Adventures
Album Crawl
19 contributors
Content: 22 music-inspired settings and scenarios; many intriguing rules and foes; alternate Miseries; a whole spread of punishments for unruly dice
Writing: Variously fascinating and horrifying
Art/design: Widely variegated but all nicely done
Usability: A couple atypical layouts that reward a bit of scrutiny and patience
Alles Wird Brennen
Content: A map-based adventure to find the keys to the city gates; includes encounter and event tables as well as enemy stat blocks
Writing: Sets the scene and the stakes fairly concisely; other descriptions are tightly focused
Art/design: Intuitive layout with some stylized illustrations of enemies and NPCs
Usability: Provides some leeway for making forward progress or just punishing inept PCs
All Hail The Necrotoad and Fifteen Fungi on the Dead Man’s Chest
Content: A hopping toad crawl and a fungal-infested ship crawl.
Writing: Background that establishes motivation and goals, practical advice on usage, and efficient summaries of fixed and random encounters.
Art/design: A gritty cartoonish illustration style with traditional block text layout aided by effective use of color and emphasis.
Usability: Consistent design choices make these larger dungeons easy to reference.
All's Well At The Macallen Farm
“A farm
Content: A farmhouse adventure for Cthork Borg.
Writing: A timeline of horrific events both intimate and grandiose in scope. Somehow, it manages to also be funny.
Art/design: Disturbing prints punctuate a tidy single-column layout.
Usability: Clear sections and a table of contents allow for easy reference after review.
All Things Fragrant and Foul
Content: New rules, eight classes, and an afterlife-spanning adventure. Also sports.
Writing: A meditation on duality. With a serious tone contained within all its dubious fragrance.
Art/design: A highly interactive and reversible design with upright and inverted text interleaved beautifully.
Usability: Designed for print. Flip the book. My condolences to page 5.
Altars of Cursed Prince Olof
Among the Blood of Thine Enemies
Content: A general scenario and 12 NPCs to do with as you will
Writing: Lean but colorful and evocative
Art/design: Almost entirely typographical, but leverages layered text as a visual figure of how the PCs’ work will ultimately be overwritten
Usability: Requires some elaboration from the GM, but the bones are there
Amputechture
Content: A phantom limb crawl.
Writing: A story-driven dungeon crawl of possession, exorcism, maggots, entrails, rituals, and blood.
Art/design: Grisly isometric map enshrined in vinyl, gruesome cover, and a track listing of an adventure layout.
Usability: Easy to read, simple to navigate, trivial to compel your scvm with a good old-fashioned possession.
An Ageless, Woodless Place
Content: A primeval playground for scvm to die in
Writing: Overviews the setting and covers random finds, weather, landmarks, and monsters
Art/design: Efficiently organized into sections and vibrantly stylized
Usability: Doesn’t have a narrative arc, but players will surely find ways to keep themselves amused; a good place to strand characters or for them to pass through while traveling
Anaqwald
Ancient Skin
Content: A complex and variable (not to mention twisted) crawl through Sarkash
Writing: Efficient but vivid descriptions of locations and inhabitants punctuated by grim wit
Art/design: Marvelous maps; type design helps map the connections amongst locations and items
Usability: Provides checkboxes to track variables (but if you mark this pamphlet, you’re a heathen and you deserve whatever misery befalls you)
Angel’s Tower
Anthelia’s Visage
Content: An ink spilling, statue smashing cavern crawl.
Writing: A dark folk-tale narrative for scvm to trample right through.
Art/design: A mixture of print and splattered ink illustration across a flowing adventure layout.
Usability: Consistent visual cues guide readers through the adventure.
Anti-Paladin Filthy Slime Jam!
25 contributors
All proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders
Anzhela and the Caged Skulls
Content: English breakfast with a side of TPK; running will only make you die faster
Writing: Text heavy, but creates a vivid atmosphere and provides psychological depth to the antagonist, something not often found in Mörk Borg
Art/design: Excellent, expressive depictions of the titular characters
Usability: Includes an alternative d6-based encounter-resolution mechanic; a bit more complex than some scenarios, but the additional moving parts make for an interesting and memorable scenario
A Pale Ground Covering All
Content: A maggot-infested portal-fueled laboratory crawl.
Writing: Squirms with body horror, filth, and promises of change for your unlucky scvm. Though the details of that change are left to the reader.
Art/design: Filthy full page illustrations envelope a clean two column layout with mini maps and tidy spot illustrations.
Usability: Doesn’t sacrifice substance for style.
A Pestilence of Maths
Content: Includes an ad hoc sanity metric, random travel events and tower rooms, and a whole lot of exploding heads
Writing: Clean and characterful with dry gallows humor and well-chosen, interconnective details
Art/design: Effective and appropriate graphic choices that interact cleverly with the concept
Usability: Packs a fair amount of tension and grit into a relatively small package
A Piece of Rotten Fish
Content: Contains detailed information about the settings as well as copious random tables
Writing: Very text heavy, and the writing carries a lot of the descriptive weight
Art/design: Fairly straightforward single-column layout in black and white with some yellow highlights and lots of grody illustrations
Usability: Includes a separate handout of images and maps for the players
Apocrypha
Content: Rules, Tables, Character Traits, Diseases, Treatment & Body Mods, Dungeons, Bounties, Followers, Gear, Summoning, Monsters, Monstrous Classes. A little of everything.
Writing: A variety show with distinct blends of humor and horror throughout.
Art/design: Dementedly scrawled art and public domain images cut through with Mörk Borgian Design Sensibilities
Usability: Clear rules, table of contents, thoughtful page references at the beginning of the monster section.
A Quiet Country Home
Content: An investigation for the Mörk Borg hack: Cthork Borg.
Writing: A delightfully understated horror that is just wallpapered enough for the imagination to set in.
Art/design: Soft & post impressionistic charcoal on canvas lend an heir of forgotten tragedy to the text.
Usability: A considerate adventure layout that preserves many of its secrets until the end.
A Shadow King's Palace
Content: Yeah, what he said.
Writing: Abundant descriptions of locations and things found within the palace
Art/design: Fairly straightforward, text-first pages with some more elaborate, image-dominated spreads later in the document
Usability: “It’s up to the GM to let the PCs escape the palace. It won’t change anything.”
A Spluttering And A Splashing
Content: A 12-room semi-aquatic dungeon
Writing: Well written with lots of character and atmospheric details
Art/design: Primarily uses the clean, clear style of Rotblack Sludge
Usability: Layouts and design make this simple and easy to run
Atticus Tower
Concept: “The foul bard Rexorn … is busy transforming suffering into music.”
Content: A sonic-themed dungeon with original creatures and NPCs
Writing: Mostly descriptive but efficient
Art/design: Exactly what it should be
Usability: A complex but surprisingly easy-to-navigate layout
Auld Clootie’s Bairn
Concept: “What has happened to suddenly change the behavior of little Angelica…and how can the Mercer family fit in to their new community?”
Content: A surreally mundane adventure with a troubled tot
Writing: Provides lots of detail and dialogue as well as suggestions for alternative plots and a metric ton of nasty insults
Art/design: Primarily designed around navigating events and conversations delivered via text
Usability: Ready to use out-of-the-box but can also be tinkered with and adapted to GM taste and need
A Wizard’s Dying Wish
Content: A one-room encounter with a cool monster twist and some nasty aftermath possibilities
Writing: Devoted mostly to describing the situation and setting, but provides the GM with inspiration and some flexibility
Art/design: Keeps the pamphlet visually interesting without being obtrusive
Usability: Fold it twice and you’re ready to go
A Wizard's Dying Wish and Other Tales
Content: A compilation of Philip Reeds pamphlet adventures in a hardcover A5.
Writing: A thick and sturdy scaffold of personalities and events to entertain or eradicate your scvm.
Art/design: Expressive depictions of titular characters and artifacts, easy to navigate maps when provided.
Usability: Encounters can easily be dropped in independently but are thematically consistent for a longer campaign.
A World Lit Only by Fire
Content: An accidental quest to save a town from a regime of vampires
Writing: Primarily descriptive and mechanical but with some appropriately bloody imagery
Art/design: Easily navigable map and clearly delineated tables and stat blocks
Usability: Even if the PCs succeed, they may still fail (horribly)
Babalon's Hangover 2
23 contributors
Content: Monsters and scriptures and dungeons, Oh my!
Writing: Text ranges from bloviated to concise; brisk to simple. But it is reliably miserable.
Art/design: A menagerie of styles as creative and varied as the community which spawned them.
Usability: Divided in three sections with a full index to aid navigation. Entries of varied accessibility and ease of reference at your table.
Basilica of the False Prophet
Content: A desperate descent. An unexpected plunge. A shattered hope?
Writing: Miserable and descriptive encounters, backed by elegant mechanics, make a narrative descent into madness.
Art/design: A masterful balance of utility, consistency, and style. Haunting yet austere illustrations and maps fill but do not dominate the pamphlet.
Usability: Pairs well with Western Wall (also by Rugose Kohn).
Basilisk Burger
Content: A fast-food themed experience
Writing: Includes stat blocks for multiple encounters as well as descriptions and some sample NPC dialogue
Art/design: Presented as a child’s place mat complete with word jumble and crayon marks
Usability: Toy prize not included