You’re looking forward to running them. And that’s fucking good. Lots of weirdness. It’s great.

Inside the three level mine/caverns have a few ways between levels, waterfalls, chasm bridges, statues to fuck with and a lot more. Some skeleton dudes want to eject you from the dungeon in order to save you. Those fucking godlings were handing out side-quests in the forest and now the payoff comes. Surprise! They are assholes and there’s consequences to their seemingly-benine tasks. Miners and people trapped. The pirate crew moored in an underground lake firing cannon at a swimming undead monstrosity. Frankly, the dungeon stands well on its own, but when you add in the mercs, their leverage, and a great beast rushing through the caverns gobbling up anything it finds, its pretty damn good. 

Text is decent. “A natural bridge, 10 feet wide, spans the natural cavern chamber which is 5 feet across. There is a roaring subterranean river 15 feet below. A waterfall thunders to the south. Stalactites hang overhead. Mushroom clusters and puddles fill impressions in the stone.” Not the most evocative, but it covers the ground well, leaning towards facts rather than relating the emotion of an environment. There could, and should, be more of that. I can quibble at the cannonfire and flashes from it not going on outside its own room. And the great beast rushing around, almost as an environmental hazard, could use a little bit more. Treasure is light on the coinage side of the house, this being for Cairn, so a little beefing up there would go a ways as well. 

This is a decent little adventure, both with and without the factions running around. You’re not going to fall over yourself to run this, but I think it’s th kind of solid adventure that I wish we saw more of.

This is $12 at DriveThru. The preview is the first twelve pages. You get to see the factions, town, and a few forest encounters. I would have preferred a page of mine/cavern encounter also, but I think you get a good sense of the faction possibilities from the preview, and a bit of the forest weirdness.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/534673/orestruck?1892600

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The Thicket (Arden Vul)

Posted on March 14, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Richard Barton
XRP
OSRIC
Levels 1-3

The Green Fang kobolds have existed on the fringes of the human settlements of northern Burdock’s Valley for decades, secure in the strange, thorny thicket surrounding the Broken Knob. Until recently they were content to hunt, forage, and generally avoid human contact. But reports of open assaults on merchants, caravans and travelers using the road from Gosterwick to Deepton are mounting. The formerly timid kobolds seem to have become aggressive and hostile. Why? Eusebia, the Archontean thesmothete in Gosterwick(AV AK-23), has had enough. She has quietly let it be known that she is willing to fund an expedition to cleanse the Thicket of this scourge, once and for all. It should be easy work – after all, how much trouble can kobolds pose?

This 55 page adventure uses about thirty pages to describe about 66 rooms inside of a thorny thicket, and some tunnels underneath it, full of kobolds and plant monsters. I might call it an exercise in self-indulgent backstory and explanations WHY. 

This is an expansion of the Arden Vul product, providing some outdoor areas to expand the area around the dungeon proper. In this case it’s a magic thicket with some kobolds living in it, and in some tunnels under it. There’s a druid spirit controlling it and he feels protective of the kobolds so he’ll manifest some plant monsters if you fuck with them. There are a few connections to Arden Vul, like the kobolds sending prisoners to the Beast Men and such. 

I do not like it Sam-I-Am. I know a bunch of you like to suck off Arden Vul. I thought it was ok. This is not that though. It’s been awhile since I reviewed Arden Vul, but I can’t imagine giving it any kind of decent grade based on the issues that are all over this thing. I don’t know what’s going on. Same designer. Same editor. But the writing style here just feels COMPLETELY off and different from Arden Vul.

Primarily this comes from a degree of text verbosity achieved through explanations, backstories, whys, for whos. This is present to an absurd degree that seems self indulgent to the extent that we’re paying for fiction rather than an adventure. I really mean this The fucking hooks take up three pages and that’s not because of the specificity provided to help the DM run them memorably. 

This thing engages in backstory for just about everything. Worry not, sturdy DM, for if the players ask WHY there’s a rock you just ad-libbed in then the adventure will provide the context! Here’s a rom with a couple of ghouls in it: “Backstory: The ghouls are the corrupted legionaries from a konturbs of the II Legion (Sheepshead Rangers), whom the Archon Adrienic deputed to accompany Ingerikos on his expedition to this area. They employed a local guide called Wulthrith. Told to wait in the cellar while Wulthrith and Ingerikos inspected the barrow doors, they became trapped in the cellar after Wulthrith betrayed and killed their master (see BV1-16, BV1-28, and BV1-35) and then collapsed the upper story of the villa. Abandoned and trapped, the legionaries consumed all their food supplies while waiting fruitlessly for assistance, before some finally turned on the others in desperation; having killed and eaten the others, eight of the twelve killed rose as ghouls.”  Whats the fuck man?! What the fuck is the point of any of that? I don’t need to know this shit. Maybe describe the fucking ghouls as legionaires or something, but all of this? 

The adventure does this over and over and over and over again. Its favorite hobby is doing this. Here, I pulled out this one in the dungeon below. It runs across two pages, taking up more than a column of space. TO NO FUCKING END. There is absolutely no point to any of this. MAYBE some of this can eek out as a room description. And the “takes a dim view” thing is nice. But the rest of the, the vast majority of over a column of text, is just garbage padding to no end. This is all trivia. It serves no purpose in any way other than a phD paper or maybe a museum exhibit. Hey, did you want to know, in the backstory, that “During her lengthy sojourn at the Knob, Grishia lightly modified the interior of the barrow and added a colossal statue of Phagtro atop the Knob (BV1-36).” That’s not even room backstory, that’s introductory backstory. Who the fuck cares about any of this?! “Oh, I like it!” Fuck you. Fuck you all to hell. This kind of self-indulgent shit is the ruin of tabletop adventures. I could maybe understand more if this were a singular work, but its got an editor attached, Joe Browning. There’s no way he doesn’t know better. What was the effort here, spell checking?I’m just aghast at seeing this in 2026 from XRP. I’m stunned.

And then there are things that just don’t make sense. Yeh yeah, D&D, elves shooting fireballs from their asses. No, in a different way. Those ghouls? They are trapped in like a one room basement. For several hundred years. They didn’t dig out of the fucking basement? And they have tools with them! And are roman soldiers! It’s fucking nuts. Whatever, you wanted ghouls there, got it. And the layout of that room? You have to get to the cellar to learn that the ghouls plead to get out, not in the room  above the cellar where the he voices of the ghouls would be heard. “Uh, oh yeah. I guess you heard some people begging to be let out, as you remove the last beam.” It’s fucking maddenning.

The kobolds cover their entrances, their WELL USED entrances with a 2’ thick mat of thicket thorns. This hides them like a secret door. Fuck no. You don’t get to use something in the natural world frequently and remove and replace a 2’ thick mat of thrown frequently and have that remain well hidden, magic thicket or not. And I’m not saying this from a nit-picky standpoint, I’m just giving this as yet another example of shit in this that just don’t make sense. Lots and lots and lots of backstory but for all that explanation there’s just stuff all over the place that just doesn’t make sense from a design standpoint or a suspension of disbelief standpoint. 

The spirit in charge of the thicket can manifest up to EIGHT 3HD plant monsters PER HOUR. THREE HD. In a level one to three adventure. And it will do this if you kill four or more kobolds. And any combat with the kobolds is 20% likely to manifest the 3HD plant monsters. 

There is no fucking way this was playtested AT ALL. How do I know that? Because there’s no way you can toss a bunch of 3HD plant monsters at the party, along with Tuckers Kobolds hit squads, at a party and not get a TPK. Not at levels one to three. It’s fucking impossible. 

The kobolds have cleared the land around the thicket, so you pass through open meadow to approach. They have guard posts up in trees all over the place. They have false entrances. They have ambush spots. They have hit squads. They have trained giant weasel and trained giant fucking boars! At levels one to three! Along with, of course, all of those 3HD plant monsters, eight per hour. If you are gonna put in a 100HD orc in the middle of a bunch of 1HD orcs then you have to telegraph that shit. 

I can’t imagine what work there was done on this prior to publication. Not on the fucking map of the thicket, proper, which is a pain in the ass to read. It took me forever to find entry “4” on the fucking map. 

Ok, so, the kobolds have some prisoners, one of the hooks says. We’re gonna ignore that. And it’s hard to burn the place out, magic thicket that regrows and all that shit. (it takes FIVE TURNS to chop out on 10×10 area for passage) And, of course, the kobolds and plant monsters. But, still, I think haunted housing this is best. Bring in a hundred hired hands, set up a camp, systematically burn it out with oil, and then flood the underground with the stream in the thicket. Then go pay the cornice to sift the ashes for loot. 

Doesn’t that sound like fun? It sounds more like a hex crawl thing to me. Beyond the text padding shit, and that this is mostly a hack, it sets the party up for failure. You’ll have to warn them, very heartily that this one is different and needs to be approached differently.

This is $15 at DriveThru. The preview is seven pages., You get to see some backstory. Don’t worry, you’ll get to see a lot more in every room. Poor preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/553194/the-thicket?1892600

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Plundering the Athenaeum of Ilth

Posted on March 11, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Dale L Houston
Duck and Crow Press
OSR
Level "Veteran"

A festering swamp steeped in ancient mystery, treasure-hungry lake pirates scouring the region, angry alligator people defending their holy sites, and weird dungeons exuding a sense of impending doom. Seriously – what more do you want from an adventure? Explore and plunder the ruins of the Athenaeum of Ilth before it is too late!

This 48 page adventure presents a faction-laden “alien” complex with an overgrown swamp persona. You can see hints of greatness in the factions, although the room descriptions tend to have a weird lack of overall vibe while noting specifics well.  Needs a little shit-stirring with the factions to give the dungeon some pep.

Ok, we got this BIG ass lake with a swamp over on one side of it. Rumor has it there’s loot in them there hills! Or, there was a giant light beam that shot out in to the dark sky, or there are pirates there. The people in town on the west side say that there ARE pirates to the west of the lake. Oh, and to watch out for crocs. Turns out there are some crocodile people living in some ruins in the swamp. Very interesting ruins. A giant ziggurat eventually, but some minor sites before you find the ziggurat. O, and the pirates are there looting (with a pirate town provided !Yo ho ho!) So, you gonna wander around till you find the swamp ruins, go in and out of them, meet pirates and crocodile people and so on. Until the AI in order detects trouble in the alien ruins and beams down some creatures to ‘decontaminate’ the site. AKA: monsters kill absolutely everything in a few hexes. Turns out the croc-people were once far more advanced than they are now. Oh, and maybe they created humans by feeding magic potions to apes. Shades of that last Alien movie I saw with the engineers and black goo and shit. 

What this brings to the table is some mini-ruins of a few rooms, a larger ziggurat complex, cros-people with a couple of factions, pirates with maybe a couple of factions, a stranded/captive linguist, and enough room to breathe, for the most part, to let all of this play out. The adventure provides some wandering tables for different regions, to support you travelling to the nearest settlement and then on the adventuring sites, either by boat or foot. And the wandering tables and rumors slot in the adventure well, theming it pretty decently. From there perhaps you discover a ruined campsite, and the ruins nearby. Which MIGHt kick off clues to other sites or start the party on the “decontamination” part of the adventure, the timer to finish things off with. You may find out about the pirate camp, or even the pirate town, opening up new opportunities that are supported by the adventure. Or meet the croc-people, learning they have two factions. And then perhaps they bring out the captured linguist, who can tell you they refer to all humans as “talking food.” Well, that certainly recontextualizes our relationship with the friendly faction … The more you explore ruins the greater the chance the decon protocol gets triggered and monsters start beaming down. Forcing everyone to once again look at their priorities, who they will befriend and what they will allow. Ith hex travel taking a day, and “exploration” rolls revealing multiple levels of information in a hex, maybe four smaller ruin sites, a pirate camp, town, pirate town, croc-people village, the main ziggurat site and the decon process there’s enough room and time for relationships to change. This is the kind of sandbox-type environment, with relationships, that you need to support this more in-depth and complex play style. 

The rumors tables are different based on who you are talking to. There’s a pages of DM support checklists to track faction relationships and progress to decontamination, as well as a host of other things. Paying attention leads to clues to other things. For, maybe, fifty rooms total in about fifty pages the hexes and relationships make this a potentially dynamic environment in which the usual “page count to encounter count” ratio I look at breaks down. The support information ALL contributes to the actual adventure and is a part of the adventure rather than just being useless fluff. 

The descriptions of the locations are a little hit and miss. Or, rather, they don’t start off strong but their individual elements have that specificity I’m looking for that brings a site to life. There’s a brief offset section at the start of each location that has some descriptive bullets, followed by some DM information. So, for one of the ruin locations, we get this as an “outside” description: “A leaning, 2-story tower in the center of a reedy pool. Crude struts hold it in place.” That’s some good details. Reedy. Struts. And then for the DM information we get “Entrance: The first floor is damp, but not flooded. A rusted iron gate (open with a Standard Strength Check) blocks stairs leading down.” These are ok. Terse, tells you what you need to know. But, also, you don’t really get “ruins in a swamp” out of it very well. And that’s what I mean by the general environment just doesn’t come through very well. The more general atmosphere for each location just isn’t there. Not that it doesn’t hit, it just isn’t there. In another nearby room inside we get “This chamber is rather warm. Horse-sized stones with flat tops scattered evenly.” The chamber, proper, isn’t present in that description. There are some general notes about “Inside the ruins all surfaces are metal. Corridors are 10’ wide and the ceiling in all areas, unless otherwise noted, is 12’ high.” But, again, those general notes don’t hit in combination with the room description. 

And this weirdly continues in areas like treasure. I think it’s quite low. Yeah yeah, compatible with all OSR systems. It’s Veteran level, we need some cash. And yet when we look at the Power Cores, looting central to the adventure, “Each core is a cone 8” long. The base

is a 5” diameter circle stamped with cuneiform of the station name (Adap, Kish, or Lagash) or a numerical code. Each core is worth 1500$.” As a curio? “A pillar displaying a golden mesh.” How much for the gold? No clue. 

So, for the croc-people we get some great specificity like “Even basic and failed attempts speaking their Ilthtori will be well received.” That’s great! But time and again it feels like there is just a little bit missing, in almost every aspect. One room will have waist-high water leaking from the ceiling, or unidentifiable shapes scurry away under the water. Another will have “An enormous corpse covered in scavenging creatures” and nothing else about it. The factions are laid out well, and you can get very excited them. But they lack dynamism. Great overviews. Long term plans. But the short to mid term plans of them are missing a few ideas to get the DM going.

Blarg. Duck & Crow, and Dale, are doing some great things here. There’s just a little bit missing, a little bit out of place, keeping these from being some of the best 

This is $12.50 at DriveThru. The preview is fourteen pages. You get to see those referee tools, the factions, some overland, pretty much everything EXCEPT a few rooms. It really need to include a few of those to be a great preview. Still, I think the preview is enough to get you excited, just not enough to let you know what to expect.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540651/plundering-the-athenaeum-of-ilth?1892600

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The Lair of the Bog Lich

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 1-2

A village deep within the steaming marshlands is experiencing strange phenomena. More and more villagers rise from their beds at night in a mindless stupor, wandering out into the bog never to be seen again. The desperate villagers have promised a great reward to anyone who can find their loved ones and stop whatever dark magick stole them away.

This eight page adventure uses three pages to present six rooms inside of a small dugout/ruined basement. It is trying to do the right things, generally, but confuses form over function, resulting in a muddled mess of rooms in which you generally just stab things.

My complaints here seem familiar to me. Which must mean that I have reviewed this publisher/designer before and then picked something else out to give them another chance and see if the issues I had were a trend or a fluke. And then forgot what I was doing when I rolled back around a couple of weeks later and ended up thinking “wow, this seems familiar.”

Only three of the five pages are actually used for the adventure. Meaning that all of that effort from the other five pages could have reasonably been put in the actual dungeon instead of the support material for the dungeon. THE ADVENTURE IS THE MAIN THING. Spend your fucking effort on the actual adventure. THEN, after you have created a masterpiece, you can add in some support material. 

At the start of each room is a little sentence of two in italics. Is it read-aloud? Is it a room summary? Fuck if I know. Sometimes it seems like read-aloud and sometimes it reads like a room summary for the DM. “You spy a ruined tower behind a curtain of willow leaves, naught

more than a collection of crumbling stone walls.” That seems like read-aloud, right? I mean, it’s in italics and thats shity and it’s in second person and that’s shitty and it’s got that folksy shit and that’s shitty. But, it seems like read-aloud? But then in other places it seems more like a DM room summary? “Behind the gate, a long rectangular room holds a pool of thick,

oozing mud in the middle.” If the room had people screaming in it, or was brightly lit with a broadway show going on, or had an obvious huge ancient red dragon in it then that little summary section would not tell you. But it seems like in read-aloud it should? So … I’m confused. What the fuck is the point of the the italics text that kicks off every encounter/location? I don’t get it. Not read-aloud. Not a DM summary. I don’t know, REALLY bad read aloud?

Because, again, there can be a shit load going on in the room that the read-aloud/summary text just does NOT cover. The description up there is just fucking weird.

After that comes a lit of bullets. Yes, this is the “we use bullets for everything” kind of adventure formatting. That’s not necessarily a good thing and does NOT always lead to better idea presentation. Anything, used too much, becomes cover. If everything is a bullet then nothing is, right? And therefore nothing is emphasized for presentation to the DM? The same with the bolding that occurs INSIDE each bullet. It’s not that all information needs to be bulleted and each noun or whatever in each bullet needs bolded. The use of formatting is for emphasizing and highlighting, calling out to the DM certain things that are important or that they may need to find quickly or something like that. “Hey, this thing here is more important than some of the rest so pay attention to it. “ And you can’t do that if you use the techniques for EVERYTHING. 

The random tables here are weird. Here’s a six entry random table on alternate names for swamp. Fen, mire, bog, etc. Why do that? Why not just present the data if you want to do that? There are, I don’t know, half a dozen of these sorts of tables taking up space. A waste of space, IMO, And in other places, like the wandering table, the entries are doing something. Yeah! But it’s so mundane that they might as well not be. “Crocodiles, laying in wait,” Ok … “Carcass crawler, digesting its last meal.” Sure. There’s no specificity there. A body half sticking out if its mouth? Ok, I’m down with that. “Laying in wait.” B O R I N G. What put it in at all?Bt, then, in a work of genius, on the map page there’s a little three-entry table for “who is held prisoner. “ Things like “pox-riddled peasant sobbing quietly.” ey! Great! War veteran missing limbs. Great! Thief trying to pick the lock. Great! Each has specificity. And that makes them worth putting in. Likewise the “random gore” table on the same page is great. It’s like those two tables were done by someone else because they are the only two that really stand out as interesting and actually adding value to the adventure. 

“Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” That’s one o the bulleted items in the DM text. Background. Telling us what once was. And the adventure is full of this. The entries are full of nonsense. “How to make an entry seem long but not actually add any value” Window dressing effects. “It glows blue” Backstory. “Once a watchtower used to survey the area, time and weather have left it in ruins.” Shit like that. But, ultimately, all you do in the rooms is stab something. As one would expect, I guess, in a six room adventure. “I remember a time in America when an eight page adventure contained the Steading of the Hill Giant chief, with two dungeon levels and a gazillion rooms that made sense together!”  Nostalgia is a terrible thing. We remember Steading, one of the best adventures ever from many standpoints, but forget the hundreds of shitpiles that existed also. There have always been shitty adventures and this is just the latest version of them.

I did, however, find this HILARIOUS. “Thelich cast a ritual to reach out into weak-willed minds nearby.” Yeah yeah, there’s a lich, a weak one, and it’s summoning weak willed people to its lair to like suck the life out of them. (Hey baby …) But, then, also in the hooks section: “A random party member begins hearing the lich’s call and is driven towards its lair.” BURN! Your character is weak-willed!  Suck it Galdalf! 

This is $1.50 at DriveThru. There’s no pREEEEEVIIIEEEEWWWWW! You gotta put in a preview man, so we can tell if we want to buy it or not. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555050/the-lair-of-the-bog-lich?1892600

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The Sunken Fortress of Varkooth

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Bryce Lynch 
By Christopher Wilson
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-6

For over a thousand generations, the sorcerer kings of Varkooth held the valley between the Schelus Mountains and the Gray Hills in an iron fist, until the War of the Heavens saw their mighty fortress sink into the very earth. Now, nearly 1,600 years later, that fortress has once more been discovered. Can a group of adventurers stop the evil contained within from spreading once more?

This 103 page adventure uses about forty pages to describe an overland journey and five levels of a dungeon with about a hundred rooms. It is essentially a minimalistic hack expanded to a hundred pages with meaningless trivia and padding. More so than usual.

Characters opening the door should make a Wisdom Attribute check. If they fail then a butterfly flaps its wings in China.

Two weeks away is a dungeon that some archeologists have found, a fabled site. They encountered some trouble and thus the party is hired to come clean the place out for them. You travel overland for two weeks entering many mundane towns and villages (the first forty or so pages), and then explore the five level dungeon where you stab things (the last forty or so pages.) 

I found a few things interesting here. On the journey you may encounter some rangers. They are framed as, perhaps, game wardens who fine or arrest the party if they have been hunting in the area. That’s kind of an interesting framing for rangers. A little out of place given the monsters running around. Maybe they have better things to do given what’s going on? No? You’re gonna write me a ticket anyway? Sure. But, still, nice low fantasy idea. It also puts the monsters on the map with brief notations, great for a DM judging reactions from the next room, and in one place explicitly tells us that the party can hear chanting from behind a closed door. Again, related to the monsters on the map, the dungeon room does not exist in a vacuum, and helping the DM describe what the party senses up ahead is a great then in an appropriate environment.

I feel like this adventure is a textbook example of how to expand an entry without adding any value to it. The result ends up being overly long and obfuscates any meaningful data in the description. We can start right off with a wandering monster table. Here’s the entry for Raiders: “Raiders: Regardless of which kingdom one may find themselves in, there are always those that wish to cause strife. In the Border Lands, raiders are usually from the Kingdom of Beiria, though they make sure to wear no livery.” We have started with “Raiders” and then went on to define what a raider is, “Regardless of which kingdom one may find themselves in, there are always those that wish to cause strife” Yup, that’s what the word raider can mean. Noting the cross-border issue and lack of livery is good, but it would be even better if this were meaningful to the adventure. It is not. There are no cross-border tensions in this. Or, how about a wild boar? “Wild boars are a frequent site in the forests and fields of the Border Lands and the Glaustian Empire. They are frequently hunted by villagers and farmers, though they can prove to be dangerous prey. Wild boars tend to be aggressive and territorial, being encountered in groups of 3d4.” So, 4d4 aggressive and territorial wild boars, with a lead in telling us what a wild boar is. 

It also engages in explaining the mundane. You pass through a non-trivial number of towns and villages on your way to the dungeon, with each being described over several pages. Each. You want to know what a Fishmongers market looks like? It’s in here. It has no relation to the adventure, other than being a place  in the town, but it’s here. No? How about spending a decent sized paragraph describing what an outlying farm is and how they sell their excess on market days and how they pay their taxes? Again, this is just some rando shit in a town along the way. I did mention “text book example” didn’t I? Of adding words but no value? These things are common in this adventure. 

And then there’s the trivia. Imagine if you constructed a room via the DMG1e tables. You rolled for monsters and put in 2d4 kobolds. Then you rolled for furnishings and you got a Stone Throne. So you put this in: “Stone Throne: Dwarven characters will immediately recognize that this throne is of dwarven construction, however, a successful intelligence attribute check, a detect construction tricks check, or a lore check will inform the characters that there is no known connection between Varkooth and the dwarven clans of the region. This begs the question of where the throne came from. It is obviously thousands of years old and will need much further research.”

And this is where my comments about butterfly wings come in. Over and over and over again. “Failure causes the left arm of the statue to break off, in a similar fashion to the right.” Ok. And? Nothing. You come across a bloody altar: “As to the location of the altar’s victim, there is no sign.”  over and over and over again there’s a feature of the room that gets a decent description, as if it should be meaningful and important to play, but it is not. It’s just describing a rock that is in the room. 

And then there are missed opportunities. The adventure ALMOST gets there in some place. “A detect construction tricks check can determine that the room is not safe but will likely hold for some time longer. The stonework of the circular stairs should give anyone pause, as there are several stairs that have crumbled away to gravel. A successful detect construction tricks check can determine that the stairs are sturdy enough for descent at a half movement rate, however” And if I don’t half move? And time and again there are places and things that SHOULD have an impact that get no explanation or description of effects at all. I’d waste most of my characters lifetime restoring and making offerings at altars in this without effect. There are intriguing possibilities that are just ignored while shit like that stone throne, which does nothing, get a description. 

There is little in the way of an OOB. I mentioned monsters on the map, which is good, but nothing beyond that. People stand in their rooms to die. Eve the drow that show up don’t do anything but stand there. “The bugbears have a 2-in-6 chance of hearing the characters coming down the hall, unless the characters are successfully moving silently” Yeah, that’s what move silently does. In one instance there are kobolds that may react: “however, they may be drawn to the sound of fighting above them.” That comes from some kobolds at the bottom of a stair. They would be reacting to the room above them, so to find this and employ it in the adventure you have to actually look at a room on a different dungeon level. How the fuck m I supposed to to that during play? Treasure in rooms that the monster visit, but that they have not looted? Sure! Why not!

There is, actually, very little to set this apart from a hack like B2. Minimal room descriptions expanded upon to column length with little actually adding to the adventure. Is B2 bad? Meh. But I can tell you that B2 expanded to a column per room would be bad if the added text didn’t add anything.

This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is the first six pages, which shows you absolutely nothing of the adventure. The preview is meant to help us determine if we want to buy it, so it should show what the encounters, etc are like.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/554271/the-sunken-fortress-of-varkooth-ose-edition?1892600

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