[Review] DIE! DIE DIE! PIG ORC!

Oink oink, motherfucker!

Eldrad Wolfsbane of Meat Grinder fame is back and does exactly what you expect from him: unleashing his inner twelve year old to create cool modules for old-school D&D with shitty art¹, monospace fonts, and lots of exclamation marks! If the title of DIE! DIE DIE! PIG ORC! was not enough to get you in the mood of slaughtering humanoids, then absorb the introduction too:

The kingdoms of the Northwestern Lands have fallen and the wars have been lost! MAN, ELF, DWARF and HALFLING are on the run or are waiting for THEIR DOOM!

Gnolls from the northeast!
Piece of SHIT Gnolls!
Fuck Gnolls!
Goblin's, Hobgoblins and Bugbears from the East!
Killing! Snorting! Raping!
Goblinoid FUCKS! We hate them!

Fleasheaters! They kill and eat the women and children!

They even eat the babies!

The ROTTEN Undead from the Southeast!

That ROTTEN Undead! That SMELL!

In the Kingdoms of the East, Mankind is being wiped out!

Do you feel the raw energy, the unbridled passion, the sense of imminent doom immediately? It makes the blood boiling! Yes, fuck those humanoids indeed! And this goes on as the author introduces the land from the point of view of desparate refugees who cannot find peace until finally reaching HIGHHILL town. The port town has a handdrawn map, some rumours, a paragraph for each quarter, and of course random encounter tables! Day encounters are your run of the mill port town encounters, with the sole exception of some rakshasas² serving as a middle finger to player characters. Night encounters have a better chance of ending up nasty, with the table including a wight, a vampire, or the specter of Old Mr. Gunderson the old dead Werewolf Hunter. That's what I call local colour!

Well hello Mr. Fancy Pants!

Highhill is followed by The High Forest Wildecrawl. We get eleven local encounters, including pompous mercenary douchebags waiting to take advantage of the local conflict, a haunting nightmare, a pack of hell hounds, a huge ass necropolis, and a sprawling swamp ruled by morlocks, among others. I love the NPC names. DEATH MONGER, Groggy Monley, Big Stinky Betty, Chopper the Ogre - even without description they immediately evoke an image about their owners. Beside names most encounters have some detail that make them memorable. One that really stood out  to me is the Lone Troglodyte:

A Lone Troglodyte lurks here. He wears ornate Plate Male and Shield and carries a grand sword. He has a backpack full of supplies. He appears to be looking at a map and is strangely far more intelligent than an average Troglodyte. He plans to find the treasure on the map and quietly retire. He had an entire party of fellow Troglodytes but they had all slowly been killed off and he is the LAST ONE!

That's a surprising amount of background for a surprisingly unorthodox NPC. He has the potential to be remembered and talked about years later by your players. Cool wilderness encounters earns +10% for the final score. There are no hexes on the handdrawn wilderness maps though, which earns -10%.

The final section is about the Old Holy Fort, a 21 room dungeon invaded by those goddamn pig orcs! The map is disappointingly linear. It has some branches, but there are no loops, there are barely any secret doors. It needs some heavy Jacquaysing, right now! The party will face all the orcs right in the very first room, and if they are laser focused on killing them they will quickly finish their mission - or die trying. There is more to the dungeon though than orc barracks and shitting rooms! Beyond their quarters lie a path to the underworld, rooms of critters, crypts with lurking undead, and a mysterious underground area hidden behind an altar where morlock priests breed humans as livestock. The latter was unexpected and got close to Lamentations of the Flame Princess territory, but the author stopped at barrels of pickled humans and generational slaves.

21. Past the secret door is actually where the Key of Deadmoore is held. In an untrapped display case. A mysterious laughter erupts for a few seconds when a PC gets the key. END

Awesome! That's how you end an adventure! Don't tell me you wouldn't be hyped after such ending to see what's coming next!

DIE! DIE DIE! PIG ORC! is deliberately amateurish, juvenile, minimalistic, but does not feel artifical like 50 ShaDes Of vOrpal³ and is actually playable. Behind the rampant ramblings of a youngster lies an adventure with terse, evocative, and fun encounters. It ain't no Meat Grinder, but hey, you cannot churn out a cult classic everytime!

Rules system: B/X Publisher: Eldrad Wolfsbane Publication date: 2022 Format: pdf Size: letter-size Pages: 24 Available from: •  DriveThruRPG (pdf)

75% It definitely has pig orcs who should die - and more!

¹ Except for the occasional public domain images of course.

² I had flashbacks of City State of the Invincible Overlord, where your daily stroll to the grocery store can easily become a deadly encounter with a high level monster.

³ 50 ShaDes Of vOrpal does deserve a praise for its art, because that feels totally authentic. When I was twelve those who were "good at drawing" drew exactly in the same style as seen there.

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