Friday, August 5, 2011

Micro-Dungeon is Mega-Awesome: The Purple Worm Graveyard


I just read through The Purple Worm Graveyard by Tony Dowler of The Year of the Dungeon, and I'm throughly impressed. A fun, creepy, idiosyncratic mini-adventure that reminds me of those wacky old Judges Guild adventures.

It features a great "task resolution mechanic" cribbed from Apocalypse World that is elegant, simple and well worth using for specific adventure situations (adventure writers take note); it's short and sweet, and it's brevity is a welcome relief to the walls of text that DMs are supposed to read in many (even OSR) adventures; and it features worm hoochie-mamas with their eye-poppers hanging out in the breeze!

Plus the hardcopy is in THE KING OF FORMATS, A5 5.5"x8.5" digest sized, with a seperate cardstock cover with the map on the reverse. Oldschool and efficient!

Hopefully Tony continues releasing similar adventures; this worm is hooked!

6 comments:

  1. That reminds me, I need to pick this up...

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  2. That looks/sounds like something we needs.

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  3. I've been umming and ahhing over this for a about a week. Now I am decided! Cheers :D

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  4. I ran the bare-bones playtest version of this adventure for Red Box Vancouver, and it was their favourite dungeon ever. Now they alternate between PCs who worship the purple worm god and PCs who fight the purple worm cult.

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  5. Thanks for the great review! For GO Play NW this year I tried out some super-micro adventures: just a screen with a map and some custom moves and notes on the inside. I'm super-psyched about this format.

    Oh yeah, and I've got to make a shout out for Dungeon World (http://www.dungeon-world.com/). TPWG was originally written as a test adventure for an early-early draft of the that game.

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