A wizard’s mansion by Daniel Herz, art by Dan Sousa, levels 1-3
Written for B/X (with houserules, natch).
  Here’s a first, someone sent me a reviewer copy for his new module. His marketing copy mentions keywords like “Classic Adventure Gaming” and “adventure site” so I’m sure I’m in a few Discords with Mr. Herz here, but I don’t know his tag and that’s good, I’m happy to review this and maintain objectivity. I can’t promise a review to everyone, but hey, I’ll at least look at it if you send me your stuff.
  And Slug House is quite the chunk to look at, too. A hefty 66-page (A5) document outlining an 82-room wizard mansion, there’s a lot here on this one. My personal bugaboo gets tickled on a formatting note, with single-column, but it’s got clean, solid language, standard bolding-and-italics for emphasis, and credited playtesters, promising. A generous helping of original art is also expanding the page count somewhat.
  I’ll discuss the art for a moment as an aside…it’s really good. I don’t feel qualified to judge art and I’m going to typically examine adventures based on how they run at the table, less their aesthetics, but Dan Sousa (contact linked in module) not only makes the fun and very colorful cover, but absolutely knocks it out of the park with the interior B&W pieces. Not an expert on these things and I’m not an Art Reviewer, but this stuff seems like it’ll really help convey scenes to players. Just look at what greets them as they enter the courtyard:

​  Our basic module plot isn’t going to shock anyone. Wizard has a mansion. Wizard likes experimenting with polymorphing. Wizard turns himself into a giant slug. Wizard’s home is taken over by experiments while he wanders the halls as a maddened slug. Wizard’s guards continue to hang out in the front area of the mansion, enjoying it as a hideout for low-level petty criminal activities. Hobbit moves in next door and opens bistro catering to the guard/bandit gang. Sorceress seduces gang leader and hangs out with her girls while bilking them dry. Everything here is perfect for a fine urban adventure site, established factions and motivations and everything else all delivered in a nicely organic fashion. As an aside, the author says in the intro blurb that this wizard house could also be set in the wilderness but no way, this is the most urban city adventure that has ever urban city’d. All to the good, just don’t lie to me able trying to place this in the middle of Mirkwood.
  Before I dive into the meat, a quibble about information organization…I like starting with a brief background and the factions, but the monster roster and system conversion notes being in the front while the maps are in the very back rankles my sense of order. It rankles, sir. Nothing fatal and probably better for a print product but it’s just an annoyance.
  The maps, once we find them, are quite good. Two-story main mansion and a basement beneath, decently spacious without being absurdly unrealistic. Everything is nice and clean, traps and doors clearly laid out with lock/secret door indicators only taking me about two seconds to grasp. There’s a nice flow throughout the mansion with plenty of loops both vertical and horizontal, clear zonal distinction, and some alternate means of ingress/egress. This thing works as a map and I’ll bet it’s not too hard on the mappers, either. 

  The initial entry to the mansion is that very nice open courtyard, which is open every day except for ​those sacred to the moon goddess (full moon and new moon), and less occupied in the rain. The aforementioned gang is still in their old barracks on the west side of the courtyard and they don’t mess with the main house, while the halflings have set up a restaurant on the east side that clings like a barnacle to the mansion and only connects via secret tunnel. There’s a well with sounds occasionally coming from it in the middle of the courtyard that leads to the basement, the main door is wizard-locked, and the gang’s barracks is pretty heavily occupied. I’d place bets that most groups default to getting in to the mansion via the halflings’ tunnel, because they want spices from the mansion’s garden (for a 6sp pittance). The NPCs are built so that they support long-term play over multiple sessions, with the courtyard as the typical starting area to be negotiated around each visit. Good setup, like an urban adventure version of the Keep in B2: Keep on the Borderland. Obviously, murder is always an option.

​  Once we get into the mansion past the courtyard (via secret doors, scaling ivy, well, tunnel, or main door, good variety), then we’re in “dungeon mode”, with the resultant random encounter rolls and all the rest. The random encounter table is nice and dynamic with lots of if-then stuff responding to player actions despite only having d8 entries, the only screw-you result is the titular slug-wizard himself, who is gigantic and vomits acid like a dragon’s breath weapon. The only mercy is that the first shot of the acid breath always misses because the slug is rangefinding…this is where I note that while the module is 1-3, the playtest apparently had 6-9 PCs, which means that yes, this sucker is going to melt some newbies. A lot of the combat for the module is generated by these random encounters (1d6 every two exploring turns, but a lot of noisy stuff provoking extra rolls), so the table is very important. Being a slug, salt is the preferred method of executing the dungeon boss with an average of nine pounds of it required to kill him off fast. Do you know how much salt costs in B/X? You’ll be figuring it out by the end of Slug House.
  The mansion, proper, is chock full of “weird wizard’s tower” type stuff. Oddball magic items that nevertheless feel natural and magical, often with costs that feel organic. For example, at the entry there’s a table with spaces for six magical bells, with a few of them missing (to be found elsewhere). Ringing them opens various doors or grants various nice magical effects, but of course that’s loud and so random encounter check is automatic. It’s good, and there are multiple effects like this.

​  Traps and magical effects are sparse, but typically make sense. Rotting floor drops you into the poop chute (and hey, more connectivity). In the upstairs there are a couple corridors with magical stairs, leading to one another. It’s basically a teleporter to open up the map, of course, but rather than being a magic circle or whatever, it’s just go up stairs in 39B, wind up landing in 38B. Smooth, naturalistic. Also covered with slug slime, gross touch that takes on real menace if slug-wizard-dude has already been encountered and melted Dave’s promising 17-strength fighter.
  Monsters are also a decent variety of challenges and types, from butterfly-stirges (they look like lovely calm butterflies, but they suck your blood), to skullhounds (hounds with skullfaces), to the usual mélange of bugs and undead and magic elementals and homunculi and That One Imp that you expect in an abandoned wizard home. Troglodytes snuck in from below and are just chillin’ in a couple places.  Outside of the slug himself there’s nothing too egregious for levels 2-3, I will once again reiterate that level 1s are going to sustain some losses.
   Our initial spiel informed us that there’s a total of 21,000gp in the whole mansion, but it’s wildly scattered around. There are the occasional parsimonious hauls of a couple dozen silver, there are tiled rooms where scraping all twenty-one decorative tiles yields up a little over 100gp, and then there are decent-size hauls like buried treasure under the back garden tree being worth a couple thousand. The biggest single chunk is in the basement’s vault with some nice magic items too, guarded by obvious locks and a subtle trap on the helm of telepathy. There’s a nice balance of risk=reward in most of the loot retrievals, with a few unguarded bits protected instead with obscuring stuff like a dirt-caked bell or a magic sword tucked under a moldy bed. Magic items that get identified get a long writeup in Appendix II, would be indulgent in the key but it’s nice in the back matter. Mr. Lynch will approve.
  The only other thing of note in the appendices is the very nice Appendix III, “Handouts”, which has a list of the fourteen notes that can be found while exploring the mansion. Just hand the PCs each one as it comes and you get a nice little in-world bit of story, also usually containing hints about what’s going on for the clever players to be either helped or go off on some quixotic quest extrapolating wrongly. Nice touch.

  As you can tell I’m sure I’m very impressed with the entirety of this module, it is a rollicking good time from top to bottom. My skepticism about sending in level 1’s and my scoffing about placing this in the wilderness aside, there really are no major misses. I like the aesthetics of course and the occasional dry wit that breaks through even the non-American English language, but I’m always first and foremost going to look at an adventure module for how it’s designed for table play, and this one is golden.
  Final rating of *****/*****, one of the finest city-based adventure sites I’ve ever seen. See it here.

  Finally, the eighteenth adventure fills us with excitement and hope. The Word-Eating Wyrm by Sam McKay is a whopping level 6, only seven rooms, but it promises us a dragon. That’s what I’m talking about. The plot I’m all on board for, the city’s ruined great library has been taken over by a dragon who hoards books and scrolls, she’s served by kobolds but doesn’t really care for them, this is a good dragon premise. Map is where I get nervous, as it’s tiny and there’s not even a real loop.
  I’m going to start with what I liked, and it’s more than just the premise. I like that the valuable book room is barred to the kobolds and they resent that, and I like that it contains a bonus hook, a map to an ancient bank vault. The dragon casts spells by eating scrolls, which is perfect for a dragon and is accompanied by a great art piece. What can be improved is…more please. Everything is nice and creative and then you go and crush me by having my level 6 DRAGON ADVENTURE be so dinky and small. This is Just Another Lair in the end, and a shabby one at that. The best use case is to seed into a city crawl and then beef it up to high heaven, just take the premise and the pieces and make something worthy of a dragon out of it. Sad final rating of **/***** is given out as a single tear rolls down my cheek. I thought we were going to end it well.
  Actually the last "content" is three pages of apathetic tables for travel encounters, dungeon hooks, and encounter types, all requiring a massive amount of homework to get to usable states.

  The overall feelings I have towards this product is…tiredness. It’s suffering a lot from comparison to Adventure Sites I, which you might argue is unfair given the selection process winnowed down an initial set into the eight best selected by five judges, but I look at even my lowest-ranked sites and I still see more creativity, invention, and quality than even the few redeemable adventures here. So, what’s to blame?
   Some of the issue is with Shadowdark as a system. It seems like a perfectly cromulent dungeon crawler, but something I didn’t emphasize enough with the quite decent example adventure from the starter edition is that it was alienated from any consideration of an ongoing campaign in a living world. Or even of a general setting for context at all. This weakens the adventures in a compilation like this, leading to an alienated, aimless lack of theme or consistent worldbuilding. Shadowdark needs a 1-10 (max) campaign setting, rather desperately, something that brings its fanbase into the world outside of the dungeon. I know its wilderness/city mechanics are sparse, but they’re not this sparse.
  More than anything, though, I’m going to be complimentary to my audience and say that the people submitting to the Adventure Site Contest are generally smarter, wiser, and more veteran people. As a result of it being The New Hotness Shadowdark is pulling from a bunch of newbies who’ve never read the wisdom of the ages, nor have they learned lessons that come from years of playing a campaign. The levels are a symptom of this lack of experience…nobody involved in this lacks talent or creativity, but there’s a lack of playtesting sensed throughout the whole thing. Nobody’s putting this stuff on the table first.
  My overall value extract from Shots in the Dark is 2.5 out of 18…that’s two adventures in the pile I’ll be using, and another couple that I’ll at least be taking bits from. A solid job was done with formatting, writing, and art on this product, which makes it all a little bit sadder…I wish you well, Shadowdarkians, just try playing at the table first next time.
  And hey, if any of the writers want to submit to the next Adventure Sites Contest...

  This is the second post in the lead-up to the second annual Adventure Site Contest. As I write my own Fog Valley Retreat entry. In the first post I covered concept and map. Now that I have the basic idea, I’m looking at the practical running stuff…there’s going to be random encounters, so I need those, there’s an “order of battle” aspect/reaction to the Inevitable Player Murder Sprees, and finally there’s a room-by-room key. It’s all very traditional, but there’s nothing wrong with the standard format, and you should definitely think about why you’re diverting away from the standard format if you find yourself doing so.
  I build my monster rosters first in these things, ideally with no more than 3-4 “standard” monsters and a “boss” or two for something of this scale. The first issue came with this being an OSRIC/AD&D-aimed module…my idea for assassin vines falls apart, because the old-school assassin vines I’m most familiar with are B/X and S&W creations, respectively, there’s nothing in AD&D…but there are bloodthorns, which are similar aggressive viney plants, and even nastier than assassin vines. On the other hand, full-up ghosts are brutal for level 5-8, even going up to 6 as a floor they’re a little unkind in multiples. Spectres fill in the same thematic niche and are a little less brutal to encounter, so I’ll instead use those…
  Meaning in the end this foggy elven shrine has bloodthorns, spectres, and elf-clerics as the “basic” thematic encounters, with a cockatrice running around as the curveball. The other three statblocks are for unique critters, the “boss” of the site a high-level elf cleric, the “target” of the site a fighter/MU refugee, and finally the angelic protector of the site who activates if either of the other two are slain. She’s a reskinned pit fiend, insanely difficult to fight at the level floor, but as a huge creature the physical geography of the site blocks her from being able to enter large sections of the complex, that can be either used tactically in fighting her or strategically in running the hell away.
  To this mixture of monsters to fight we can then add traps. This isn’t the kind of location that has pits or arrow traps, but taking advantage of the elfy nature of the retreat I do like a magical rune that casts Sleep and a nasty poison that inflicts ghoul-like paralysis, both nonlethal but very dangerous to non-elves while being ignored mostly by the usual inhabitants of the location. You can see how taking into account physical geography and race-specific abilities enhances the interest of the site and gives a lot of variety. This is why generic/universal and “theater of the mind” are both absolute poison for module design, I don’t mind a submission with a different system or a simple map, but HAVING a system and HAVING a map is vital.
  Some weird or discordant bits add spice to an adventure, but it’s easy to overdo it. My nasty little idea of a cockatrice running around in the fog is fun, but it needs some thought. Acolytes and the high priest can be familiar with the little bugger and aren’t in danger, but this is a spot that welcomes in (evil) refugees, so I need a mechanism to defend a visitor…thus, I invent a stone egg, a little egg which makes you be avoided by the cockatrice, the refugee has one on him. This also gives the idea of a wonderful bit of treasure/trap, perhaps there are incubated little cockatrice eggs in one location that are easy to drop and/or hatch if not kept warm. Keep them intact, you have a valuable thing to sell. Accidentally break one, you have a baby cockatrice (a chickatwice) running around in the fog or in your backpack. Lovely. Because petrification is such a nasty left hook, I do want to telegraph the danger…ambiguously, in the case of a statue of a fleeing victim at the entrance of the retreat, and more obviously in the chance to stub your toe on a stone mouse or something. This is all fun but that’s the only thing I’m adding off-theme.
  Other things we have are a couple locations, one a choir chamber and one a harpsichord room, that allow for loud music to echo throughout the area. There are a couple uses for this, both as an obvious place to attract attention, always useful in a heist or assassination, but I’ll also put in a chamber full of dancing spectres that will subside with different music. Give that dance chamber a pair of huge, fragile, and very very valuable crystal chandeliers and you’ve got a wonderful theft subplot. The entire location has over 150k in treasure, but it’s a nightmare to extract.
  Keying is remarkably easy once the story and inhabitants of a location are worked out. I’m trying something a little cute with symbols for fog status of a given room, but it can be mentioned in descriptions too. Thinking through the in-universe purpose of a given location suggests the key in most cases, like how the secret doors work as escapes…probably how refugees return to the world after swearing homage to the god of the retreat, there’s hidden escape backpacks with supplies and coins in them, the doors are covered by bloodthorns though…let’s give the high priest a scroll of Speak With Plants to make sense. Details just all work out if you know the main environment.
  I have at this point (August 15th) basically finished the first draft of the adventure site. It’s a page for the map and three pages of writing. If I was pushing the submission deadline (January 1st, 2025) I’d print it, spellcheck/grammar check, and then ship, but because I do have time, I’m going to do the third part of the adventure design, in many ways the most important…I’ve got it on my map and we’re going to get to playtest.
  I hope the players enjoy the chickatwice. 

​A one-shot by Destiny Howell, illustrated by Ryan Lynch, level 2.
Written for Perils and Princesses
  Whew boy what have I done. The Sweet Escape is for some fresh hell, a game called “Perils & Princesses” where players are apparently candy-loving princesses? And they get railroaded into rescuing a baby bird from a witch’s six-key tower over the course of twenty unevenly illustrated pages? A lot of effort went into this thing to evidently serve as an introductory adventure for the aforementioned TTRPG system, and it is aggressively SYSTEM focused…bad events/random encounters are Wrinkles, status effects are Wear, Woozy, or Befuddled, all fine and good and understandable, but needlessly twee. That’s not really a critique of the adventure, that’s the system though, so let’s grit our teeth and ignore the headache, dive on in.
  Thou Art Lost is combined with Bearing a Load of X (in this case, sweets delivery) to deliver the PCs to near the witch tower. The witch (called Dulcinea because Howell hates me) is experimenting with phoenix chicks and turning them into candy hybrids because why not and one escapes and a golem made out of chocolate is chasing it and I think my pancreas just shut down. Anyway, help the cute talking candy-bird and rescue its siblings and there’s a timer to see when the witch gets back to murd…er, capture the PCs. If at any point the PCs fail the chick resurrects them, which is lame but might be the first thing I’ve read that does play for the intended audience of little girls or adults pretending to be little girls playing princesses.
  Swiftly moving on from THAT distressing thought, what I liked is the line work on most of the art and how the map looks quite nice. There are occasional smart nods here and there to magical powers, like how the tiny bugs outside of the front door know the password if they’re asking. I like the magic item reward, a literal bit of Phoenix Down, a feather that resurrects the holder after 1d20 days, nifty.
  Where do I even start on what can be improved? I could quibble with the dry predictability of the random encounters, the vagueness of the Wrinkle results, or the nauseating repetition of candy motifs, but I think the biggest issue is with the attempt to be “fairy tale” itself. The twee tone and soft outcomes are in fact in opposition to any real fairy tale. The Brothers Grimm, please remember, sanitized their fairy tales. Actual fairy tales drip with menace and danger, and if you spend any time with children you’ll rapidly learn they love that. Whimsy shouldn’t be pushed artificially, it’s something that emerges from the deadly-serious way that children approach the world combined with the magical outlook that comes from being able to talk to animals and trees. This treacle is a gross simulacrum of the actual world of fairy tales, which are really just folk tales with all the inherent moral freight that implies.
  Alack, that means the best use case for this thing is to run it straight with other greying millennials as you all weakly grope towards the dimming memory of lost childhood. Also maybe the tower map is okay to swipe for a generic tower if needed?
  Final Rating? */***** with a suspicious glare and a sternly-worded injunction against ever doing this again. 

​A dungeon by Aleksandar Kostić (edited by Alex Bates), level 1.
Written for Shadowdark.
  A terrible storm is brewing – you must find shelter from
this accursed weather, and quickly! Veldmark, the nearest
town, is over ten leagues away, so your only choice is the
ruined fort on a nearby hill. As you approach, a faint cry
echoes from deep within the decrepit structure. The hair on
the back of your neck stands up in warning, but perhaps
it was just the wind. Perhaps. Gathering up your courage,
you enter the halls of the Grimhill fort.
  Hey, it’s One Of These Adventures…sketchy ruin beside the road, But Thou Must railroad tracks in the form of an oncoming storm, I’m pretty sure late Dungeon magazine had one of these every 5-6 issues. Mr. “Art of Caustic” here uses his eight pages languidly to key a dozen-room fort/cave/tower ruin with an understated story and a well-formatted isometric map. Writing is fine, efficient and decently formatted. It’s a good enough idea and I’m fine with the adventure site scope, just no need to include the little railroad at the front. Even in a one-shot.
  I want to run a sidebar on this map. It’s an interesting thing to talk about, a nice-looking well-executed little map with some wonky choices made in a few places. The line work is very good, I really like how well-illustrated the tower, the cave-pool, and the ladders are…but this is the Cult of the Loop taken to an extreme without any consideration to making the dungeon geometry generate meaningful choices in playing the game. Three entrances/exits on three different elevation levels only matter if there’s some trade-off made between entries, which, spoiler, there ain’t. No, there isn’t any environmental or gameplay difference between those colorful levels, either. I could complain about the pointless stock-art pointy hands but they wouldn’t really be worth mentioning if they were on a more meaningful map. I’ve praised the combination of an isometric GM map/player map pairing, handing the players something with this illustration would be so much better.
  All that aside, the ruins are filled with the Usual Suspects as people explore. Bandits with a couple leader minibosses, wolves in the cave, undead in the tower, traplike things, giant rats, it’s the expected elements here…the “tragic curse” isn’t really brought to the forefront but there’s a sad ghost and a wight that can be neutralized/set to rest if a pair of figurines are brought together. Your reward for this is the storm stops and the sky immediately turns blue. Whoa.
  What I liked is obviously a lot with the look of the thing. I like the clarity of the formatting. I like the map’s look. I like the evocative and moody writing at times. I like the attempts are giving a little personality to the bandits…
  ….but what can be improved is consistently found in the mirror image of those nice-looking elements. The formatting is good, but the content is often generic. The map is cute, but usability is low and the site’s gameplay potential is lacking. The writing is trying hard, but having flowers “smell like sorrow” is a bit much for example. The bandits have little stories, but there’s not a lot of ways to interact with them. I didn’t mention the treasure before this, but it’s the Shadowdark Norm of “fine but lacks pizzazz”, improving the treasure with some hiding/more traps/gameplay interaction would go a long way to improving this thing.
  I’m being a little dour, the best use case on this one probably is seeding it on the map as a moody little adventure site, people will probably still have fun despite the generic elements and the awkwardness of not having a player version of the isometric map. I need a new rating that somehow summarizes “Just enough talent being shown to make me feel disappointment.”
  That’s going to have to be summarized by Final Rating? **/*****

​A dungeon by Gnarledmonster, level [decline to say].
Written for Dungeon Reaver/Morgle Blurk/OSE.
  No. Nosir. Nuh-uh. This “one page dungeon” is written for three different systems, featuring a gonzo completely unplayable isometric map and zero actual keys, just a set of rumors, a roll of treasures, a hyper-powerful set of random encounters, and a “solution” that requires squinting at the purple abomination of a map until a headache forms and you decide to let the players win. The name is a pun but consuming this content makes you Korpophagic.
  The story is “inspired by Ravenloft” which should send everyone here running in a panic but I’m going to ignore the chill of warning and forge ahead. Evil and tragic Lord Blodig (sigh) is kidnapping villagers (sigh) to turn them into mutants (SIGH) and there’s a 50s bounty per kidnapped villager (SIGH). Blodig isn’t killable in his humanish form, instead his soul is in the weirdo eyeball thing that the text calls a heart which is in turn hard to destroy without “dealing with” the “extraplanar being in the basement”. I don’t even know how players are supposed to navigate this thing. MAP THAT ON GRAPH PAPER. I DARE YOU.

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​ Uh so what I liked is that each system had its own separate page so that I didn’t have to look at the Burgle Hurk Yellow one.
  To be honest there’s darned little of what can be improved here. The eye-hurting map is completely and utterly unusable as-is, just complex enough to defeat graphing without having any obvious keying attempt. This is despite is also being childishly simple and small in terms of actual room count. You could do quality-of-life work like bringing up the OSE treasure like a 200gp pipe organ to whatever the value should be for a location that has you fighting d2 Chimeras…but that would be ultimately useless, just adding more disappointment potential to what is still a botched abortion of a “dungeon”.
  The best use case is probably in eschatological arguments as first-rate evidence against the postmillennial conception of the perfectibility of humanity within this current fallen world. It’s also excellent as a purgative, a welcome replacement for the discontinued syrup of ipecac. While there’s a potential use case for this thing as a depressant, I would not recommend using it to combat overstimulated mind states as there’s probably an associated risk of inducing schizophrenia. There’s an argument to be made for this product’s best use case is as a torture device but I categorically condemn any such use as being in clear violation of the Geneva Convention. You could also use this as a TTRPG adventure module if you wanted to discourage a group of players from ever attempting to participate in the hobby again.
  Final Rating? -/***** because it’s worse as an adventure than an actual blank sheet of paper, even with no writing implement provided.