GL1 - The Nameless Dungeon (review)

[bryce0lynch]

Chris Gonnerman
BFRPG
BFRPG
Levels 1-3

One day you are walking down a road, minding your own business, and the next thing you know goblins are hunting you in a forgotten dungeon …

I hate this adventure. More than usual. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because the weekend is over, or my wife is busy, or I had a bad day at work, my f***ing cat is trying to drink my 8am PBR. Maybe. I think, though, it serves as an excellent example of how things fail. Gygax wrote a lot of bad sh**. Good DM’s are not always great writers. You have to translate your vision in to the written form for the adventure to be a success. In so many of the things I review I don’t think the vision gets translated. Somehow the great play experiences don’t materialize as a component of the adventure. The DM must add color and bring the adventure to life. But the published adventure must inspire the DM to do that. That’s the f***ing point of the published adventure. I don’t know who Gonnerman is.rpggeek implies he has something to do with BFRPG. I’ve never seen it but I think people like it. I’m sure he’s probably a nice guy. He certainly has had the wherewithal to get off his ass and do thing, which I can respect. But this adventure? It’s boring as f***. Welcome, my friends, to Dwimmermount Part 2.

The adventure is simple: your group is attacked by goblins in a forest, repeatedly, until you chase them. Then you fall through the forest floor and in to the dungeon. The goblins chase you in. This is a three level dungeon with 90 some rooms. Usually multiple levels and a lot of rooms is good sign. Not this time. Sometimes you can tell a lot from a map. Does it look generic & boring or does it looks like someone was excited to drawn it? Does it inspire you, the DM, to ask “Oooh!! What’s in THAT room?” or do you look at it and say “Meh.”Yeah, it’s got some loops. There’s an example or two of same-level stairs. Otherwise, it just looks like a contrivance. There’s nothing to inspire. The wandering table is similar. Just a list. It DOES provide a nice monster stat summary, but otherwise it’s just a list. And not a good list either. Lots of poison and AC3/HD4 monsters on the level 1 list. That’s not cool. The adventure notes that the ants (the AC3/HD4 creatures) are a kind of intelligence test for the PLAYERS. Do they charge in and die or find a better way. While, generally, I agree, that has two problems in this case. First, you put them on the wanderers table in addition to lair’ing them. That makes the parties death random, just as the Save or Die monsters on Level 1 do. Second, how do the players know? Have they memorize the BFRPG monster manual? A troll, a giant, a dragon, these are things the players will recognize. They’ll say “Oh Sh**!” and run away. Great! But a group of 10 orcs, one of whom is AC-10 with 99HD and doing 1-100 damage on each hit is unfair, especially at level 1. Player knowledge is to be encouraged, but you can’t subvert that by then using things the players know nothing about and not giving any clues to them that it’s coming. That turns things in to an arbitrary killer DM game. No one wants to play that kind of game.

The encounters, through, are the real problem. They have the same kind of “maximally boring” thing that Dwimmermount has (had?) Every room description starts out with … a description of the room dimensions and where the doors are. You know, the thing the map shows? The f***ing PURPOSE of the map? Yeah, that’s it. It described right there as the first couple of lines in each room. Joy. What follows is some boring read-aloud. Well, sometimes. Sometimes there isn’t read-aloud. What’s the point of this? Are you holding my hand or not? Then, there will be something in the room that is boring as f*** and has way too many words to describe. The room is dark. The room has a monster (another paragraph! Yeah!) The room has a feature that you can’t interact with. The room has a feature you can interact with, but to no effect. There is nothing in the room descriptions to catch the DM’s imagination. It’s all BLAND. There is nothing in the rooms to interact with, meaningfully, for the players. For example, the continual darkness room. There’s nothing to it. It’s just dark. Or, the room with the “Slow Mirror” that shows the room as it was one hour ago. Except that the f***ing room is empty. What is shows is maybe a random monster poking its head and then moving on. It’s not just f***ing boring it’s a waste of time as the players try to figure out what’s going on. What’s going on? Nothing.

It’s as if you took a minimally keyed dungeon, like Mad Archmage, and then expanded the descriptions IN THE MOST BORING WAY POSSIBLE. This looks like Stating Facts. “The room is 20 foot by 20 foot with a 10 foot high ceiling. The walls are grey fitted stone and are slightly slick with moisture. In the center of the room is table. It has four legs and a flat surface on top. The legs are in good shape but are plain and the tables surface shows signs of use, with some minor cuts and scrapes on it.” Yeah, it’s f***ing description. It’s a description of nothing. How does that room support play? How does it inspire the DM? There’s room after room after room like that in this adventure … just like in the original Dwimmermount draft.

I like the Internet. You can find some great D&D sh** on it. But you gotta wade through the crap to find it. This is part of the 99% of everything published for D&D that is crap. These sorts of well-meaning products are a dime a dozen in the OSR. That’s too bad. But what do I know, I’m drinking PBR at 8am on a Monday.

MODERATOR: POST MODERATED TO OBSCURE MATURE LANGUAGE.

[SmootRK]

Thanks for your opinions. I can appreciate some of the points you make.

That said, not a fan of the language choices you utilize. For me, these choices in language (namely cursing) diminishes your points greatly... to the extent that I cannot take your opinions as being actually relevant. I study quite of bit of psychology as it relates to communications (both as public speaking or in written form)... and the use of such "shock" language is not particularly well regarded except for those in the comedy fields.

In fact, I will take the time to moderate your language choices in your review, and I sincerely hope that does not offend you greatly. We just keep things a tad more tame around here due to having many youthful members or those that enjoy the game with their children, where a less intense language is better appreciated.

[Dimirag]

Agreed with smoot, I know he just puts a copy of what he writes on another page, but this forum is more "family oriented" so that kind of language is out of the way here, so it would better perhaps to simply put a page link or a moderated version.
To me, whom I have to translate the best I can what I read to my native language, reading to much curses makes to loose interest and really diminish the content, and is more critiques of tastes than to give ideas on how to fix and tell what is wrong with the module.
Note that these are just my personal opinions and no disrespect is intended.

[-1warrior]

In my opinion, while GL1 isn't the best of Chris' stuff, it doesn't really deserve the review you gave it. You get what it says. It's a dungeon, and a pretty open-ended one at that. I've inserted this adventure into my campaigns several times over the years since it's release, and I think it works well. Just my opinion.

[Longman]

With all the stuff going down in the world, to get like this over a free gaming module? Have to assume the guy was mostly joking. Not funny, just weird.

[Solomoriah]

To correct what I consider an important point, GL1 Nameless Dungeon isn't a BFRPG adventure, it's a classic D&D adventure originally posted on Dragonsfoot; it was revised, corrected, and converted to BFRPG and inserted into the BF1 Morgansfort multimodule.

I honestly don't understand the angry rant, though. If you don't like it, fine... it's not like either Dragonsfoot or myself charged you any money for it. There are a lot of adventures out there that I could rant like that about, but why bother? Just because I don't like them doesn't make them (or their authors) worthy of that sort of treatment.

[bryce0lynch]

I assure you, I did not single out GL1 for a rant. There's a lot of softball in the OSR, and in niche subcultures in general. That's not me. When I say something is good you know it's good.

I'm sure Gonnerman is a nice guy; most people are. Probably a great DM. BFRPG seems very popular. But whatever vision there was more this dungeon did not translate on to the page ... which I stated in the review. The product must inspire the DM to greatness and provide the elements needed to support interesting play. That's the purpose of the product. This did not do that.

What then is the difference between randomly rolling up a dungeon in the back of the 1E DMG and and this product? Very little. I have no doubt that there are many DM's who could take this product, or a completely randomly generated dungeon, and create an amazing evening of play. But that's because of the DM and not the product. GL1 ends up in the same pile as the vast majority of published product, free or not. To their credit, folks are excited and create something amazing ... in their own minds. And it doesn't translate or get communicated effectively to the consumer. The chaff masks the wheat, the truly great adventures that DO inspire and communicate the wonder of FRPG.

I told you I didn't like it and, more importantly, I told you WHY I didn't like. I have not the conceit to assume everyone should like what I like. You get to read the review and decide if you like what I've described or don't like what I've described. Ranting that "SUX!!" makes for a poor review. Explaining why let's you make your own decisions. And, perhaps, raises the quality of future product.

I have struggled with my attitudes regarding free adventures. In the end I decided that it is more important to direct people to good product, regardless of cost, then to worry about a different standard for free vs. pay. After all, time tends to be much more valuable than the pittances charged for commercial product.

This product deserves every bit of the review of I gave it. That doesn't mean Chris is a bad person. It means Chris didn't write a successful product. There is a world of difference between the two.

[Hywaywolf]

"It means Chris didn't write a successful product."

Actually, that is not what it means. It only means that Chris didn't write a product that you like. The Nameless Dungeon has been downloaded and successfully played many times on its own and even many more times as part of "BF1 Morgansfort: The Western Lands Campaign". If success is measured by whether or not a product meets bryce0lynch approval then obviously you would be correct in your assertion. On the other hand, if you measure success by number of downloads and/or times played, then I would judge that as a self published product with no product advertising or promotion other than to announce its availability on the BFRPG forum, then I say its been pretty successful.

[Metroknight]

I assure you, I did not single out GL1 for a rant.

But you did and you came here specifically to rant about it and point fingers at Chris. I don't know who you are and I put your critique on people's work on the same level of a chimp slinging poo.

If you had actually researched the background of the module, Chris wouldn't have to correct you on this particular point that you claim Chris was the original author of the module plus if you took the time to research about Chris you would have known that he is the creator/developer of BFRPG and the host of this site.

Right now your critique carries less water than you holding a holey cup full of piss in front of a fan. Come back and give a proper objective critique when you have fully research what you are criticizing instead of personal foul mouthed rant.

[Solomoriah]

Thanks, Hyway.

For the record, bryce, since you don't seem to know this... I am Chris Gonnerman. I've been using the handle Solomoriah for decades now, in various places online, and I think most of the long-term members here know my real name. I've held back replying here because it's a review of one of my adventures; being overly defensive is a personal issue that I try hard to resist.

But hey, why not. One of my biggest hassles in running an adventure is having all the stats etc. figured out; Nameless provides the bones of a dungeon, with some interesting but apparently random locales, fully detailed and ready to run. There's no "story" to speak of, just a hook that dumps the player characters into the dungeon, and that was intentional as well.

In the Old School, we don't write story (excepting backstory, of course); story is what happens when the players pick up their dice and walk into our world. The Nameless Dungeon was actually inspired by Endless Tunnels of Enlandin, a Dragonsfoot module which, despite glaring level-balance issues, is a blast to run... and just as random and story-free.