Caves Of Shadow is a GREAT introduction to D&D.

It's basically written as a stripped down version of D&D 3.0 (which actually makes it easier to adapt to 5e than a more rules intense 3.0 scenario). Although the adventure is quite short happening all in one location and only having seven encounter areas having an NPC, a few mysterious objects to explore, and a significant final fight gives the feel of a 'real' D&D game.

My two criticisms of the adventure both come from it's overall uninteresting visual presentation. Given how small the map is it looks like it could have been laid out over the two center pages and then been pulled out and used with counters or miniatures. The second issue is that the addition of a few small pieces of art (a door, a rat, the old man, an ogre) would have really imersed the reader/DM more in the adventure.

Overall I think Caves Of Shadow is one of the best introductory adventures for any edition of D&D both for players and for DMs. And for $0 it's certain good value :)

Calling "Into The Darkness" an adventure is a bit overstating it.

It's basically a single encounter meant to walk new players through a basic encounter. The best part of Into The Darkness is the DM Tipsheet meant to help a DM learn how to play monsters.

Into The Darkness is not objectively bad or poorly written, it's just a bit flat. The focus here is clearly on the mechanical aspects of the encounter with no flavour or colour given that would honestly impart the more engaging elements of an RPG.

For $0 if you need something quick to drop in it's not bad, but as an introduction for new players it really doesn't do a great job of showcasing D&D in it's best light.

I just read through The Bloody Harvest and although I haven't had a chance to run it yet I thought I'd share my initial thoughts.

First up it's nice not only to have access to a low (1st) level Ravenloft adventure, but also to see that adventure located outside of Barovia. Souragne is a domain that hasn't been serviced much since 2nd edition as it's origins/themes are rooted in the plantation era southern United States and some of the material has not aged well. I think the author has done a really good job of touching on the existing flavour of the region while simply leaving out the more problematic elements.

The adventure does a good job of setting up a 'big bad' while letting the inexperienced characters deal with minions and exploration in the lead up to the finale. The formatting of the adventure is quite good being easy to follow and logically laid out.

My one criticism of the adventure (and this just might be my personal taste) is that I found the adventure to be a bit visually flat. A bit of interior art and some additional maps would make this a 5-star product for me.

This adventure is a huge bargain and GREAT value for the money. I highly recommend the adventure to anyone looking for a non-Barovia introductory Ravenloft adventure.

First up this was a great crisp scan and other than one table on page 65 I found the whole thing to be crystal clear.

The adventures themselves still feel very much 'on rails' to keep them progressing inline with the novels but there does seem to be a bit more exploration and they feel less on rails than the advntures presented in DLC1.

Overall I enjoyed this collection more than the first and defintely think it's a worthy addition to the collection of anyone gathering D&D material from the old TSR era, but having said that I think it has far more value as a book to be read, rather than a series of adventures to be run.

This is an absolutely AMAZING amount of solo gaming content, and I can't believe it was only $4!

Grave Of The Green Flame combines map based overland exploration with some individual location set pieces. The adventure has a simple setup (find the bandits who robbed me) coupled with a few teasers towards a bigger grander story.

The addition of the 'Adventure Point' system offsets one of the biggest problems in solo games driven by non-solo gaming engines. Usually the lack of other party members or easily accessible healing magic in systems that generally include them mean that one or two bad die rolls can bring disaster. The addition of the 'Adventure Points' are basically re-rolls that give a player a limited number of do-overs to avoid those adventure ending failures a limited number of times.

I did have two minor issues with the adventure; not sure if there was hiccup with my PDF or my printout but entry "T" seems to be missing from my copy, the other things is for me personally I would have liked some artwork in the adventure to dress it up a bit.

Having said that I highly recommend Grave Of The Green Flame, it's one of the best solo adventures I've played and was a bargain at the price.

I have to say this is a very different adventure from other solo adventures I've bought in the past. It won't be for everyone but I quite liked it.

The adventure itself is quite short, being only 60 entries in total. It is however proceeded by 5 very detailed pages on creating a character, which makes this solo adventure arguably the best solo adventure I've played for a new player inexperienced in either D&D or RPGs in general. In addition the adventure is followed by; a bestiary, and notable NPCs. This really fills out the overall experience and also makes this adventure something a new player could develop into their first adventure to DM.

Even though the adventure itself is short I enjoyed it and I really liked the 'under the hood' info included separated out from the text of the adventure itself. This would be a great template for game companies to follow for including an introductory solo adventure into box sets for new RPGs.

Although Mark Of Amber is not considered to be the 'classic' adventure that X2 Castle Amber was it has a far more coherent narrative and better development of the story and the Amber family.

For me, my intent is more to weave a campaign around the original X2 adventure using Mark Of Amber as a source book to pad out the narrative.

It's a nice book and feels like a bargain for the price but my one criticism would be that my print copy appears to be reproduced from a somewhat low-res or blurry scan. I can see and read everything but artwork is not very crisp.

I have to admit; I picked up And Then There Were None based solely on the title, and although it did not turn out to be the adventure I was expecting it turned out to be an excellent adventure of a variety (haunted house) that I really like.

'And Then There Were None' is the title of one of Agatha Christie's more famous novels and I was expecting a mystery along those lines. I was initially disappointed that that wasn't what I got, but then discovering I had bought a low-level haunted house adventure with a CR appropriate villain that none-the-less felt like a big-bad I was moe than satisfied with my purchase and honestly think this adventure is under-priced at only $1.99.

As is frequently the case with horror/haunting/mystery adventures I don't want to get into details for fear of spoiling things, but I will say if you enjoy the discovery elements of playing through Ravenloft and exploring Strahd's descent from basic evil to becomming a true monster this adventure will really appeal to you.

If I was going to suggest any potential improvements for the adventure it would be adding some art. The visual presentation is a bit flat and could be punched up with a few pieces of art or simply public domain pictures of rooms in old abandonned mansions or castles.

Overall I highly recommend this adventure. It's a fantastic one-shot and could easily be dropped into or used to start a campaign.

I'm predisposed to like horror adventure anthologies, but this is objectively one of the most rewarding horror adventure anthologies I've ever read.

The one downside of anthologies tends to be that low page counts generally equate to very little backstory and flavour, that is not the case here. All the adventures in this collection center around the Lovelace family and Lovelace manor. This means that in addition to being able to share some inital background material each story builds on the overall narrative. This results in extremely easy to run one-shots that none-the-less have a ton of narrative weight behind them. It seems so obvious reading it now, I can't believe more adventures haven't taken this route in the past.

In addition to the structure, the quality of the writting itself and the intensity and sense of dread discovery in the stories themselves is fantastic and rewarding. I don't want to spoil anything but imagine classic victorian-era ghost fiction with just a hint of inspiration by way of Lovecraft.

The one thing for potential purchasers to be aware of are the content warnings by chapter and I would encourage DMs to consider those and their group's sensibilities before diving headfirst into some of the content herein.

I bought this anthology about a year ago but got distracted and never got to run it. This year I think it will be the bridge from Halloween through Christmas in my RPG schedule and I'm sure my players will really enjoy it....or be scarred by it....either way, I'm fine.

On my neverending trip through gaming nostalgia I recently picked up Expedition To The Barrier Peaks which I recalled being one of my favourite adventures during my early days of D&D.

The adventure holds up really well if you're interested in weird genre mash-ups and I love the fact that the S series of modules had so many pieces of art to present to players but in 2020 I ran into one problem with this adventure that simply didn't exist in my initial playthrough decades ago, this adventure is EXTREMELY well known to players of a certain era. That means one of the adventure's strongest features (the reveal of that genre mash-up) is pre-spoiled for most players. Having said that if you have a group of players who are new to D&D and don't know the history of these older modules this adventure is fantastic! It lays out a somewhat traditional quest storyline and then almost immediately subverts expectations of what can exist in a fantasy RPG.

One caution for potential DMs; I do remember back in the day when we played this laser guns lingering around our 'fantasy' game for awhile got less fun once the novelty wore off. Having said that, to me personally this and the EX series of modules are my favourite Gygax modules contributions to D&D!

I really struggled with how to rate this adventure. Truthfully I kept bouncing back and forth between 3 stars and 4 stars and if I could give 3 and a half stars that would have probably been a more accurate and fair grade, but I'm going to err on the low side for a reason I will get into shortly.

First up; I purchased The Hauting Of Eliuska Manor completely on a whim. It happened into a search for another product I was after and it sounded interested (I love haunted house scenarios) and has a really nice thematic cover. Ultimately I feel like what I got was a bit of a mixed bag with more positives than negatives so your individual experience may differ from mine.

First up; the writting. I really like how this adventure is written and laid out. It is extremely DM friendly and has background and motivations spelled out in the encounter/location blocks for every encounter. This means a minimum of page flipping and searching during the game and really keeps the DM focussed on 'why' things are happening and helps maintain focus on a tone. This kind of clarity is a huge boon when trying to run an adventure where atmosphere and mood are important as it prevents DMs from accidentally breaking that tone and potentially confusing players. In addition I felt the objective quality of the writting was quite good as once again it contriubted to the mood without any of the prose becoming so flowery as to feel forced. The author does a great job in creating tension and making everything feel like part of a larger story instead of a simple set-piece.

The art and cartography. This is where I really struggled to formualte an opinion. I really like the style of the artwork and there is certainly enough of it. Likewise the maps look interesting and well done. Having said these things I purchased the print copy of the book and the clarity of both the art and the maps is terrible. Although much of the adventure could be thought of as occurring in darkness the art and maps themselves are printed so dark that details can be difficult to make out or lost. I'm not sure if this is a print quality issue, or something to do with the original files itself but I was really disappointed that some imagery that looks like it's probably pretty fantastic is dimished by how it's been produced. My other visual issue with the cartography is that it feels like there is a lot of wasted space and the maps are presented smaller than they need to be, basically if most of the manor maps were printed in landscape rather than protrait format they might have looked better.

Value for money. And this quite honestly is where I decided to err on the low side of that 3.5 star comment from earlier. Although I like the adventure and will definitely run it, looking back at my purchase $19.99 feels like a lot for 50 pages of this print quality. Had I spent $10-12 on this I would probably have considered a case of I got what I paid for.

Overall I recommend The Haunting Of Eliuska Manor as an adventure but would not recommend paying for the POD version.

Rabid Dogs packs a TON of great content for DCC into it's 32 pages! I'll start off by simply saying I highly recommend this to anyone playing DCC, but especially to players and GMs who have been using the system for awhile and could use a few new things that feel 100% inline with the flavour of DCC while still adding something new. You'll get your $4 worth (and more) in the first 15 pages!

One of the first things in the zine is a new occupation table. For me this was a huge boon as I really enjoy playing funnels but after years of playing them I have to admit the existing occupation table which is admittedly quite large had begun to feel a lot smaller. The great thing about this new table is that there is no power-creep so one player could use this table while another player uses the existing table from the rulebook and they would blend together deamlessly.

The next section is an optional set of rules for removing the race-as-class from DCC. These rules are handy for anyone who wants to play an exotic race but doesn't want that choice to define everything else about their character. Race-as-class is a holdover from the B/X days of the game and although there's not necessarily anything wrong with it, it does feel like it railroads exotic fantasy races into their basic roles/stereotypes from Tolkein novels.

The next rules section of the zine introduces the Outlier, a pseudo-Ranger more inline with the 'no-heroes' power level of DCC. I really like the Outlier and can't wait to play one in a game. I think of it as basically an outdoorsy version of DCC's Thief. Basically swapping some of the Thief's dungeoneering and criminal skills for a smaller selection of outdoors skills while also being slightly sturdier in combat than a typical DCC Thief.

the final rules-centric article is on dogs as PCs. These dog rules are really neat as they tap into the growing popularity in RPGs of animal PCs while still being very anchored in the world/system/balance of DCC. Your dogs have skills and abilities, and they do improve as they level up, but at the end of the day they are actual dogs with all the limitations you would expect and not magical dog/human hybrids. I don't have any plans to run an all-dogs DCC game, but having said that the next time I'm a player in a funnel I'm definitely going to include a dog as one of my characters.

After these additions to the rules Rabid Dogs leaves us with two road-side encounters. These are great additions to a GMs toolkit as in my experience published DCC material focusses on interior locations so having some additional overland content is a boon to those of us who rely heavily on published material for our games.

Once again I highly recommend Rabid Dogs to anyone and everyone playing DCC, I can't imagine anyone not getting their money's worth out of this product and finding atleast one thing that will become a permanent addition to their game.

I genuinely don't know if there are any other 'legacy' books that hold up as well as the Gazeteer series for me personally.

Principalities Of Glantri is an amazing book that in addition to providing some additional/deeper setting information for some of the adventure modules of its day has a huge number of adventure seeds and ideas for writting your own material. As someone who has played through many (every?) edition of D&D so far books that steer heavily into story and background rather than edition-centric mechanics are always my personal favourites and the Gazeteer series hits that nail on the head.

The main features of Principalities Of Glantri for me were both expanding the background of Glantri which had previously only been hinted at in content featuring the Amberville family, and a deeper dive into what the world of wizardly academia looks and feels like in the D&D known world.

A great looking book filled with a ton of inspiration and campaign seeds.

If I was reviewing this product at the time of it's initial release I would probably be giving it 5 stars, but as a sourcebook for Dragonlance's AD&D publications it's been surpassed by other more complete books that were published after the conclusion of the initial DL1-14 series of adventures.

Having said that, this book holds up extremely well and as a primer on the world of Krynn and what makes it different from TSR's main settings at the time (Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms) Dragons Of Mystery paints a vibrant picture of a world that is truly different rather than just 'Greyhwak + Dragons'. The artwork is spectacular and my scan copy was quite crisp and clear. The information on the moons of Krynn as well as the dieties is a must have (in my opinion) for anyone running a Dragonlance game and is well formatted and easy to read. I would also say that for a certain type of gaming fiction fan (I would include myself in this) it's always a fun resource to have game stats for the characters in a story.

One HUGE positive I would like to put out there for anyone considering this book for a game for later editions is that the first half of the book is almost completely flavour and reference without any game mechanics connected to its edition of the game. So if like me you want background and source material you can just copy and give to players without it having a disconnect with (in my case) 5e.

If you like your fantasy RPGs old-school this is the go-to choice for me.

Really straight forward core-mechanics combined with the old-school mentality that encounters should be lethally dangerous without being unfair really lands as intended. I really like the experience system allowing characters to feel like they're legitimately improving and growing without having the uneven power jumps present in some level based systems.

If you're a fan of old school british RPG art and concepts or simply want a fantasy RPG that hits that game design sweet spot of 'easy to learn, difficult to master' Advanced Fighting Fantasy is a great choice.

MAY YOUR STAMINA NEVER FAIL!