Deadly Delves: Reign of Ruin Review

Reign of Ruin is a 34 page adventure for Swords & Wizardry by Jon Brazer Enterprises, suitable for a party of 6th level PCs. In terms of transparency I received a complimentary copy for review purposes.

The book opens up with some starting fiction and background. The background is a set-up for the adventure, where the descendant of a long-dead black dragon tyrant mobilizes her minions to menace the warm-blooded races who her forebear terrorized so long ago. The backstory is a bit wordy and rather specific with proper names and regions. I feel that it could be shortened considerably to be more generic for the purposes of individual campaigns.

As for the present era, the plot hook for the party to get involved is via a scout’s last dying words of the razed city of Northam and its need for reinforcements. The other hook involves traveling merchants explaining in more detail that the Ixtupi (lizardmen devotees of the black dragon) have come to attack the village as revenge. Once the PCs get to the town, they find it in the aftermath of a massacre, with a few clues pointing to the identities and motives for their attackers in the form of a survivor’s testimony and draconic graffiti. The clues give a relatively good sense of the opposition for a canny group of players (corpses whose flesh seems to have dissolved off their bodies which is the result of acidic breath weapon), but overall I feel that this adventure could have had a stronger start if it began proper with the party arriving in the town. The merchant adventure hook is too much “tell, not show” and ideally the site of an attacked settlement alone should be enough to attract the PC’s attention.

Further encounters before the main dungeon itself include the village of Mistlevy (the raiders’ next target) and a swamp encounter where the Ixtupi are fighting a rival tribe of lizardfolk. In both of these encounters there is quite a fair number of enemies, but also potential allied NPCs to fight alongside. This does a good job of preventing characters from feeling overwhelmed, but on the other hand risks the GM rolling “against himself” a fair bit if their gaming group is slower-paced. A good idea may be to grant the players the opportunity to control said NPCs; I did this in various campaigns, which made my gaming group feel more engaged with the battle.

Additionally the first encounter has a point where the black dragon main villain makes a personal appearance to wreak havoc before fleeing back to her temple headquarters. The intent of the adventure is that the party will face her down in the heart of her lair, with the first encounter as a taste of things to come. Although mobile and strong like many dragons, the old adage “if it has stats, the players can kill it” holds strong. A bad saving throw or lucky attacks may bring the dragon down at the outset, and given that the final encounter is a pretty clever room full of terrain-based hazards, this would be robbing the gaming group of a good fight later on down the road.

The temple itself has three major levels not counting the aboveground entryway. It has a healthy mix of reptilian monsters, undead, animated objects, and other creature types to prevent combat from getting too monotone. The dungeon is the meat of the adventure, and there are quite a few traps. There was one trap that I liked but felt could have been executed better: stone pillars which summon corrupted elementals if a spellcaster uses magic which deals energy/elemental damage while within their vicinity. It takes an otherwise common tactic of “blast them all” to use against the party in a thematically interesting way. Unfortunately said trap is a one-time occurrence so that it is likely to happen without the players growing aware as to their purpose. A repeat appearances of pillars would engender a cautious mindset in players; they would need to weigh whether they risk using powerful magic against the enemies currently arrayed against them, but at the possibility of biting off more than they can chew. Another involves a room which fills with acidic water while dragonblood brutes (who are themselves immune to acid) attack the party. A hidden lever can be found during combat to drain the room. I particularly like this touch; it combines monsters and environmental hazards together in a way I don’t see often in many OSR modules.

As for enemies, there are mentions of what happens if the complex goes on alert, notably in the form of kobold slaves acting as messengers. However, most of the intelligent monsters rarely go beyond their own rooms and instead prepare to attack PCs who come to them first. This feels a bit artificial, and while it makes sense in some cases (unintelligent undead and constructs) it would’ve been nice to have suggestions for what rooms monsters would retreat to or use as chokepoints in case of an invasion of the temple. Lord knows the complex has enough traps to exploit for this purpose!

The final encounter with the black dragon overlord has a good description of the room in which the battle will take place, with descriptions of terrain for both the party and for the dragon to use to their advantage.

Miscellaneous Thoughts: The maps for this adventure are well-detailed. Full-color and grid-based, they cover the entirety of the main dungeon as well as the first encounter. The adventure also makes clever use of existing class features. The “Open Doors” roll, for example, is used for various feats of strength such as escaping from the grip of a giant venus flytrap or pushing a fallen stone block trap to reopen a passageway.

The adventure itself is rather expensive for its size ($10 for a 34 page adventure). Given that adventures have limited replay value for gaming groups, this reduces its viability in comparison to other Swords & Wizardry products of similar length but at more affordable prices. I understand the need to make up costs especially given the detail of the maps, but as a consumer it will not be an attractive option.

In conclusion, Deadly Delves: Reign of Ruin rates well for an OSR adventure. It has the core idea of a dungeon delve, but the terrains, traps, and enemies are varied and well-detailed enough to keep the players on their toes. Its low points are that the BBEG shows up too early (and thus risks the potential for an early death), the fact that temple has a high enough number of traps to the point of triggering player paranoia which can slow gaming to a crawl, and the product’s price tag is rather high for a book of its length. But overall the good outweighs the bad in this dungeon crawl. My final verdict is a 3.5 out of 5 stars, rounded to 3 for the purposes of OneBookShelf.

Hyperspace Messenger 03: Aliens is a 20 page book, with 16 pages of content, the other 4 being things like cover, credits, OGL, and a product blurb. The introduction opens up by saying it's meant to help emulate settings like Star Wars, where the vast galaxy has a seemingly uncountable number of alien species where a few are featured but the rest are left to the imagination. To that end, the book is meant for both players and Referees to make their own alien class with a step-by-step series of random-roll tables.

The Meat of the System

HM3 generates an alien class by rolling for core traits, along with miscellaneous details such as reproduction, lifespan, size, and unique abilities. The major details include things such as Hit Dice, Saving Throw progression, Base To-Hit, and Weapon/Armor Proficiencies.

Each table result provides a sample Experience value, which is used to determine how much the alien needs to get from level 1 to 2 and is then doubled from there. Generally speaking, the more powerful results cost more experience: being proficient with only primitive weapons (bows, swords, staffs, etc) adds 100 Experience, while being able to use any kind of weapon is 400. As the basic White Star classes are usually 1,200 at the lower end to 2,000 around the upper end, getting consistently good results for your randomized alien has the trade-off of having you lag behind the rest of the party.

Some traits can result in lowering the Experience value for faster progression, such as an anatomy incompatible with most (human-designed) equipment, lacking an important sense such as being blind or deaf, or a -1 penalty to an ability score rolled at character creation. Overall it seems like a fine, consistent system, but noticed mixed results when trying to build a few of the core White Star classes with similar abilities. The Aristocrat, Mercenary, and Pilot had more or less the same Experience Progression, off by 100-250 points. The Alien Brute was off by a bit, whose base is 2,000, had 2,4000 with its HM3 counterpart.

Special Abilities

The table for Special Abilities is the real highlight of this book, containing ninety features differing widely in form and function (the 91-100 result allows the player/Referee to choose freely). Each Special Ability adds 200 Experience to the initial value, but due to their nature lower the alien's level cap by 1 (10th level is ordinarily the base cap in White Star) for each one taken, to a maximum of 4 Special Abilities.

The Special Abilities vary a lot in scale. One one might grant the alien a +2 on rolls involving interaction with others (Sociology Experts), while another might automatically heal 1 hit point per round (Regeneration). Most of them provide an explicit game effect or ability of some sort, like being able to stick to surfaces due to adhesive, increased movement rate, or even a continuous immunity to mind-affecting effects! A rare few are more geared towards Referee fiat, such as the alien species having a universal positive reputation which can result in social opportunities and opened doors.

My favorite included Symbiotic Immortality, where the alien has a symbiotic life form living inside it accumulating knowledge which can be passed on to others of its species upon death. The game effect is a +1 Wisdom, but this really sets up interesting cultural and role-playing opportunities for said species.

Conclusion

Five sample alien species and a fillable worksheet provide the final parts of this small book. Overall, I really like Hyperspace Messenger 03. The sample tables cover enough mechanical ground to make all sorts of aliens, even ones from popular franchises such as the Vulcans from Star Trek. The best part is that the book's contents are OGL save for typical product identity stuff of art and logos. The author even encourages folks to use his system to make their own aliens for their own works and share on social media. He also suggests using a non-random "pick your abilities" method for generation, which more or less works due to the restrictions on Experience and maximum number of Special Abilities.

I heartily recommend this product; it may be short, but it's very useful as both a player and GM tool.

So I've been talking about this book with one of my gaming buddies, and decided that my PM's informative enough to share with the world. As of right now I read all but one chapter of this baby, so I feel that I can give a better overview of the game (or as far as someone who's never done actual play experience).

Overall this game is very much a dark fantasy with Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy elements. It's not as D&Desque as a retroclone, but elements appear here and there like some suspiciously similar spells.

Dice Resolution

In short, the resolution system is D20-based. You roll a D20 for most tasks and add relevant modifiers. In some cases it's versus an attribute of a character (like the Target Number to hit an opponent is their Defense). Most non-opposed checks are a Challenge Roll, which is a D20 with modifiers, and the Target Number is always 10.

One of the big things in this game are Boons and Banes. Instead of tracking a bunch of modifiers from spells/class features/etc, most effects grant you either of these. Each Boon/Bane is a d6, which can add to your D20 number. However, for multiple dice only the highest result is used (so rolling a 3, 5, and 1 for 3 boons would apply +5), and boons and banes cancel each other out on a 1-1 basis.

Overall I like this. Most modifiers tend to come from your Attributes (which are like D&D ability scores), and from what I've read Boons and Banes are far more common. It's easier to keep track of and to grasp than forgetting if muddy ground imposes a -2 or -4 penalty on graceful maneuvers and such.

Ancestry

In this game there are six playable fantasy races: humans, changelings, clockwork, dwarves, goblins, and orcs. They share much in common mechanically with their D&D counterparts, in that they determine inherent abilities you start out with as well as a common cultural backdrop. However, the assortment here is quite different enough from the typical Tolkien mold in that elves and halflings are absent (they exist, they're just not playable) but goblins and orcs are choices.

One's ancestry determines starting stats, but there are sample tables for rolling traits. Some of them are optional, but some are required such as the shape of your clockwork PC.

Humans are the most numerous and versatile race. Not much different than many other fantasy humans.

Changelings are creatures made of dirt, twigs, wood, and other such things masquerading as mortals. They are literally the "swapped-out fairy child" from folklore, and as a result are feared and distrusted in many lands. They have the ability to steal a person's likeness and are vulnerable to iron.

Clockwork are the ones I find most interesting. They are sapient constructs who don't necessarily need to take a humanoid form depending on their intended function. They have pretty high defense scores due to natural armor and don't need to worry about poison, age, and other living maladies, but have low starting abilities.

Dwarves are folk whose arrogance once challenged the gods, and as such were cursed to lair underground and hold its precious minerals. Like their D&D counterparts, dwarves are physically hardy and gain bonuses to attacks against certain races they have enmity with (giants, orcs, troglodytes).

Goblins are refugees from the realms of Faerie and tend to occupy bottom-rung jobs in mortal society nobody else wants to do. They vary widely in appearance and tend to have obsessive personality traits others find repellent, such as storing animal body parts in jars or eating only candy. They are agile and naturally sneaky/

Orcs were once a race of slave-soldiers for the Empire of Caecras, but after a rebellion they earned their freedom and now one of their own sits upon the throne. Unsurprisingly they are very strong and make for good warrior PCs but start with more Corruption than the other races, meaning their soul is more at risk when making pacts with fell powers.

Overall the races are short in write-ups, and while some of them are geared towards certain roles I like the fact that the options feel quite appropriate for a dark fantasy setting.

Level System

Shadow of the Demon Lord only goes up to 10th level, and PCs start as level 0 characters. PCs level up whenever the GM tells them to. However, the suggested advancement rate is rather fast, with the group as a whole gaining 1 level per session. The designer intended for the arc of beginning adventurers becoming great heroes and going against civilization-ending threats at the upper echelons. Assuming a weekly game, the average SotDL game will take 2 1/2 months to complete.

Now, every level you gain something significant.

1: Choose a Novice Path 2: Additional Novice Path benefits 3: Choose an Expert Path 4: Gain the advanced benefits of your Ancestry (your "race" in D&D terms) 5: Additional Novice Path benefits 6: Additional Expert Path benefits 7: Choose a 2nd Expert Path or a Master Path 8: Final Novice Path benefits 9: Final 1st Expert Path benefits 10: Final Master Path benefits or 2nd Expert Path benefits equivalent to Level 6 choice

SotDL's Paths are its classes. The Novice Paths are the typical Mage/Priest/Rogue/Warrior, but the Expert and Master Paths are the equivalent of 3rd Edition D&D's Prestige Classes. They vary widely in tone, and there's a lot of them too. 16 Expert and 64 Master Paths to choose from! They range from things like an Artificer who creates odd devices and trinkets, a classic wilderness Ranger, a druidic Woodwose who can take plant form, and such.

Best thing of all is that none of the Expert/Master Paths have prerequisites! You can mix and match to your heart's content for all types of character ideas. Of course, many Paths are more suited to certain combinations, but I like the idea.

Magic

Magic in Shadow of the Demon Lord leaves me with mixed feelings, although the good parts slightly outweigh my reservations. For one, it's sort of like Vancian magic, in that you can only cast spells a certain number of times between rests before running out of juice. Spells are grouped by tiers (0 to 5) instead of levels as a measurement of power, and your Power attribute (raised via levels in magical Paths) determines what tiers you have access to as well as how many times you can cast every spell you know of various ranks between rests. For example, a Magician with a Power stat of 2 can cast every 0 rank spell they know 3 times, every 1st rank spell 2 times, and every 2nd rank spell 1 time.

Magic is split up into 30 Traditions representing facets of reality or concepts. Fire, Nature, Destruction, Necromancy, etc, with 11 spells for each. One must learn a Tradition in order to use spells, and you start out with the 0 tier spells. New Traditions and spells can only be learned via leveling up in a magical Path or via discarding a Level 4 Ancestry trait, and you either have the choice of learning a Tradition (and gaining its 0 level spell) or learning one spell for each Tradition you know.

Although it's encouraged to be broad early on than specialized, SotDL avoids the D&D problem of clerics switching out spells for every occasion and rich wizards using the gold to scribe dozens of spells into their spellbooks. Funnily enough, the complete spell chapter is only around 30 pages in spite 330 spells: this is because most spell entries are very short, and most effects are fixed and not modified by one's Level or Power stat.

Also, I noticed a short supply of long-duration/permanent and save-or-lose spells. Most spells are 1 hour duration at most, and the offensive spells tend to create horrible effects once the target reaches 0 Health (freeze beam solidifies and shatters, disintegration turns to dust, etc) in keeping with a Warhammer-esque bloody dark fantasy.

Still, magic is very versatile, and the Priest and Mage have the most customization due to the Traditions in comparison to the Warrior (who gets boons and bonuses for combat stuff) and the Rogue (who gets some nimble-based attacks and can learn magic as well via a choice of class features, albeit at a slower pace). However, it's not as bad as D20 D&D, and since there are Expert and Master Paths dedicated to specific magic styles and traditions, making an effective gish isn't very hard.

Setting

The setting takes place in the lands of Rul and the Northern Reach. Basically there are tears in reality known as the Void, the dominion of demons who leak out into the mortal realm and other worlds. However, the Demon Lord is unable to fully breach such tears, so it works through agents and foul worshipers to wreak evil in the worlds. The Demon Lord gains power via the consumption of souls, and seeks to envelop all of reality.

The setting chapter takes a big picture look, focusing more on broad regions and countries than individual cities and towns except for capitals and the like. Problems and plots are explained more as broad strokes than local occurrences. In short, the bullet point tropes are:

The Caecras Empire (the most powerful country in the world) is undergoing civil unrest, as the orc soldiers rebelled and now their leader sits on the throne. Many provinces are now declaring independence for fear of an orcish invasion.

Faerie are a thing, including two of the PC races being such. Elves, trolls, and even devils are fey (the last ones tasked with hunting down souls). The more powerful ones tend to be amoral and capable of giving form to concepts (like wearing a child's laugh as a cape or some such).

The east has nine plutocratic city-states with their own themes: a mostly-empty city devastated by plague, a city which deals in slavery to feed its Colosseum entertainment industry, a city with freedom of religion which causes all manner of crackpots and wicked cults to operate openly, etc.

The two main religions are the Old Faith (druidism and pantheon of primal concepts as deities) and the Cult of the New God (fantasy Christianity with woman Jesus). The New God's followers are everywhere, but they have a holy theocracy which has an Inquisition dedicated to hunting down evil spellcasters and servants of the Demon Lord and other foul things.

It's an early industrial setting, where there's still medieval tech but guns are becoming more common, and some of the more prosperous cities might have a clocktower or train.

Amusingly I've noticed that in spite of the PC races being well-suited to dark fantasy, and the elves are amoral fey, there are still halflings in the setting although not as a PC race. They're much like typical fantasy halflings except they're related to humans and have a rather powerful "luck" ability which allows them or an ally a reroll if a die of any kind is a natural 1. They're actually not reclusive at all and tend to be present in some human lands, which makes it all the odder that they're not a PC choice.

Bestiary

The final chapter comes with nearly 40 pages worth of stat blocks for monsters and NPCs, as well as simple templates to simulate Paths like a troll witch who uses curse magic.

There's a lot of both classic and original monsters to fight, and there's some generic "monster" or "undead" stat blocks to act as a framework for PC animal companions, summoned monsters, and for the GM who needs simple horde minions.

An interesting thing I've noticed is that in regards to damage/health scale, things don't seem too out of whack. For comparison, a starting-level or low-level PC or monster may have around 13 to 25 Health. It's very rare for an NPC or monster to have 100 or more health barring some "end-game" boss enemies. Given the class features of Paths and some beneficial spells, I've seen damage bonuses to attacks and spells range from 1d6 to 4d6, with some of the more powerful spells doing something like 7d6+10 damage. Base mundane weapon damage tends to range from 1d3 for light stuff like daggers to 2d6 for warhammers.

I admit that I have not crunched the numbers, but from a guesstimate I can see combat not taking a tortuously long time unless you have a lot of characters to control through the round or something.

Overall

While it's rather long (278 pages) it's short in comparison to other non-rules lite RPGs (Dragon Age and Numenera are about 400 pages each, Mouse Guard is 320, Vampire the Requiem 2E is 321). It comes with a bestiary of dozens of foes, a setting overview, dozens of character customization choices, and 300+ spells in spite of that. Where many other books which do the same would have 200+ more pages.

What I don't like is that the magic system still has some Vancian influence, and how you can't do minor things all day long like in many other RPGs or Pathfinder/4E/5E. The options for mages are still greater than solely non-magic paths, although multi-classing/gishing in this game's easy so that takes a bit of the bite off. I think that having halflings at all was a poor choice, and there's no free quick-start or SRD: the quick-start costs $6.66 and includes the first two chapters, enough to start at 0 level but misses out on the Paths and Magic, which I think are the major sellers for showing off the game.

In short, I'd recommend it. I think it does enough things different to set it apart from other fantasy RPGs, and there's still cool choices for all types of character concepts for a dark fantasy feel and then some.

Dungeon Bastards is a rules-lite beer and pretzels game which can be picked up and played within the span of a short gaming session. It is a parody of the conventional RPG stereotype of adventuring parties being inherently disruptive elements in the gaming world with the trouble they generate.

The focus of the game is on a group of sociopathic and probably inebriated adventurers back in town and up to no good. It emphasizes poorly thought out shenanigans and belligerent conflicts. The writing style is intentionally vulgar in emulation of the play style, but more for humorous purposes than an attempt to be dark and edgy. Think of the Rat Queens comic and you're probably close to the mark.

DB's task resolution system is rather simple and universal for all manner of activities. There are Moves in the game which cover likely scenarios in the vein of Apocalypse World engine RPGs, and you roll a number of six-sided dice depending on your relevant Stats and Skills.Every 5 on a die counts as one success, every 6 two successes. Competitive Moves have people subtract their successes from their opponents before resolving it, while passive Moves require 1 to 4 successes depending on their difficulty.

Successes are used to activate particular benefits while narrating the scene, allowing you to change things more in your favor the better your result. If things don't go well in your favor, you move up one step on the Bullshit Meter, which is Dungeon Bastard's 'health' system, only it represents a combination of humiliation, injury, and physical and mental exhaustion from one too many hare-brained schemes. If your Bullshit Meter is filled, your PC either "leaves the group like a little wimp," dies, or stays in the game by taking a permanent hit to one of their stats to reduce the Meter by one.

All in all, the system's universal design is very good for the game in that it only requires players to memorize one set of rules instead of keeping track of various mini-systems for activities, and the reliance on narrating things out instead of setting benchmarks is not common in typical fantasy mileau but works for the type of game Dungeon Bastards is going for.

Additionally, the advice for Game Mastering in back includes a random generation d66 table of adventuring ideas generated by rolling two six-sided die with representations for the tens and the ones digit. Even then you get 36 results, ranging from the petty ("An army is laying over in town and taking all the beer! This can't stand!") to the more standard adventure scenarios ("An Elder God has tracked you down for revenge. Fucker is a killer at parties.")

Overall, Dungeon Bastards is a short and easy to learn pick-me-up game with an interesting idea. It's cheap enough that price isn't much of a concern either, and the spin on the "muderhobo" stereotype of adventurers is something many players are well-acquainted with that they can easily imagine the type of game it encourages.

I already wrote a full review elsewhere. As HTML code is not allowed, I'd advise you to search for "3rd Party Pathfinder Review: Path of Shadows" on Min-Max Boards or Giant in the Playground's respective D20 subforums. There I examine what the book has to offer with an in-depth, chapter-by-chapter analysis.

For an abridged review, this product is well worth your money. It has a little something for every character concept, except perhaps for non-casting martial classes save the Barbarian. The nightblade class is a cool mage-thief type who utilizes a path system for a variety of character concepts based on whether they manipulate shadow for illusion, damaging elements, illusion, the cold powers of death, or the manipulation of shadow energy to create pseudo-physical objects.

Many of the class features, spells, and magic items have good synergy with each other, and the author does a good job at taking care of potential infinite combo cheese. There is shadow magic of many different schools other than just illusion, and evocation-lovers will be pleasantly surprised to find their brand of magic highly represented.

Finally, the artwork is downright beautiful. Path of Shadows is a solid first entry for Ascension Games, and provides a lot of material suitable for many kinds of Pathfinder games.

Rule Zero Underlings is a blessing for Game Masters low on preparation time yet who need to generate gangs of baddies to menace their foes.

Many role-playing games have mechanics to simulate hordes of mooks which are dangerous in groups yet can be easily felled by individual heroes. Unfortunately the rules-heavy nature of Pathfinder makes stat block creation an involved process, and the way hit dice scale means that only a tiny assortment of low-HP monsters can be truly used as mooks.

Rule Zero Underlings handles this problem by creating a new monster type with its own set of rules. An Underling's base abilities are almost entirely derived from its group Challenge Rating. Be they bandit, giant, harpy, or zombie a CR 2 minion has the same values for AC, saves, and the like. Critical hits, ability damage, and variant weapon damage and range increments are either universalized or done away with to cut down on book-keeping, with the option for averaging damage rolls to cut down on dice-rolling.

It's entirely possible for a high-level Fighter to one-shot giants and other mighty foes due to the use of Wound/Kill Thresholds in place of traditional hit points. Underlings do not keep track of hp damage, instead they get injured or dropped if a single attack's value bypasses said threshold, and two 'wounds' drops an underling.

An underling's race (or monster type) can grant unique features on top of this, with some iconic monster abilities turned into spell-like abilities to better simulate certain attacks. Also provided are various templates which simulate the features of iconic classes such as clerics, mages, and thieves which can be used to make assassin-mages and vampire clerics for further customization.

I've used Rule Zero Underlings extensively in my own gaming sessions, and it's been a blessing both in terms of cutting down on preparation time and speeding up combat while still provided a bit of a challenge for my group. In spite of its small page count, it's one of the best gaming aids I've purchased and any Pathfinder GM can benefit from this.