Send 'em if you've got 'em. If you haven't got 'em yet, send it before January 1st.
   What are the rules? Why they're right here.
   But HOW do I make an adventure site? Well, I went through the process last year. Blogger Ghriziffe is starting a series this year. And I'll be discussing the process with Dunder Moose this upcoming Tuesday, November 4th, all about designing dungeons. If you have questions, ask there, comment here, hit the Classic Adventure Gaming Discord, or send me email. Above all, have fun. Best of luck to all the entrants!

   It's not just RPG adventures over here in the Casa Del Gibson. My wife (Karen) and I also write fantasy and sci-fi stories under the combined name B K Gibson. There are novels (10 of 'em complete so far) still in the production pipeline, but we also write short fiction and our very first officially published Amazon work just dropped in the form of Mercs And Mayhem, a collection of short stories about mercenaries, with settings a range of fantasy, sci-fi, and a few present-day. If that's at all up your alley, then check it out; if you have KU it's even included in your subscription. 
   I'll drop a review of the other ten stories as I read them, but our own, In the Company of Shepherds, is a fantasy story set in the World of the Three Seas, a Greek-themed world of hoplites, spirits, monsters, and the magical Shepherds, gifted individuals who stir the Passions in their fellow Citizen-Soldiers. You'll see lots of phalanx-vs-phalanx battles, mercenary intrigues and reversals, and (because it's only fitting) a good Homer quote or two. Everyone who's read the short story so far has been commenting "I really want more from this world" which, well, good news about that...this is the setting of next year's epic fantasy trilogy in the form of Shepherd, Stoic, and Strategos. We're really excited about. 
   Seriously, go check it out. It's a ton of fun. 

   Get ready. Set to writing. Set to playtesting. Fire up your email and in get yourself ready to SUBMIT. 
   Once again, the rules are simple. Submissions are open from November 1 through January 1, with judging to immediately follow. 

The Basics:
  Submitted adventure sites must be:
*Small enough to stumble on in a hexcrawl or in a city, call it 8-24 keyed locations, ideally a single session's content.
*The location nonetheless has a story to it, with potential hooks/rumors, and would make a satisfying night's D&D session.
*Page limit of 2 pages excluding map(s). Fonts limited to “normal” (eg, Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri), no smaller than 10-point…basically, aim for easily readable. Please note this is a maximum, not a minimum...if your site is complete at 1 page, submit at 1.
*At least one map; if using someone else's, must be legal to use in a publication.
*Must be compatible with TSR-era D&D So B/X, OD&D, AD&D or a very close retroclone (ACKS is close enough, Shadowdark is not, if that helps).

The Contest:
    Submissions will be judged by a five-man panel and reviewed by most of us (I'm reviewing all of them even if we get two hundred) for feedback and edification of the writers. Out of all submissions, the judges will vote via ranked choice and the top eight adventure sites will be compiled and published in the free community publication Adventure Sites III, with all rights remaining with the original writers if you want to polish, change, or fiddle with your site to release yourself. The top two adventures get a free adventure from our contest sponsor Malrex of the Merciless Merchants, while the winner also gains GLORY and UNIMAGINABLE FAME as KING OF THE ADVENTURE SITES. Matthew Lake, from last year's contest, has made rumblings of his plans to defend his crown, so watch out. 
   The focus is for something that is usable at the table. A harried dungeon master needs to plausibly be able to seize your site and reasonably present it to his table of 3-6 over-caffeinated (or slightly drunk) murderous vagrants for all of them to have a great time. There are five judges, but all of us are going to care most about usable adventures to run at the table.  So look at sites that get used, not wildly creative imagination-fields rife with ideas but short on practicality. 
​   Questions? Ask away here. I look forward to seeing all of your adventures. Game on!

An adventure by David Dudka, levels irrelevant
Written for oneshot rpg
   Welcome to horror season, let's get spooky.
  Well this thing is visually unpleasant. It’s…enthusiastic, looking like someone’s very best effort at making a near website in 1997. Single column, lots of public domain art, generous-but-weird margins, thick blocky font. Despite being a complete mess visually the writing itself is competent and reasonably clear, which is good because this twenty-six-page monster is a social adventure high on setting flavor and a lot of Scooby-Do mystery solving. As always with these things a timeline would be helpful but if rides were beggars then horses would wish.
   As for our story…well, it’s 1600’s Vermont, which is technically not New England but rather New France, but mostly we’re still trading on Salem vibes, just with a slightly Catholic twist. Your party is a group of 17th Century Delta Green Agents, basically, who get sent on a mission by the governor to a little village deep in the titular Devil’s Hills. On the way you bump into some effigies with rotting deer hearts in the place of heads, a nasty supernatural attack of hungry wolves, and then its off to the town where five witches are in the slammer awaiting execution by burning. In a bit of refreshing authenticity over half the accused witches are men, but in a dull bit of predictability the real witches were The Man all along (it’s the village elders, of course). Figure things out or not, it’s time to bumble into the ending set piece where a demon of hunger goes on a rampage along with a third of the town who turn into hungry zombie-ghouls. Survive and it’s job well done, my flintlock friends.
   At this weird little product’s very best, what I liked was The Village feeling conveyed by the environment and visuals. Movie as a whole was a bit of a letdown, but the vibes were impeccable. James Newton-Howard’s soundtrack was wonderful:

​   Some of the horror imagery is well done, with a sacrificed horse turning into the illusion of a grand feast that PCs eat if they fail their saves, while those that succeed witness their fellows eating the entrails of the horse corpse. That’s some strong horror. Flavors of the witch accusations are over-the-top but also convey a nice message of “witch panic”. Mood is decent.
   That means what can be improved can be, well, improved. The writer can manage that level of horror at some junctures, so the fact that most of the set-pieces are very meh is a little disappointing. I know it’s a horror one-shot, and those don’t usually trade high on player agency, but there really could be a more free-floating investigatory section in the middle, complete with the Dyson Logos village map and everything else. Give a mass of character sheets, a timeline, and the map and you could have had this all a lot more organic. Wonky visual design getting fixed would be good too.
   I’ll grant a best use case as “autumnal horror one-shot”. Not a lot of individual bits and pieces to use beyond that sacrificed horse feast horror.
   Final Rating? **/***** feels slightly generous but this module at least tries here, so I’ll take that are something.

​A hexcrawl by Fell Fables, level 15(!)
Written for DnD5E(?!)
   What.
   Seriously.
   What?
   It’s rare enough to see 5E content on itch.io. It’s rare to see hexcrawls. It’s well-nigh unheard-of to see high level content. All these together? This adventure should be hailed as a monument to ambition.
   And then we go into formatting and I want to make that ambition-monument into a gibbet. Four pages counting the grainy cover, a hexmap that is aggressively mis-keyed, font designed by ants, for ants, tables that are randomly organized as heck, and then the final page is dominated by the titular Demolisher’s beefy 5E-statblock. Understanding this product is an act of psychological analysis mixed with intuition, almost occultism. I believe I am reviewing the author’s intended adventure, but there’s enough arcane inference taking place here that I’m not sure. Call this a review of my impressionistic interpretation of the adventure.
   High-level adventures struggle with their plots, and we’ve all seen the elements of this one, but it’s solid. We got us a fall-from-heaven scenario, Angel Crashdown. In this case it’s a Demolisher-class angel, designed to destroy your Sodoms, your Gomorrahs, your Ninevahs. He’s rebelled and wants omnicide, fell here at a cursed island dedicated to a scorpion-themed archfiend, and there’s a week before he turns into a devil. Infernal diplomats are wandering around the island to find him, there’s a volcano-tomb about to erupt, magic stuff is around the area designed to tell the story of this old island/battlefield, it’s a pretty solid hexcrawl-story being told despite the teeny tiny amount of content. A couple subplots go nowhere, too, but hey, whaddaya whaddaya?
   So what I liked here beyond “massive admirable ambition” were the nods to actual high-level play realities, including knowledge that some of the characters will be flying, accounting for the players’ own ship, random environmental effects with nasty damage totals, and plenty of high-level monsters. Once the confusing map notation is deciphered, I like how the notes show the Big Bad’s progress from hex to hex each day. This should actually be a fun adventure that semi-challenges a level 15 party of four D&D 5E characters…that’s an accomplishment. Artifact ring as quest reward is pretty decent.
   Oh but what can be improved isn’t just formatting. The day 2 environment effect has a fire event that deals fire damage if players can’t solve an algorithmically generated maze in a non-specified time period, which is admirably creative, but will practically lead to a ton of other issues. Those effects in general are the most random and hard-to-adjudicate things. Lore table is what I’d call “rumors” and those could be handled a little better on the usefulness vs. trivia scale. I dislike the “DC X” knowledge checks but that’s just the way of the system. The final critique is with the Demolisher himself, and the other outsider encounters, is that all fights are little bit too easy for the level. Scope is good, implementation is a little underpowered.
   Still in all, best use case for Demise of the Demolisher is “play as a high-level hexcrawl in a tradgame system”. Honestly. It’s a baffling series of choices in presentation that desperately needs two extra pages for text, but it basically succeeds at its purpose. Good job(?) I think. There are some decent elements here for extraction, like the map, the enemy, and little sub-hex ideas. Just, you know, bring your mining picks.
   Final Rating? ***/***** with two stars more deducted if you’re a little visually-impaired or don’t like the effort of overcoming a document actively attempting to stymie their efforts to understand it. Add two more if you’re desperate for content in a level 15 tradgame (you poor soul). It’s one heck of a something, that’s for sure and certain. 

   Here we go, now's the time to get hyped. You're less than three weeks away from being able to submit your adventure site to Adventure Site Contest III. Once again, it's a small 2-pager (excluding maps), so easy enough to do. We have a JUDGES PANEL filled with returning greats. CHECK OUT THEIR REVIEWS, and you'll get an idea about what each one of us is looking for:
-Myself, who'll be coordinating (send submissions using the CONTACT link to the right here)
-Grutzi, of kind and enthusiastic demeanor.  
-ShockTohp, of even keel and keen detail eye.
-Owen Edwards, who likes gentle humor and playability.
-JB Blackrazor, WHO WILL FLENSE YOUR VERY SOUL. AD&D OR DEATH.
   So study up, read the old reviews, and when the time comes...SUBMIT.
  I'll be running a panel at Legend Haven very much related to this, called "So You Want to Write An Adventure..." at 3:15 pm CST, on this Sunday, October 19th. Check out the online convention if you think it'd be up your alley, there are some interesting writing and gaming topics throughout.

​A dungeon by Nameless Designer, level 1
Written for The Last Train to Gravestone
   Okay, that post title was a mouthful. This a review of the sample adventure contained in the Nameless Designer’s Weird West game The Last Train to Gavestone, which is, in a breathtaking bit of self-effacement, a “minimum viable product for running a weird west game”. The man ain’t getting rich off his hype train here, but that’s okay, he’s also not selling these very AI-art-laden productions at all. Not even PWYW, just free. But how’s the play?
   Weird West is a strange genre. The appeal is obvious, of course…Westerns are a distinctive genre with cool visuals, wonderful sounds and soundtracks, and a huge number of cultural touchstones. Why not add magic too? Well, part of the issue is that if you want stories about violent amoral drifters with complicated relationships with the law who blow in and out of town looking for gold, that’s just D&D. Then add the fact that the things that make westerns distinct from D&D are guns and trains, and, well, you can see how adding magic makes it a touch awkward at times. Everyone likes the Weird West idea, but when you ask them to stay a while for a long campaign, the cracks start to show, particularly if the mechanics are grown from the rich nightsoil left by D&D over the decades.
   So, this game. Well, I’m not doing a full system review, but it’s…fine. Like Heroes of Adventure, the system that spawned it, you have a pretty flat leveling curve (this one with only 5 levels), simple classes with decent modularity, and a d20 math core without a lot of desperation. The one neat bit of…if not innovation, at least cross-breeding…is that you have defense items like “cowboy hat” that roll a die (d6 in the hat’s case) to get rid of that much damage instead of your taking it. I like that, it’s basically like items out of the classic card game Bang!, which is a fun game to kill 30 minutes with.
   But what about the adventure, Mr. Reviewer? Ah. Yes. That. I have commented before that a sample adventure is an oft-neglected essential for any proper fully-fledged game system, as it shows us how the designer expects us to use his document in active play. Here, we’ve been given a wild-west adventure where…an undead zombie wanders into town from an underground tomb dungeon in the town’s graveyard. Oh. Sure, it’s the burial site of a famous desperado, the Ghost Rider, and there are cowboy hats on the zombies, but this is a very recognizable Standard D&D Adventure Site. Just, you know, with a few more spurs.
   Eh, I’ll begin what I like with the fundamental design of the map, it’s simple but there’s enough complexity between the branching paths and those secret doors to make exploring kind of fun. The secret doors are also well designed, with one to the north in that last room tipped off easily, which then indicates the rest due to symmetry. There’s a ghost in the well at the end that’s pretty rough to face at first level, but ghost-bullets are present in the early portion. Not bad. Random encounters are fine.
   You know what can be improved in the main is GIVE US A WESTERN ADVENTURE. A dungeon crawl in an undead tomb, really? If we were forced to crawl around underground, couldn’t we at least get an old mine with rail carts? It’s not an uncommon problem, but it is disappointing here. If you are going to force us into a tomb, there’s also more for the different genre that could be done in the encounter design as well. Everyone has guns, give us shooting galleries. Beyond that, my design quibbles are just quibbles, like wanting more interesting loot and more enemy variety. That’s deck-chair rearrangement, though.
   I don’t know if this is damning or praising the adventure, but I think the best use case for Tomb of the Ghost Rider is actually using it as an adventure site in a standard D&D-like. It’s nothing special, but if you’re desperate for a tomb, it’ll work fine and dandy. Unfortunately, it’s not something that handles Western tropes particularly well, so I wouldn’t use it there.
   Final Rating? */***** with a star added if it’s being used with the fantasy game that it really wants to be used in. Next time give us a train job…

A dungeon by Matthew T. Austin, levels 4-6
Written for Shadowdark
  Caveats here, the author, Lord Matteus, is a friend on my Twitter. I also enjoy listening to his YouTube interviews. So, positive feelings towards the maker here. I’ve also been told he’s going to be rewriting his old adventures, so this 2024 version might be improved later. It’s what I scooped for free on itch.io, though, so on we trudge.
  Oh, yo, it’s another one of those “Weird Tales” jam adventures. Those have been a cut above aesthetically, inspired with more direction than is typical for the usual Crapshoot victims. Eight ‘zine pages, in this case with thirteen-ish keyed areas, plus a little before and after stuff and talk about the magazines that inspired the adventure…it’s a solid format. This particular adventure is white-on-black, which is controversial, populated by AI-art, which is even controversiallier, and makes a font choice on its maps which confuses “A” and “X”, which is controversial to nobody but me. My eye also twitches when I see a double-column norm violated with single-column footers and tables at times, but that might be a me problem. These nits aside, it’s well-formatted with things like new monsters included in text, nice spacing, maps inline, etc. Approve of that.
  What about the story of the thing, though? Well, it’s built to place on a hexmap. The titular White Wizard had himself a tower, got defeated, returns after decades, now his mutant servants are stealing things again and the local lord is hiring adventurers to help. There’s some extremely mild Lamentations of the Flame Princess stuff with the mutations, about .02 Raggis, but by and large we’re just in fun simple “hack through the wizard’s lair” stuff.
  Which leads to what I liked the most, the White Wizard’s Robe. Both a very powerful magic item (+3 to saves, AC, and spellcasting) and a horrible curse that transforms the user into the White Wizard himself over type…that’s great. There’s also a secret room in the back with the wizard’s brain in a jar, has to be destroyed to kill him for good, very solid. Spellbook has new high-level spells and also boosts transmutation spellcasting, but mutates on a failure, great design. I like the fact that the writer actually plays the game, as if shown in the treasures available and the practical push-your-luck stuff with tower-ruin-digging. There’s a nice nasty mutation table that’s pure suck, but that’s fine because the vats of mutation goop are pure hazard. There are a couple of decent interactable NPCs too, including a stated rival adventuring pair. This is built to be a satisfying single session, good adventure site concept.
  …but what can be improved first and foremost is “make it a little less grindy”. I think the random encounter table plus keys will make it a little overstuffed with combat for its scale. There’s my own personal bugaboo of a scene you walk into in media res, it’s a set-piece that’s apparently been waiting for the audience, bad mannar paly. I don’t find goopy mutant enemies to be particularly compelling, but I guess that’s my shoggoth to bear. More substantially, I’m not impressed with the maps, not a lot of exploratory potential there despite them having the appearance of loops. Forgivable with just thirteen rooms, but better mapping is always better.
  You’ll be happy to know that the best use case here is to use it. Sweet, it’s a workable adventure site. The White Wizard, his spellbook, the items, and the mutation table are all usable out of context as well. Worth checking out.
  Final Rating? ***/***** and that’s perfectly fine. My gripes still exist and aren’t easy to patch but it’s also useful, clear, and very fast to comprehend. Feel free to dismiss my positivity because I like the guy but it’s clearly made by a worker who understands his craft.