Review: Appendix N Adventures #1: The Ruins of Ramat

Brave Halfling Publishing's Appendix N Adventures Toolkit was among the first 3pp product lines announced for DCC RPG. It's probably the most infamous too: after a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012 it still didn't deliver everything that was promised. I'm not sure whether John Adams is just an unlucky guy who bit more than he could chew, or some scam artist who desired to earn some quick buck on DCC RPG's succes. He did deliver me a Delving Deeper boxed set and the first shipment of ANAT modules (heck, I actually got it twice with a year difference!), he did help quickly whenever I asked him for something, but there is still a lot of stuff I paid for missing. This won't hold me back from reviewing what I've already received, and neither will it influence my opinion on the products. In this series I will review the adventures one by one, and the add-ons in a single post in the end.

The Ruins of Ramat is a character funnel for DCC RPG. The print version is a digest sized booklet, which comes with a detachable cover, cardstock handouts, and an alternative level 3 version of the adventure. These are all parts of the pdf version too. The quality of the print product is top notch. The booklets seem sturdy and they look beatiful. Doug Kovacs made a fine cover, while Mark Allen did some cool handouts, and amazing map that imitates the style of the current DCC adventure maps. The print version has a bit more art (one by Steve Zieser, the rest by Mark Allen), but it lacks the end of the player introduction in both copies I own.

The module starts with two pages of background about how a cleric from a different sect compromised and destroyed a militant order of Ramat  from within. That's two pages wasted because the players won't learn anything about it, and likely won't care either. There is a section that highlights the features of the adventure, which is unnecessary for such a short module. Next is the player introduction, with one of the lamest hooks I've ever seen. A bunch of villagers learn from a crying girl that her dog was pulled down to some dark hole by a giant clawed monster. Risking your life to return a probably dead animal to a nameless NPC is everything but a tempting reason to go on an adventure. If you want a good hook for character funnel take a look at The Meat Grinder or Sailors on the Starless Sea! The former throws the PCs right in the middle of a massacre and makes the players thirst for vengeance, while the latter operates with kidnapped beloved ones and some rumors of great treasure. Much better!

The dungeon starts great! There are slippery stairs and a hungry spider right at the entrance. It doesn't matter if someone dies by breaking his neck, or being snatched away by the spider, it will be hilarious anyway. Once down the players can go three ways. This will be a random choice since they don't know anything about the place. The problem is that only one of those choices will result in a meaningful adventure. Going right they can explore most of the dungeon, have some battles, and get all the loot the place has to offer. Going forward they will run into some meaningless encounters with giant bats and meet a dead end. Going left their adventure will end early - either because they die in the trap, or because they find the dog and decide to end their quest.

Do you love all the crazy and weird stuff of DCC RPG? If your answer is yes, then you will be disappointed, because the rest of the adventure is unimaginative. There are 17 rooms in total, but most of these are far from memorable. There is nothing "Appendix N" about the adventure. What truly saddens me is that an extra sentence or two would have had been enough to make it raise above mediocricity!

For example, there is a cell with lawful aura where the chaotic PCs feel uneasy, the rest heal better, get a bonus to saving throws, and have a vision of Marpu, a former cleric. The healing bonus is useless for funnel characters, unless the Judge allows the bonus to natural healing too. Even then it's only marginally useful because level zeroes usually die by a hit. The saving throw bonus is useless because it's only available in the 10 x 10 feet cell. They can't even take a battle there! The vision is useless too, it only refers to an optional adventure. It doesn't even give a hint about what happened here. Did I mention there is no description about the room at all? You get a single sentece about the door being okay. Well thank you very much, it's a huge relief that I don't have to waste my imagination to describe a plain wooden door! The text is full of one sentence long descriptions without any substantial information.

This is where I started making notes on the margin. The room got some nice furniture (rather unusual and striking in a moldy dungeon), and a large tub of odorous hot water. Looking into the water long enough made Marpu's vision appear on its surface. He would answer a few questions before disappearing. I think there was a pallet too that could resurrect a single character laid on it. There were seven more empty cells on the corridor. I made one of them the spider's nest with the remains of earlier victims, and put a pile of coins in another that would turn into a golem when harassed. I could go on what I changed on the armory, library, chapel, dining room to make them a bit more interesting.

The monsters are generic too. There is a giant spider, some bats, some skeletons, an undead cleric, and a black tentacle demon that can't leave the sanctuary. At least the demon is powerful: it has an instant death attack and requires a unique way to defeat it. The level 3 version is much better in this regard: it adds flying demons, an engulfing psychic ooze, a few skeleton acolytes witch charm spell to the mix, and a bit more of everything else. Putting these into the funnel (in smaller numbers of course) would improve the adventure a lot.

Surprise! The treasure isn't that attracting either... There is a ring that works as a lantern for an hour, a few healing potions, a light golden chainmail, some junk weapons, and a chest of gold near the end. There is a cursed shield that's simply there to mess with players: it turns to dust on touch and gives a -1d on attack rolls. No foreboding, not a single sign of danger, it isn't too good to be true either. It's just a simple bronze shield that will mess with you. There is also a minor artifact among the loot, the Spear of Ramat! There are murals depicting it slaughtering demons with its holy light. Sounds fun, doesn't it? Well gues what, it's just a McGuffin. It has no stats, because its special abilities only function for a cleric of Ramat. Once taken it will force its will upon the PC and make him dispatch the demon mentioned above, essentially finishing the adventure. Once a demon is gone an angelic being appears and takes the spear. Well, at least you can keep the 500 gold... Did I mention that the loot in the level 3 version is exactly the same as in the original module? The only difference I discovered in loot is the lack of the cursed shield.

The adventure ends with an appendix that proposes two optional adventure ideas in a few sentences: one is a trip to the underworld realm of psionic lizardmen, and the other is a quest for becoming a cleric of Ramat. These are actually cool sounding adventure opportunities, which aren't planned to be released. Shame.

While there are hints of egyptian theme (just look at the cover), it's unfortunately not emphasized in the scenery. No typical egyptian elements like ankhs, scarabs, hieroglyphs. They could've helped in giving the adventure some character, which it painfully lacks. Instead of a black tentacle demon how about one with crocodile head that spits deadly slime globs? Instead of a generic ten feet deep pit how about one with scorpions? The point of adventure modules is reducing preparation time and inspiring the Judge. Unfortunately The Ruins of Ramat doesn't help much. The module looks gorgeous, the map is amazing, it also has some potential, but it's up to the Judge to create something good from the bare bones he paid for. If you are willing to finish someone else's job you can start it by adding a giant clawed monster mentioned in the hook, because the writer fucking forgot about it.

Tl;dr: The Ruins of Ramat has stunning illustrations, forgettable content, and lazy writing. You can buy it on DriveThruRPG.

Disclaimer: The DriveThruRPG links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through the link we'll get some credit for your purchase too.

Doomed Free Time

Wow, I haven't posted anything in a month. Sorry for the hiatus, but in my free time I was busy playing Doom. It's been a while since I was so captivated with a video game - and it's not even an rpg! Years ago I have given up on first person shooters because I didn't like the gameplay and level design of modern shooters. While there were some old-school games like Rise of the Triad, Shadow Warrior, I still had more fun with returning to Quake here and there to check out a few mods. Playing Doom was amazing, especially after I felt how my long regressed shooting skills were improving again.

Since I have finished the game it's time to start taking care of other duties and hobbies again. Stay tuned for more!

Review: The Meat Grinder Too

Well, that was quick! But is it a good idea to release a sequel so soon for such a masterpiece as The Meat Grinder? We haven't even digested the first one, we haven't finished appreciating it. It was so good that the expectations are higher than Mount Everest. Will The Meat Grinder Too deliver too?

The art follows the same cheap retro style as the previous adventure. You'll get the ugliest demon woman and old man you've ever seen, and lots of fish men. The dungeon map is just as neat and useful too as before.

The story follows the events of The Meat Grinder. The party arrives in Porttown to rest and level up. Porttown is a dirty shithole razed to the ground. The town's description is very short: you get the name and picture of the twelve places you can visit. While it pains me that there's nothing about the Keep of the Unseen Lord or the Wizard's Tower, the info given is more than enough for the Judge to start the new adventure. Onward, to the River Rat tavern!

The locals honor their heroes with a huge celebration in the tavern. There is massive party with more than fifty people and lots of scantily clad maidens, just as it should be in a kickass sword & sorcery adventure! Then the demon bitch shows up with the heads of the murdered children on a plate, throws it in the mass, and everything gets bloody depressing grimdark. That's what I loved about the first one: no dicking around with pretentious hooks, the party is thrown into the adventure in the blink of an eye and once they realized what's happening there is no turning back! The demon woman encounter is freaking amazing by the way, her abilities reminded me a of Evil Dead II's granny on steroids.

It's a pity that the wicked introduction is followed by a sluggish part where the brooding NPCs tell the backstory and are arguing with each other. It's not long at all, the dialoge is entertaining, but it suddenly halts the momentum the beginning had. Also, playing arguing NPCs as a Judge feels weird. It's like arguing with myself.

Fortunately the dungeon and its environment compensates for the break. The coastal area around the dungeon is already disconcerting, with stormy weather, screeching black birds, shipwrecks. Then the party stumbles upon the entrance which has rusty faces on it that will laugh for days after their monologues. Sweet!

The lair is inhabited by fish men who like torturing, sacrificing, and impregnating shipwreck survivors. Like the beast men from the earlier adventure, they are abominations the players will hate. They aren't the only foes here though. The Fish King is a small dragon that breathes sleeping gas and can teleport. He likes keeping his hybrid wenches around. There is a demon with unpronouncable name that looks like a whirl of duest, eyes, mouth, and teeth. Its bite will make worms burrow into the victim's flesh. How awesome is that? The White Lady resides here too, who is a creepy undead that drains strength - a sure deathtrap for juvenile players whose characters are just as horny as their creators and try to fuck every female NPC.

The rooms aren't boring either. You get torture chambers, a sacrificial temple with prisons, room full of pits, statues shooting death rays, another meat grinder, and of course treasures! Besides the usual coins (which are given exact amounts again, a nice old-school touch) there are two magic items, which have unique backgrounds that don't mean much but do sound so cool that the players will surely keep them even if they find better items over time. Heck, they sound so cool that after reading about the trivilium wars and Hargemel the Demon Wizard I feel an urge to learn more about them!

You probably won't relive the wonder of the first one, since it's still a fresh experience, but the that won't make the sequel any less an inspiring. The more time I spend reading it, the more I want to run it. Eldrad Wolfsbane understands what makes ugly retro fanzines tick. Unlike most contemporary trash this adventure has a heart - a deviously evil, black one. You can download it HERE.

Update: The original link has been unavailable for a while. Fortunately Michael Markey has shared his 6x9 version of it HERE. Thank you!

Update #2: Thanks to the generosity of Eldrad Wolfsbane the original links are public again.

Dark Souls and the Spirit of Old-School D&D

It seems my girlfriend is twice the man I am: a few weeks ago she finished Dark Souls. In case you were living under a rock and never heard about it, Dark Souls is a cruel japanese dark fantasy rpg where you will die a lot, usually because you suck at combat or you are careless. It's a game I adore, but never started playing seriously because it needs a lot of time, patience, and endurance. I usually lack all three of them nowadays.

Character sheet full of juicy details, and you haven't
seen the inventory screen yet!

But why is Dark Souls so interesting for a Dungeons & Dragons fan? Because the game cannot deny the influence of old-school D&D. Dark Souls is full of spells, items, monsters, game mechanics, and design principles a grognard will be familiar with  - even if some of them are hard to recognise thanks to weird twists and changes to the well known formula. Let's take a look at some of the most interesting and less obvious ones I've found so far. I'll leave out trivialities like "you can be a wizard Harry!", "OMG it has fireballz!", and "you can slay giant rats!" Those are pretty common fantasy clichés no one will be surprised to see in a crpg.

Experience for Gold: In D&D gold and experience are the two main resources needed for advancement. Interestingly in classic D&D most of the experience is awarded for the treasure the player character brings up from below, which makes XP seem a bit redundant. Dark Souls merges GP and XP into a single currency: souls, which are used both for payment and advancement. You can earn souls for defeating enemies, or you can find then as item, which esentially replaces the gemstones and jewelry of D&D. In Dark Souls your character and most NPCs are undead and demons, so it's fitting they use souls to trade and gain power. This is an amazing example about how you can make some weird game mechanic make sense in your setting.

Death Penalty: Every death means losing some progress in old-school D&D. While in Dark Souls you won't lose levels on death, you will lose all your unused souls and respawn at a bonfire. You can recover your dropped souls, but you have to be careful, because if you die again your previously lost souls will disappear. I've seen people lose souls enough for multiple level ups thanks to stupid mistakes.

Importance of Player Skill: Classic D&D puts a huge emphasis on player knowledge and skill. So does Dark Souls. Death is a harsh lesson. If you want to advance you have to learn from your errors. While good luck, improved stats, and quick reflexes are helpful, knowing the attack patterns of monsters, the signs of traps, or the small difference between normal chests and mimics is what will make the real difference between a successful and a bad player.

Familiar Monsters: Even if you ignore classic fantasy tropes like giant rats, giant spiders, dragons, undead, chimeras, hydras, hellhounds, snakemen, etc, you'll still find enemies that feel like gigerian reimaginations of Monster Manual entries. Mimics, myconids, slimes are no-brainers. Pisacas remind me of gricks. Phalanxes are lemures with spears and shields. Chaos Eaters are the nightmarish children of xorns and rust monsters. Chaos Witch Queelag is Lolth. The predecessor Demon's Souls had mind flayers. And there are probably more I didn't notice, yet.

Historical Arms: Unlike most crpgs nowadays Dark Souls has polearms, and they are downright awesome! Speaking of polearms, I've always found it strange how specific Gygax was with their names in AD&D while using only generic terms for the most iconic weapons of fantasy fiction: swords. Thankfully the developers of Dark Souls weren't so ignorant! Besides the generic swords you'll find Estocs, Claymores, Flamberges, Zweihanders, Iaitos, Uchigatanas on your adventures.

Weapons vs Armor: Do you remember AD&D 1st edition's unwieldy Armor Class Adjustement section of the weapon table? The game has something similar with different armor offering different amounts of protection versus each damage type. If you know what you're going to face it might be a good idea to dress and arm yourself for the occasion - unless you are one of those who like dodging around naked or attacking from distance.

Enchanted Equipment: Dark Souls uses the good old traditional plus symbol to mark weapon and armor upgrades, but also introduces different upgrade paths to make the system more complicated. These enchantments need special materials and expert blacksmith.

Looks like a good place to die.

Megadungeon: I've left the most important to the end. Dark Souls' Lordran is a colorful and
immense dungeon with multiple levels. The protagonist's journey goes through monumental castles, moldy catacombs, sparkling crystal caverns, fiery hellpits, gloomy forests, and even abstract places like a city in the past, or a world inside an ancient painting. These areas are not only huge, but they are full of secrets, loops, branches. They are also interconnected, thus the game is everything but linear. To make things even more complicated there are covenants you can join for different benefits and a few memorable NPCs who are far from static shopkeepers and questgivers: they have their own stories, they have goals, and your deeds will influence how they behave with you and even each other, which makes Dark Souls' environment feel alive.

A few years ago I thought Dark Souls was just a grim hack & slash for masochists, but after trying it myself and seeing the adventures of the Chosen Undead I had to realize how close it is to old-school dungeon crawls and roguelikes. It is a game worthy of sinking a good hundred hours into it. Unfortunately before I can do that I'll have to finish like a dozen other games. But who knows, maybe once I'm retired I'll be able to start my journey through the land of the Ancient Lords!

Review: The Meat Grinder

When I started the hobby I was a broke kid. I was glad when I could spare some money to buy a rulebook, so I didn't understand who the hell buys modules which were usually short and expensive. During my first ten years as a Game Master I've only bought a single adventure collection, which was written for a hungarian rpg best forgotten. I've found it on the shelves of an antiquary. It was dirt cheap, and I've had an urge to buy something. Those adventures were so shitty I couldn't even finish reading any of them, and I had absolutely no idea how to run them. All these lead to me ignoring modules for many years.

Of course as I grew up this attitude changed. With more money and less free time I learned to appreciate modules. I prefer short, straightforward, imaginative adventures, but I'm usually happy if two of these conditions are met. My favorites are Judges Guilds classics and the current run of DCC modules. Still, I usually just steal ideas from them. It's very rare when I find a module I want to run as written.

The Meat Grinder is such an adventure.

I discovered this beauty while browsing the Goodman Games forums.

"A FREE Zine Module for DCC! 
In the 1970s ZINE Style! 
Completely unprofessional! 
A Level "0" Funnel that brings one to 1st level! 
Make many stacks of "0" Level characters! 
Various spots where prisoners are found to replace the dead!"

I love character funnels! Some of the most fun adventures I've ever run were funnels. Not only they are often crazier than your average dungeon crawl, but they also produce far more casualties, yet somehow the sessions are more light hearted than usual. I've yet to see a player who was mad because of character death during a funnel, or one that didn't have a satisfied grin on his face when at the end he could level up his survivors to first level. It feels like a great achievement, a proof of the player's cunning and luck - even if he lost three or more characters by the end.

The author wasn't lying about 1970s style. The art and the layout is so bad and childish that I fell in love with it at first sight. What this booklet lacks in skill, it makes up for in mood. It has illustrations of goatmen (cool!), goatmen murdering people (wicked!), the graet pig man beast (awesome!), and a demon I could hardly imagine without the illustration (crazy!). It also has a map in the middle which mimics the DCC style by filling the whitespace with art. It's amazing! You'll know at first glance which room is which even without turning the page to its description! Kewl stuff so far!

The writing is just as amateurish and unprofesionnal as the art, which makes it already miles better than what professional publishers produce. It's not bland and neutral, it has the excited voice and attitude of a teenager writing up his first adventure. It feels like listening to one of your nerd friends who can't shut the fuck up about how he has slain a demon lord with his level 100 infernal paladin/wizard/assassin last night or how he is going to kill all the PCs in his next adventure. But it's not annoying! It's goddamn evocative. It gets you in the mood of running this shit! After reading the hook you'll want to murder the goatmen for what they did. After reading the way to the dungeon you want to visit all those cool sounding places the text mentions. After reading a room's description you want to send your players there and see how they die. Heck, I would actually visit them myself to die!

Style isn't enough for glory of course. An adventure needs interesting places, encounters and treasures!

After the introductory massacre the rest of the adventure takes place in the disguisting demonic dungeon of the loathsome beastmen. It's a hostile environment with evil altars, piles of corpses, meat grinders, a rusty pit above pool of acid... Yeah, the pool is a quite obvious trap, and it's not the only one - the players can get killed by energy blasts and toxic gas too. The adventurers will be glad to leave this place behind once they finish their quest.

Mosts of the monsters are goatmen, who attack in large numbers and are wicked bastards that like cooking people alive or raising them as zombies. The players won't feel sorry for killing them. There are far more interesting inhabitants though! Their leader is the GREAT PIG MAN BEAST who will hack survivors to pieces with his cleaver. They have a summoner who sacrifices a small girl to summon a demon. There is a pig polymorphed into a dragon. I still smile when I think about the last one.

After all this awesomeness the treasures are surprisingly generic: mostly gold and gems, The only interesting item is the magic sword of the zombie knight, which is a +1 sentient longsword that wants to punish murderers and can detect sloping passages. I almost wrote intelligent instead of sentient, but he's actually quite stupid (Int 3).

I will have to fix my earlier statement. I don't want to run this adventure. I want to get drunk to forget what I've read, then play this adventure, then finally run it for my party! I'm also in the mood to draw my dungeon on paper with pen again, to do shitty little illustrations around them, and use courier font for my notes. I also want to see Porttown and all the places mentioned in the module. These twelve pages made me happier and more excited than anything done by professional publishers this year. I don't know who wrote is (I do have a guess), but I'll buy him a beer one day.

You can download The Meat Grinder from HERE. It's free. Download it. If you are a Judge, print it out and hand it to your fellow Judges. If you are a player, don't fucking dare to read it, just print it out, hand it to your Judge, and tell him he's a pussy if he's not going to run it. At least by printing it you made it sure some trees didn't die in vain.

Time to die Goat Men!

Update: The original link has been unavailable for a while. Fortunately Michael Markey has shared his 6x9 version of it HERE. Thank you!

Update #2: Thanks to the generosity of Eldrad Wolfsbane the original links are public again.

Cleaning Up

To remove all the clutter (or I can say, ghosts of the past) I have exported the old posts and removed them from the blog. I find it unlikely anyone will miss them, but if I'm wrong just drop me a mail and I can send the exported xml file. But I think whoever reads the blog is more interested about what's coming, not how did I get rid of old campaign material.

Despite not having a DCC RPG campaign at the moment I still can't ignore this old-school masterpiece, and thus can't resist writing up pages of ideas for it in my exercise book while travelling. Some of my favorite topics are still classes, hybrid classes, and non-race-as-class races, so expect something about those in the near future.

I have a bunch of short adventures that I ran in my campaigns, and on conventions. Some of them are as small as an encounter in a shipwreck, others are as big as an abandoned city of frog people. It would be a pity to let these fade away - and some of them are literally fading away because I was stupid enough to use pencil when writing them down!

Me and my girlfriend are also working on a small project. It has something to do with D&D 5e, DM's Guild, and answering such important questions as what happens to the corpse of a slain dragon, what do the undead drink when they want to forget the past, and how can we make one of the most basic tropes of fantasy adventures more interesting... Stay tuned!

Reboot

The stars are right, the time has come to reboot the blog. Stay tuned for more, you'll soon get stuff like free homemade stuff from my current campaigns, info on a project we're working on with my girlfriend, and probably short reviews about tabletop and video games. The focus will be on D&D 5e, DCC RPG, and WFRP.

No session reports anymore, though. It's a burden that killed both this and my previous blog. I've left it to my players to write it for their own amusement.