Six Thoughts On A Thousand Dead Babies

1. An adventure module by Zzarchov Kowalski. Dark secrets in a quiet town, devil cult, some interesting magic items and spells, works with any TSR-era D&D or clone or the author's own system (Neoclassical Geek Revival). Whimsy and disgusting death. Written by Zzarchov Kowalski.

2. The sparse art is the closest I've seen to Sin City era Frank Miller illustrating a D&D module. Jez Gordon did it. He also did that cool map in Qelong. He also plays Man Rider. He is becoming an impressive figure. Why Zzarchov didn't have him do the cover I'll never know.

3. It says "OSR"in it a lot. Most consumers are not going to know what "OSR" means. Unless we assume only the kind of people who'd read this review and so probably know OSR stands for Old School Renaissance (of TSR-style D&D) would ever pick this module up. Which might be true.

4. It is efficient, engagingly written, mechanically solid, and there's a sense of...anticipatory and ominous giggling?--as if the man with the banana peel knows that when you slip on this peel when there stars are in just this position, the laughter will rend the sky.

5. This is integral to recognizing it as special: if you get the joke and dig it, then it's going to seem like clever mischief. If you don't, it's still absolutely playable: there are factions and red herrings and there is a small dungeon with obstacles that would entertain any group I know for an hour or two and it's very possibly still worth your four dollars and your twenty seven cents, it just won't stick out as being terribly unusual.

6. If you like both of these and you like that both appear in the same thing, you'll probably like A Thousand Dead Babies (spoilers--highlight to read):

A SMALL LEATHER POUCH FILLED WITH TEETH
The teeth in this bag are all from an adult human (or humanoid). There are 23 teeth in total, all but 4 are charred. Burning a tooth will cause a billowing cloud of fog to fill the area with 75 cubic feet of fog. They quickly become damaged if exposed to light. 

THE SCROLL OF MANLEATHER

This is a two foot tall rolled up piece of human leather, tied shut with a bloodstained piece of twine. It contains a spell to enlarge a goose into a monstrous bloodthirsty. . . goose. The spell appears to have originally been recorded as a tattoo that someone decided to remove from its previous owner. The spell is called Dire Goose. 

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This 'Qelong' Book Is Out There Operating Without Any Decent Restraint, Totally Beyond The Pale Of Any Acceptable Human Conduct

Fucking tiger, man! Look at this fucking shit we're in, man!

 "

This stupa seems burned from the outside, but intact from the inside. It contains nothing but a scroll, which constantly reads itself in echoing and sonorous tones, unrolling slowly across the lectern with no hand turning it.

        It takes four hours for the scroll to read entirely through itself. The language is unfamiliar and ancient  (-3 to Language checks); it deals with the nature of Time, a god who slowly smothers the other gods to death and drowns their bodies.

        The smell of frankincense and the sound of bells are thick within. Characters inside the stupa who step outside emerge at a different time from the time that they entered (centuries, weeks, hours, back or forward, it is up the Referee); characters outside notice only a few minutes passing.

        If characters leave at exactly the place in the scroll’s reading that they entered, they return exactly to the point when they left from; outside it seems that they only ducked into the stupa for a fraction of a second. Picking up the scroll stops the reading and possibly unleashes a Symbol on all within.

"

I KNOW, RIGHT?

And check out the map:

This is only part of it because, like, I don't want to be giving away all the best parts of the book for free

Right? RIGHT?

After how many years of computer-generated maps we finally get one done right.

So yeah, Qelong is fucking good and stuff.

Alright, lemme put on the helpful, insightful hat:

So Qelong is written by Kenneth "I did more research while I ate breakfast this morning than you did the whole time you were in college" Hite and the rest of the team is mostly kids--rock & rollers with one foot in their grave--the art's by Rich "remember that crinkly crawly sweet art in Carcosa? I did that" Longmore, laid out and cartographied by DIY D&D Designslave #1 Jez Gordon and published by James "I own a machine that turns internet hate into production values" Raggi's LOTFP. It is compatible with all TSR-era-D&D-style games.

It is about like a kind of Apocalypse Now-y Southeast Asian setting with mist and rivers and magic-poisoning and locals at war who want to kill you and take your stuff.

Formatwise, it follows the template of the old '80s TSR setting books and many setting books since:

• Background info with some plot (in this case The Thing That's Up The River)
• List of distinctive features--some exactly what you'd expect given the cultures its modeled on, some intriguingly weird
• Rumor table for the area
• Name generator
• Under-illustrated list of new monsters--some exactly what you'd expect given the culture its modeled on, some intriguingly weird
• Random encounter tables disaggreggated by terrain type
• Nine (unmapped) specific sandbox locations, with details on who's important where
• A couple maps
• All conscientiously statted out and written in expansive paragraph form
• Hideously drab, lurid, rigid cover by an artist capable of much better, though in this case it's Jason Rainville instead of Keith Parkinson

7 bucks, 52 pages, about one usable idea or tool per page, so that's 13 cents per idea. Plus the art is cool.

Personally, I'm packing all this stuff up and sending it to Drownesia by way of Yoon Suin.

Other things you could do...

-Print out the map and start putting settlements using the tag system from Red Tide on it

-Replace the locals with Warhammer goblins who are totally happy that everything around them is poisoned with chaos magic

-Run a domain-level game of mass combat and conquest here over a terrain of ghost-haunted swamp and toxic mist. Because land wars in Southeast Asia always work out well.

-Next time the PCs crash a space ship in your sci fi game, send them here: they're at the mouth of the river, they hit a time filament, and the mcguffin in the Heart of Darkness ruining the water and air is their own warp core, which they're probably wanna get back.

-Fucking just put Colonel Kurtz up there. Make him a naga with 9 Kenneth Hite heads buried up to their necks in mud. Have a ceremony where they're chopping open a big tusked hog.

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Quick Seclusium of Orphone Review

The Seclusium of Orphone is a book about wizard's tower style dungeons.

It is full of really good and often original ideas about rooms, items, creatures and NPCs.

These are, unfortunately, organized into fairly poorly designed tables and lists and multiple choice locations that make the creation of these dungeons harder and slower than they need to be while not gaining a lot from being presented in that format. And this is coming from a guy who loves tables and lists, and multiple choice locations.

So, as a compendium: Awesome!

As a tool: It needs a lot of work.

Most of this is because of stuff I said here or here. But the TL;DR is below:

Basically dungeon creation is set out here like character generation, and as a wise man once said character creation should be slow but interesting or functional but fast. Seclusium swerves violently from the mundane to the magical and (unfortunately) back again over and over--I can see most readers starting off going "I'll use these rules to make a dungeon, that'll be a fun way to kill some time!" then after the first one, or (more likely) a quarter of the way through the first one, taking scrupulous notes on whether the guest rooms are "spartan and bare" or "tiny and cramped", going Fuck it and skimming for ideas and then putting it up on the shelf next to The Dungeon Master's Design Kit and the Central Casting books and every other GM tool you wish someone would read, scrape, and Abulafia-fy to save you time.

When the options on the tables are interesting (which is gratifyingly often) the separate versions don't usually have a pressing need to be in a table or list and don't seem to use that format to their (or the GM's) advantage.

When the options on the table are mundane but essential, the formatting of the tables is too slow for the time it takes to roll on them or choose them off the list to be worth it.

These seem like the kind of random tables that work the way people who hate random tables think they work. "Door opens: 1- In 2- Out 3-4 Pick one".

Also, if it was going to take this slow step-by-step approach, it could've used a worksheet or some other original graphic device to help take all the dozens and dozens (and dozens...seriously) of answers you'd have to give in order to go through the dungeon-making process into a thing with a map that the GM could actually look at and use at the table. If you're gonna hold my hand fucking hold my hand, guy.

(UPDATE: The book claims one of the multiple-choice-dungeons can be done in a half hour, so I tried it. No way. That's not even enough time to answer all the questions, much less draw a map and key it with your answers. And I don't write slow.)

I could go on and on about the format but this is actually a pretty cool book so I don't want to spend much more time bitching about it than I have to.

It also contains some quick rules for making LOTFP (or any other old-school D&D or D&D-like game) less trial-and-error and player skilly and more about character skill and some good but fairly blog-standard dungeon-running advice, if you're into that.

So:

If you want dungeon ideas, you should buy it and you should read it, but afterward you'll probably want to raid it more than use it.

Which is fine and good but a bit of a shame--there is so much worth raiding in RPGs and so little worth using.

Footnote: I've seen a draft of Jeff Rients' "Broodmother Sky Fortress" and it looked to be this format of fill-in-the-blanks walk-you-through-it dungeon done right. Though in terms of raw number of usable ideas, Seclusium is perhaps its equal or better.
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I WENT TO THE ELSIR VALE AND ALL I GOT WAS 8 RULES ABOUT HOW TO WRITE MODULES & A MONOGRAMMED GLASS BONG SHAPED LIKE TIAMAT, Part 6

2 AM

Shower head's dripping.

This morning in Mech Pendragon we fought absolutely no-one for the second session in a row. It was like eating macaroni and cheese two meals in a row: really good but god damn do I want some meat next time.

Then tonight in Vertique, we decided--fairly out of nowhere--to rob the military payroll off a moving train. 60 soldiers vs. 4 PCs, mostly first level AD&D. Survived, no casualties. Insane luck.

Tomorrow I run a game here for the LA people. Including a first time player.

By rights, I should prepare, but instead I'm reading...

RED HAND OF DOOM CHAPTER IV, THE FANE OF TIAMAT

Just like I read the rest of it.

I figure: get enough D&D in your head and you can just run things by opening your mouth and letting it fall out.

Which is probably the best way to read this module: just stuff it in your brain without thinking about it too much and only keep what doesn't immediately drop out of your ears.

2:23 AM

Most of the stationary guards are unique monsters selected by Azarr Kul for their particular abilities and strengths in the rooms they are to watch over. These guardians do not leave their posts except to pursue fleeing characters, and even then they give up pursuit if the PCs leave the Fane entirely, returning to their posts. If they hear battle in a nearby chamber, they prepare themselves for combat but do not abandon their posts.

Because you hear the enemy's penetrated deep into your sanctum and is frying the guards and why would you go check that out, right? I mean, that might result in an EL inappropriate encounter or, worse, require the writers to think of a reason you couldn't just up and leave your room like any other Devilwall Spawnslaster.

2: 30 AM

The dungeon's a building shaped like a giant Tiamat.

Whether you think that's Rientsian Stupid or plain civilian Stupid, the fact is that we already had a boss in a giant building shaped like a lion back in chapter 3. So like dudes come onnn.

But then also y'know I've spent a lot of time in these reviews pointing out missed opportunities, right? But here's the kind of Missed Opportunity Singularity that only comes once in a lifetime. You've got the Tiamat building, right? Each of these heads seems crafted from a different type of stone -- obsidian, alabaster, soapstone, malachite, and marble -- corresponding to the coloration of each head.  And earlier you've got the stone lion building, right? So...

Right? Sooooo close.

Fuck.

So many possibilities.

So close.


2:54 AM

In addition to being like the 900th dragon and dragon-related thing the (6-12th level) PCs fight in this campaign, in addition to casting 2 buffs spells on himself as soon as he detects them, the big blue dragon the party meets here hides and uses magic to change his voice to sound like 5 voices and hides in the giant statue and pretends to be Tiamat talking to scare away the PCs.

That may very well be the saddest thing I ever read.

3:08 AM

After you fight that dragon you fight 5 little dragons from hell (abishai), 2 undead dragons with 2 legs (zombie wyverns), and six dragon people (blackspawn raiders).

I'm going to sleep.


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1:01 AM (the next day)

Pit bull put Mandy's dog in the hospital.

Then we had a game. Because she's like "I gotta get my mind off this".

Game's over, now to finish this thing:

We are in the temple of Tiamat. Absolutely no fascinating imaginative exploration of what a religion founded on the worship of a five-headed death lizard older than time might look like.

1:17 AM

More invisible monsters.

More hell hounds.

More do I weep and sway from weeping, sipping scotch, waiting for Tiamat and praying for an ending.

1:55 AM

Mandy: "You have to find a bugbear sorcerer but they use a nighthag as a cook? People really have their priorities screwy."

Of all places to decide to start trying, why here?

Oh, the hag's alright I guess. She tries to trick the PCs by disguising herself as an enslaved maiden and haunts their dreams. And the PCs can try to trick her, too. But, man, this is Tiamat's House, this fairy tale stuff seems like it belongs in some other part of the adventure. Tiamat doesn't need a crooked crone slingin hobgoblin hash, Tiamat eats baby meat and kingflesh smeared on the butts of popes.

2:14 AM

More wyverns.

More greenspawn razorfiends.

2:26 AM

Warpriests: Dudes, you're in room 13, you're seriously just gonna be sitting here praying when the PCs show up? How did you get this job?

2:31 AM

(take a break from reading the module: Mandy makes a Mech Pendragon PC. Her mechs are 2 Geths, a Dorvack and Fei Yen from Virtual-On.)

3:39 AM

A canopied four-poster bed sits to the southeast, and to the southwest is a large mound of cushions and furs, next to which stands a bejeweled water pipe crafted to look like a five-headed dragon--it appears that up to five people can partake of the pipe using the long, flexible dragon-shaped pipes extending from the body.

3:43 AM

Mandy points out that "Francesca" and "Lucia" sound less like the names of erinyes concubines than someone's maiden aunts.

3:49 AM

Trying to think if there's anything complicated or interesting about the traps in the trap room. Nope. You speak the passwords to get in here or you set off the first trap and you just need to roll a lot of dice properly to deal with the others.

3:52 AM

The interior decorators here sure do like the dragon motif.

3:57 AM

Climax: Boss, lightshow, 4 of a monster you already fought. "...they probably won't notice the PCs until they enter the chamber". 

I know how it is man, one time I got out of the shower and the Army Corps of Engineers had broken in, built a 1/32 scale model of downtown Paris during the 1889 World's Fair with an Eiffel Tower and post-Montgolfier-style balloons with real helium in them and everything in the living room and I was just like What theff....how did......you......? 

Protip for High Wyrmlord Azarr Kul: even if you win this scene and kill the PC party and summon Tiamat, she's gonna have some hard questions about how you let 44 of your friends, highest-ranking employees and lovers die in high level fireball-tossing combat before even so much as leaning out the door for a "Hey Francesca, how's everything going out there?" Middle management is just like that, ok?

And he, of course, turns invisible.

4:22 AM

When/if Azaar Kul dies, Tiamat shows up. A crappy, Encounter Level 12 "aspect" of Tiamat with less than half the hit points of a garden variety max size max age regular dragon. At least she doesn't drink any potions first.

___

11:18 AM 

Comment: 

"What characteristics would something Zak could use out the box have?"

Good question. Let's not be all like hippos wallowing in hate. Let's do something good.

What do we know now?

What did we learn from all this madness?

What's important in a module?

1. Efficiency is Beautiful, Efficiency is Art

Old news:

The entire point of a module is it's convenient. If it takes more time to find information in a module than it takes to make up stuff just as good then it's taking the only unsullied virtue a module can lay claim to and forcing it face first into a bucket of rancid toad semen.

Who does this right? The one page dungeon contest winners. Stonehell.

2. ...As Is Art.

All that said, you will have to put sentences and pictures on the page to have a module. Make them good sentences and good pictures that contain evocative images and ideas that don't already exist somewhere else, or at least not in some other product by your same company, and especially especially especially not in the last chapter you just fucking wrote.

This does not mean write a lot. It often means the opposite. Here's Noisms describing an entire setting in 25 words:

Tibet, yak ghosts, ogre magi, mangroves, Nepal, Arabian Nights, Sorcery!, Bengal, invertebrates, topaz, squid men, slug people, opiates, slavery, human sacrifice, dark gods, malaise, magic.

Who does this right? Death Frost Doom.

3. If You Want To Design A Module, Do Some Actual Designing 

You are in the only profession in the world where people explore possible structural set-ups for open-ended tabletop RPGs. This is your chance to invent something no book or movie or comic or even video game even tries to invent. So do that. Don't short-shrift it.

If your set-up opens up a new possibility (generating rules or structures which the players could use to work through a mass combat in a city environment--to pick a totally not random example) run with it, don't rely on easy and staid structures like railroads and scene-setting: if your audience likes those, they already know where to get them for free.

Who does this right? The Great Pendragon Campaign. Keep On The Borderlands, I guess. Vault of the Drow. Tomb of Horrors. Masks of Nyarlathotep. Nightmares of Future Past. A lot of setting books.

4. Take Advantage Of The Fact You Made People Buy A Book And You Had A Budget

It's a physical thing in the reader's hands.  For the GM it's specifically one more goddamn physical fucking thing in his or her hands. This does not have to be a bug though, it can actually help.

Like maybe put the information on the map. Like maybe put the clue in the picture. Like maybe let the map and the picture describe the place for you. Like maybe let the entries be in an intuitive order that lets them be their own index.

Who does this right?  Oddly, the one page dungeons: and they don't have a budget and aren't physical things.

5. Fuck Off With Your Boxed Text

"Well beginning GMs may need..." ...a crutch so that they never learn to engage their players?

Who does this right? Most people who aren't paid by the word. By some shocking coincidence.

6. Give Players As Many Things To Do And Ways To Do Them As Possible

No, just because it's a module does not mean its a railroad. Put things there that can be interacted with in multiple ways, that can interact with each other in multiple ways, and make them desirable (rather than mandatory) to interact with. 

Who does this right? Death Frost Doom, Caverns of Thracia.

7. Minimize The Stats

This is really an aspect of 1, but deserves a call out because it requires special thought: your stats for your game system are a pain in the ass and a lot of times they don't have anything in them your GM needs to know.

On the other hand, flipping around to get them when you do need them sucks, too. So find a way to manage their presence on the page.

Who does this right? Carcosa, Death Frost Doom

8. Don't Write The Module Cynically

This is pointless advice because nobody who would do it cares about doing a good job in the first place, but here goes anyway:

Don't put things in there you know are shit and you know you yourself wouldn't even use just because hey, fuck it, they're paying you. And, also, pay attention to what you're writing.

And sadly, honestly, I think 1-7 are equally pointless because probably a lot of these things were written by people who didn't care about 8 anyway.
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You push the needle in, Face death's sickly grin....PART 6

ZAK KEEPS READING THE MODULE CALLED RED HAND OF DOOM PART 5

Oh these things I do for you people.

HERE"S THE REST OF IT IN REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.

Chapter 4: The big fight.

Thing That Could Easily Have Been Better #1
(Are they Douglas Adams fans? I'm going to say yes.)

Ok, the PCs have to be at a city (site of the big fight) on Day 42 of the campaign and...I get it: it's a set piece battle. There isn't much point to writing one if you can't guarantee the players show up. So they include some optional railroading devices to get them to the church on time. Fine.

However, if the PCs fuck around and don't get there on their own and you have to have a magic guy gate them in to save the city, you could at least have their failure to show up on time have consequences in the fight and change how it works. Have them show up at a disadvantage, have them show up in a weird place, have them show up scattered by teleporter accident, have something to show that decisions have consequences because that's called a game.

They don't do that.


Thing They Did For No Good Reason That Wasted Space They Could've Devoted To Better Things
Fish meet barrel

They do describe a lot of places in the city:

2. The Stone Wyvern

The Stone Wyvern gets its name from the petrified Wyvern that dominates the inn’s common room. This looming statue takes up half of the room and is mounted on a large upthrust rock that protrudes through the building’s floor from the ground below. The wyvern was petrified more than a century ago by a group of adventurers who were defending the local farmers. An enterprising gnome named Yabaling bought the plot and built a building around the wyvern, figuring that the statue would make an excellent conversation piece. He was right – today the Stone Wyvern is one of Brindol’s most successful inns. Yabaling’s son, Trabalard Yab, runs the inn now. He has developed a healthy fear that some troublemaker might come along and unpetrify the wyvern, but he also worries that getting rid of the statue will hurt his business. As a result, he spends much of his time worrying.


I like that. Though it should just say:

2. The Stone Wyvern

One of Brindol’s most successful inns. The owner has developed a healthy fear that some troublemaker might come along and unpetrify the wyvern, but he also worries that getting rid of the statue will hurt his business. As a result, he spends much of his time worrying.

Similarly: ten lines to tell us a weapons shop sells weapons, five to tell us the market is a market, 

In addition to these descriptions, you also get a full-color map of the city!

...and none of that matters once the fight starts.

The players are not really in control of the tactical decisions about where to fight or allocate resources that affect the fights they get in (a Professor X mental link tells them where to go and who to fight) and the 21 shops, homes and other locations are not mostly places where the fighting takes place and what and who is in them doesn't come into the fight.

So basically the map and details are for a pre-battle, zero-stakes town-interlude (familiar to anyone who has ever played a computer RPG) where there's no time-pressure and therefore no need for a city map at all. 

Thing That Could Easily Have Been Better #2
Innovat....nah, fuck it, deadlines

The design decision that the PCs don't really get to plan the strategy?--that sucks. 

You want an epic-scale fight where the PCs battle multiple dragons, giants and manticores but do not want them to get to play general? If not now in this pseudoTolkien module with the mighty hosts of Tiamat, when in their D&D lives do they get to do that?

Couldn't they at least play "trying not to get killed in a fight far bigger than them"--which would at least mean they could make some decisions about who to fight and use that big juicy citymap to save at least their own asses and get xp-ambitious if they wanted to?

So it's a major lost opportunity and one that goes against the main cool thing about the module: the rest of the chapters give you the bad guys' overall battle plan and its moving parts and lets you figure how to deal with it and in what way. This chapter, the climax of it all, has you getting assigned all over the city like you're the goddamned Wonder Twins and the NPCs (who've been doing fuckall throughout the adventure while your brave PC heroes were fighting lions and taxidermists) get to be Batman.

What you get instead of strategy is a multistage council meeting where at each section the PCs need to try to get on the right side of various issues which don't really change the shape of the fight for them ("Where do we put all the support clerics? Here or there?") and be persuasive. I suppose it is well-designed noncombat for what it is but it's such a pale shadow of what could've been that I don't care and if you do it's because you actually played it and it was fun to do the funny elf voices but man they made you pay for it and they were lazy so I have for them no mercy.

So then the battle starts and there's a bunch of fights. They are all with kinds of creatures you probably  already fought nine times in this module. Another giant/manticore/bugbear/dragon that hates you. The only unusual fight is there's a sniper to take out who is on the second level of a shop and has two monsters on the lower level guarding him. This one at least exploits the city architecture a little.

An inventive GM could probably make all of these scenes epic, but to my mind the quality of the raw material just raises the bar: you got flying dragons and tall buildings and desperation--and the module does nothing with them, really. Just stats and mats.

Look: defending a city from a ravaging tide of pullulating monstrosity is fucking fun as shit. I know that. It'd be great to run this. But I'll be goddamned if this object here with all the pages and the pictures does a damn thing to make it work any better than what you'd come up with on your own.

So then anyway after your little railroad of staged encounters you add up a special victory point score from all the things you've done in the module so far to weaken the host and, if it's high enough, you win the battle. If it's low, you lose it.


Either way, it was all pointless because there's more monsters they didn't tell you about in Chapter Five... but that's tomorrow.
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An Opera About A Five Headed God Dragon And Some Other Ideas Worse Than That, Part 4

Mr S, how many blog entries does it take to get to the center of the freakishly overrated 3e adventure module known as The Red Hand of Doom?

A...one

A...two

A...three

Three!

No, look, it keeps going.

Why aren't you wearing any clothes?

____

Here's what I learned in Red Hand of Doom Part Three: The Ghostlord's Lair

The Ghostlord is real!

The Ghostlord is a bad lich!

The Ghostlord is what Chapter 3 of Red Hand of Doom is about!

The Ghostlord's phylactery is stumbled upon by the party in the last chapter!

The Ghostlord will help the bad guys unless the party stops him!

The Ghostlord has an extensive backstory that doesn't come into play!

The Ghostlord used to be a druid!

The Ghostlord has a lion motif just like the city of...I can't remember, one of the cities in the book!

That doesn't come into play!

The Ghostlord has 10 magic rings and he gave five of them to color coded magical mechanical lion golems! No wait, he didn't but that would be cool right?

The Ghostlord lives in a wood with random encounters!

The Ghostlord's house is a stone lion!

The Ghostlord's house is surrounded by flying ghost lions!

That sounds like a thrift store T-shirt!

The Ghostlord has another thing that they don't just come out and call a dragon but, which, come on, is a dragon!

The Ghostlord doesn't lock his doors!

The Ghostlord has a friend named Ulwai Stormcaller who looks like if Vincent from Beauty and the Beast had a kid with Starfire from the Teen Titans and she grew up to be an S&M hippie with bard levels who wrote an opera dedicated to the glory of Tiamat worth 1,000gp!

The Ghostlord's house is full of Doom Fist Monks and Doom Hand Clerics!

The Ghostlord chapter has invisible monsters again!

The Ghostlord is like guess what's in the pool! What? A lion.

The Ghostlord just wants his phylactery back, so once the PCs break into his house, kill everyone in it, and trawls through his stuff, he lets them go if they give it back!

The Ghostlord Chapter takes more than half the length of the entire Keep On The Borderlands pages to tell you all that and pretty much nothing else!


Fuck!
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Go forth, Mount your Beasts, and into their Gullets stuff Bread Crumbs Of Divers Sizes, Part 3

In Chapter 2: The Red Hand Of Doom module powerfully evokes all the ignoble and fascinating terrors of war.

No, wait, it doesn't do that, this table on the Middenmurk blog does.

Use it if you get it in your head to run this ridicularious wad I'm in the middle of reviewing...

...summarized by Mandy as follows:

"Wait, Tiamat's advance guard is bugbears? Who taxidermy owlbears?"

Now, where were we...

Introduction

Part 1

ah, ok, Part 2 The Ruins of Rhest

The implacable horde trudges ever forward laying waste to everything in its path.

The PCs can hang around the wartorn villages and deal with all the murder and pillaging or go seek aid elsewhere.

Most of the encounters are like this:

A bunch of hobgoblins. BUT WAIT! "These hobgoblin warriors are armed with composite longbows instead of javelins as described in the Monster Manual." Whoa. THAT'S NUMBERWANG!

or

Greenspawn razorfiend? Go fuck butts. You're a dragon.

These are mainly disappointing for the amount of space they take up on the printed page, but shouldn't be actually that bad to play out. The better ones include...

One of the injured townspeople is actually a shapechanging spider-woman wizard spy.

The bad guys starting tracking the PCs using barghests.

The monsters set a trap for the PCs using fake prisoners to lure them in.

There are detailed contingency plans for if the PCs get captured (down to which room of which dungeon they'll be locked in depending on what version of their plan the horde is enacting) and if they try to sneak into the main camp and assassinate the army's bosses (down to the names of the pair of ladies sharing Kharn's bed. I told you everything I know I learned from Tiamat.)

The advice on handling interpersonal roleplaying using skill checks is solid: if the PCs' approach is good, add a bonus to the check, if it isn't, deduct a penalty from the check. Not that anyone should need that advice, but it beats a lot of modules I've seen, where the player's tactics are completely ignored outside combat. Again: Expedition To The Ruins of Greyhawk, it is in the direction of you which I am looking.

The random encounters here have more hydras and manticores on them. Why they aren't invisible I'll never know.

But Chapter 2 is about so much more than joylessly bludgeoning you with standardization and repetition, it's also about joylessly bludgeoning you with hippies. Wood elves from Starsong Hill who ride giant owls to be exact. They're your friends.

Did you hope something named Red Hand of Doom would be cooler than that? I kinda hoped something named Red Hand of Doom would be cooler than that.

I won't say I expected it to be. Official D&D modules are always like that, you ever notice? Dragon Mountain is about a bunch of towns and then a bunch of kobolds and a dungeon set up like It's A Small World, not a dragon, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is about going to a space office building, Temple of the Frog is more about laser guns than a creepy amphibian religion, Dwellers in the Forbidden City is about monsters in caves, Castle Greyhawk has Spock and Kirk drinking beer with Spider Man with four arms in the background, and even Ravenloft is not a gothic horror but a themed dungeoncrawl about as spooky as Frankenstein meets the Wolfman. Why can't anyone at D&D ever seem to just decide that after you name an adventure after an evocative and cool idea then make the goddamn adventure about that cool idea?

Anyway the elves have giant owls and don't even have the decency to therefore live in a weird owl-accessible aerie with crazy beams or levels or a giant dovecote or whatever. They just live on a hill. If you're gonna have 6th level PCs face an army with ninety manticores and ten dragons in it you might as well take advantage of how nuts you just made everything.

Here's a nice touch: evidence of a dead elf is found in the what-i'm-just-gonna-call-a-dragon's teeth, so the elves have a funeral. That gives the PCs something to interact with once they come back, and they can make some Perform checks to impress the elves at the no doubt Burning-Man-esque festivities afterward.

Then the PCs have to infiltrate a city of lizard men and reptile women and there is another good GM tool: a list of what PCs see if they observe for one, then two, then three hours, etc.

Only even though it is an abandoned, flooded city, the lizard people don't get cool sword & sorcery digs like the Fiend Folio told us they did...

...nope, just huts. Meh.

A long dagger has been thrust up through the table from below, its thin blade protruding from the table's center. No less than three dead frogs are impaled on the blade....Their latest favorite game is one they invented called Stupid Frog, in which the hobgoblins lake turns trying to impale frogs on a dagger blade stuck in a table. 

This is where all of the creativity went in this module: into making up games for humanoids to be playing when you interrupt them so you can have a Level Appropriate Tactical Encounter. See also Let's Eat Beetles from last chapter.

This module would be a million times better if the default supported path was trying to fool goblins by murdering frogs and eating bugs instead of trying to impress elves by dancing at a funeral.

There's a dragon. But, more importantly, his boss, Wyrmlord Saarvith (hobgoblin ranger) is, just like Wyrmlord Koth (ambitious bugbear sorcerer and last episode's boss) an amateur taxidermist. He's stuffing a stirge when the PCs show up.

What? The? Fuck? Is going on in the Elsir Vale taxidermological community? Is it all Wyrmlords? Did they meet in the same class? Was there a classified ad? "Are You An Evil Humanoid With Class Levels? Do You Enjoy Putting Stuff In Animals After They're Dead? Do You Know A Dragon? If So, Contact Azarr Kull At Location K--No Experience Required!" Or maybe this is the Teachings of Tiamat... 

This goes wholly unremarked in the module and so far as I know no-one on-line has noticed it either.

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Ambitious Bugbear Sorcerer Taxidermist Ghost Faker, Part 2

After being my usual blindly-angry-that-things-written-for-children-half-a-decade-ago-are-crap self yesterday about the introduction to the Red Hand of Doom module, we now move on to the actual adventure...

PART ONE

-Exciting restatement of some stuff we already read.

-Players, depending on the dice, get ambushed or would-be-ambushed by a mixed party of hobgoblins with hellhounds.

-Our first designer notes! They just amount to How Hard Should I Make This? advlce.

-One of the orcs is invisible. Those of you who have read my rundown of Greyhawk (or any high-level 3e module) will be less than shocked to hear that invisibility, a power so potent and wyrd that Red Hand's most obvious literary and cinematic stylistic forbearer saw fit to grant it to but one creature at a time and even then only with the help of the most powerful object in its entire mythopoeic structure is being thrown around in the first encounter by some CR 3 yutz. Get used to it.

-The town of Drellin's Ferry and its people are detailed in 29 entries and 3 pages. These reveal: it's a town. The only details even remotely unusual enough to be worth the column inches are:

• The humble hamlet sells a variety of +1 weapons, magic scrolls and magic services.
• One of the inns is owned by a thief.
• One of the stores is owned by an assassin.

The rest takes such a long time to say so little that it could give Undermountain a run for its money. Everyone responsible is a bad person, let's move on.

-So the PCs roll up on the town, meet the town watch and probably don't fight them. Then an NPC shows up, explains the plot and offers them a Quest: there's a titular horde of monsters in the Witchwood (which is a good name for a wood)--slay them.

-Then you gotta see a man in a cabin about a trail. He has pets, which is the worst thing to have after 1999 in D&D because, this being the WOTC era, it necessitates spending another page explaining the CR of the dogs and what happens if the PC fights the dogs and how much cover the logs outside the cabin provide and how many hit points their collars have and Wild Empathy checks and generally takes a rusty grater to your beaten broken battered gamer soul and saws and saws until the visions begin to come and these visions are dark.

-"Wouldn't surprise me if some of the goblins are holed up there. Just the sort of thing damn goblins would do." SERIOUSLY ALL GAME DESIGNERS: STOP WITH THE RUSTIC CABIN BUMPKINS. Rustic cabin bumpkins make everyone's life worse. Yes, this includes the one in Death Frost Doom.

-In a shocking twist, the bumpkin does not like the goblins either and wants to help you find them.

-Hydra in the water under a bridge. Hydras are fun. Fighting on a bridge is fun. Ok.

-"ambitious bugbear sorcerer"

-The gatehouse is partially collapsed, as is a section of wall to the south. A small wooden building sits next to the remains of a long-abandoned garden in front of the structure. The walls surrounding the keep are about fifteen feet high, with a two-story tower looming in the southeast corner of the courtyard within. Large boulders lie strewn amid the ruins of the two watch towers, and a massive humanoid skeleton slumps amid the ruins of the northern one. This skeleton still wears tattered fragments of hide armor, and a large club lies next to one of its bony arms.

I was at the Gore family estate in Virginia once. It looked exactly like that--except the skeleton, of course. It was normal-sized. I think it was Adlai Stevenson.

Anyway, here we are in the gatehouse, which is the main fightin' here.

-An entire column given over to say A warrior was slain by giants here, it is said his ghost still haunts the gathehouse except plus a lot of details that don't affect anything in the game or matter and are boring.

-Now: 5 paragraphs devoted to an empty shack.

...I flip a few pages to see how much longer this chapter is.

-On page 27, some goblins are playing a beetle-eating game. That's fun. This also marks the first original idea in the book.

-There is a manticore in a room and a minotaur in a different room. Also I am listening to the Stones' Sister Morphine right now.

-The ambitious bugbear sorcerer is an amateur taxidermist. He stuffed an owlbear. It's in room 8. What am I dooooing in this plaaaace, whyyyyy does the doctor have no faaaaace?

-Then there is the first awesome thing in the module (and another thing Expedition To The Ruins of Greyhawk should've had) a goblin battleplan picture that the players can actually look at with stuff that matters on it that players can use to plan, interdict and disrupt the upcoming goblin plans in the coming campaign and plus bonus stupid goblin graffiti saying "Death To The Humans!" and all whatnot. Inasmuch as this map may actually be worth paying for, I will only reproduce my favorite part of it here:

-On the roof there's a fake ghost that's just some old dead body rigged up by the bugbear to scare people away because I guess the ambitious bugbear sorcerer amateur taxidermist thought he was a villain in a Scooby Doo cartoon instead of a guy with his own manticore.

-The giants have crude giant tribe territorial marker effigies. That's suitably fucked up.

-Dear secret treasure hoard with extensive backstory: why would giants bother to make Gauntlets of Ogre Power?

-In other news, there's a dragon. He drinks a Potion of Bull's Strength. I'm not entirely certain the authors know what a dragon is.

-He also drinks an invisibility potion.

-Now you're fighting on a bridge. They also seemed to have missed a trick with the monster selection here: the PCs have to demolish the bridge while fighting a young dragon. It'd be way more fun if they had to fight giants here because then the PCs could come up with the idea of trying to trick the giants into smashing the bridge for you with their boulders or their great galumphing stride. The dragon's kinda young and just breaths chlorine gas, not acid, so not up to the task, really.

-The text assumes the players will find the area on the charmingly graffitied battleplan that says "Vast Monster Horde Gathers Here", take a look at it and then run off to warn the townspeople in their path. There are provisions in the module for what is in my experience the most likely course of PC action: the players grab someone's invisibility potion, make a bee-line for the goblin camp and try to identify and assassinate the horde leader outright--but they're in the next section.

-While it doesn't set the world on fire, it's fair to note the book does do a good job of describing how townspeople will react to various things the PCs could say ("There is a horde coming.""By horde you mean like 12 right? Not like 100,000 or anything...."") and when it's time to discuss evacuating Expendableville the various positions the handful of council members' will argue for are concisely represented and cover the plausible spectrum, thus making the pre-Monster Katrina pow-wow an interesting and eminently runnable noncombat. These two bits are by far the most GM-friendly presentation of NPCs and how to deal with them I've seen in a WOTC module.

-There's some encounters provided to harry the town with before the main attack. They're just that: encounters. About as interesting as rolling the encounters randomly would be.

-The chapter ends with the horde rolling up on a wisely evacuated or foolishly defended town. We'll see what happens to PCs who aren't dead or off the rails cooking up schemes to polymorph into goblin wench spies next time in Chapter 2: The Ruins of Rhest...

Basically?

Viewable invasion plan: Good.
Freak out council: Good.
Amateur taxidermy: Something.
The rest: Here. Save some money.
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Everything I Need To Know I Learned From Tiamat

It was 2006. The Lord of the Rings movies were over. Britney Spears had not yet shaved her head. And there came forth a module: The Red Hand of Doom.

Some said Whoa, a module! WOTC hasn't put out one of those in four years!

Some said Wait, isn't that a Hellboy storyline?

Nope, wrong hand.

Some said Wait, is that Nick Cave? Or Milton?

 "What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, 

Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, 

And plunge us in the flames; or from above 

Should intermitted vengeance arm again

His red right hand to plague us?" 

Nope, wrong hand.

Some said Huh, whuh? Is it any good?

And it is to that fourth host I dedicate the following blog entries.

Let's see what's in here...

Introduction

-Italic text. The head hobgoblin's giving a little St Crispin's Day speech to the troops...

"We will take the lands of the elf, the dwarf, and the human, and make them ours! Under the banner of the White  Red Hand of Sauruman Doom we march..."

...it's like that. 

-There's a Temple of Tiamat. I like that. I love Tiamat. Did I ever tell you how much I loved Tiamat? I think I did once. I love her fiercely and unconditionally. Be good to her, Richard Baker and James Jacobs, I am watching you.

- "... the young half-dragon hobgoblin warrior Azarr Kul discovered the abandoned temple and was awed by the teachings of Tiamat he read..." Also, I love that there's teachings. That's a marvelous concept--is "You should incinerate people and then shoot them with poison and lightning, that's what I do" a teaching?

-Basically, war is coming, and there are various missions the party undertakes to weaken the enemy before the final showdown. These sections get chapters:

• I: You find out there's goblins who want to have a big war. And you fight a dragon.
• II: You meet some elves. And you fight a dragon.
• III: You go somewhere and fight someone and there's a lich.
• IV: Epic battle at Minas Tirith Brindol.
• V: You take the fight to Mordor the Wyrmsmoke Mountains

-Page 6 has a Tipper Gore Gamer's wet dream: An actual picture of an actual Savage Orc menacing an actual Helpless Female--in an actual Mainstream RPG Product. Come see the violence inherent in the system!! If you look carefully the girl's got a Marilyn Manson streak in her hair.

-Page 6 also has something people with lives might care about--the thing signally missing from Expedition To The Ruins of Greyhawk's Evil Army Slowly Gathering scenario: a motherfucking timeline for the motherfucking bad guys to do their motherfucking plans to motherfucking sweep across the motherfucking landscape plus motherfucking descriptions of motherfucking things the motherfucking players can motherfucking do to motherfucking delay and/or motherfucking disrupt motherfucking it.

-The epic battle is influenced by a victory point system: every time the PCs successfully accomplish a leg of their mission that should affect the fortunes of their foes, they get some victory points which count for their side in the battle. Original or not, it's a good idea.

-There's some advice about distributing magic items. This being from the 3.5 era, it's appalling.

-There's a D100 random terrain-type table that's mathematically identical to what it would've been as a d20 table. Kinda makes you wonder what they teach in Game Designer School. Harmless though.

-4 paragraphs of wholly fantasy-generic local history because why I don't know...

-Did You Know?

Brindol is 81% Human, 8% Halfling, 5% Dwarf, 3% Half Orc, 2% Gnome 1% Elf

Germany is 81% German, 7% Other European, 4% Turk, 2% Asian, 6% Other

Now That You Know, Do You Care?

Oh and it has this picture, which has got to be in the top ten worst D&D pictures ever. Yellowish Rugby Hooligans Of Doom?

-One of the NPC clerics is named Shining Servant Tredora Goldenbrow. Christ. That's like Dungeon World bad.

-Oh and here's Farstrider Terise Whellin. These aren't even pot-smoking names, these are like names you think are a good idea after just smoking some leaves. Just like whatever's in the yard. Whelll-innn. Yeahhhhh.

-Lots of places are described. Some might wonder why the basic strategic skinny on each of these places wasn't written on the map ("Dwarf mines here""Bridge here") instead of just like muddly overlay textures of dirt and rocks, but I've learned not to ask such questions. You might think the descriptions would focus on what you need to remember about each of these places in order to understand the coming adventure rather than, say, what kind of nuts they grow. You would be incorrect.

Oh but it gives a sense of atmosphere and place and... Well, kinda. The place is "a generic eurofantasy place" and, more importantly, if I'm the kind of person bothering to read this I probably have 900 generic eurofantasy places in my head already and as I read these five pages of places I do not know which of the things being told to me is supposed to be important later and which is there because the author thinks I am just plum missing out if I don't know Lake Rhestin used to have houses around it but it doesn't anymore and similar fascinating business about thirty other places.

If it's the engagement of unfolding narrative they want: just reveal these things as they become important. If it's sandboxable reference material, put them after the plot so I don't sit there going "Why are you telling me the folk of Nimon Gap grow apples, pears, and chestnuts while shepherds and goatherds keep their livestock in the heights now of all times? Will there be a quiz? Do I need to know this before I hear about orc plans?". And make the entries shorter.

-Despite all this stuff and spastica Kirin of Old School Hack fame and the guy running me and various members of the D&DW/Pornstars crew through Rappan Athuk every week tells me he ran it and it was epic. So let's remember terrible taste and total organizational failure does not necessarily a bad time make. 

See you next time in Part One: The Witchwood...
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