[Review] Into the Maze of Dreams (OSE); Ai-generated shit tier digital litter

[Adventure]
Into the Maze of Dreams (2023)
Luiz Eduardo Ricon (Hexplore Publishing)
“First Tier Characters” (lvl 1 to 5)

Shit Shit Shit. Digital litter. Garbage. Dregs from the latrines of the mentally ill. I am without words, incensed to my very soul, my fury is olympean and burns with the heat of the very fires of Hell! This adventure is low-effort garbage that is worthless for everyone and I will run you through the process of discovery so you won’t fall for its ilk. Please refer to bolded text for indicators of shit quality.

36 pages. It begins with a page full of ads, then title page, then credits which is spammed full of links to social media and drivethru. First page: First tier characters is not a concept in core OSE. So why is this terminology being used? Text is bloated with redundancies to pad out the page count and give you the idea you are getting something. The adventure claims compatibility with generic OSR and boasts that you can easily adapt it to Pathfinder, Five Torches deep, Shadowdark, Maid the RPG, Vampire the Masquerade, Monopoly, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Mahjong. The common OSR wisdom states that most old school gaming systems are interchangeable. On the one hand, this is true, you can run a B/X adventure in AD&D. On the other hand, each system has a host of different assumptions and subtle differences that will make a real difference in an adventure with substance that is made to actually be played. Extra spells, differences in statt limits, altered cleave rules etc. All that might require adjustment in order to make it run. “Can be adapted,” is bullshit. Everything ‘can be adapted.’ I can ‘adapt’ my adventure to run in mahjong. Claiming broad compatibility with every system under the sun is empty marketing bullshit.

Second point: A trigger warning. + safety tools + session zero. Trigger warnings are a pseudo-scientific concept, brought into popular culture by malignant agents seeking an excuse to dictate its shape, using weaponized empathy and moral camouflage. This has been used to great effect although by now the ruse is mostly apparent. The idea that someone playing an adventure could get traumatized by something as vague as ‘psychedelic elements’ is hard to credit so including it is primarily a means of signalling conformity with the dominant cultural narrative, and this tells you its target audience is composed of the most conformist, least critical, most zoned out dupes, and this message is included to re-assure them: ‘Don’t worry my fellow heckin wokerinos, I’m just like you. Buy this adventure and let us together fight the evil nazis/putler/drumpff/coof/global warming/the dictionary/chuds!‘
As long as the tranquility of their carefully tended bubble reality is not disturbed, this audience will generally buy anything with bright primary colors on them. Bring in the heckin’ dollarinos! Once you have signalled that you are willing to appease whatever histrionic demands are put forth by the more unstable members of such communities (this is colloquially known as ‘paying the troongeld’ or ‘Xandering’), provided you don’t become the target of a cancellation attempt by an inadvertent comment or simply random chance, you are basically good, and no effort need be expanded on expensive innovation to improve the quality of the product. The moderators of such communities will generally squash any sort of critical voices bemoaning the incompetence of the designer and low quality and effort of the product, with the exception of charges of insufficient narrative conformity. The takeaway point is that in any commerical ecosystem there are different strategies for different audiences, and Adventure Quality is only one particular attribute one can focus on.

What does this page really communicate? Yet another fucking overview. But the adventure is only 36 extremely padded pages, 8-11 is the city (which consists of a list of what appear to be ChatGPT generated NPCs), 12-20 is the dreams leaks, which is a single encounter followed by several possible hooks (again, these look AI-generated), and 20-30 is the dungeon, which consists of seven rooms. Do I really need a seperate overview page to help me navigate that? No but it helps pad out the page count. We are using random tables? Wow, what a novel concept. The OSR has been around for 20 years, I have never heard of this before!

This is another good indicator of a scam. It’s not that there is not ever a good reason to use ToTM (say, in places with unlimited boundaries like the planes or with simple encounters during a hexcrawl), but try to imagine, for a moment, all the complexity, all the decisions and factors that are encompassed in something like this:

And then collapse that into this.

Theoretically there is no reason that all that interaction, all that information, all these extra factors, cannot be compressed into those points. After all, how many angels can sit on the head of a pin? In practice, this almost never happens, so Theatre of the Mind is usually an indicator of lack of complexity and a corresponding lack of effort.

Long-winded explanations of patently obvious things to further pad out a worthless adventure. Observe generic adventure hooks:

By now I had begun to suspect this text was AI-generated. There is something about its lack of substance, its generic, grammatically pristine but soulless sentences that can provide only surface mimicry of the structure of the actual adventure. Notice the generic descriptions, the lack of specificity. Mechanistic adjectives, applied with metronome precision. Grindstone has dark catacombs in which are located mysterious secrets and deadly dangers. GEEEE. Nothing specific. How many people, how much is the inn, can I get retainers etc.

Notice exact paragraph length, generic descriptions, lack of specific information (alignment, levels, etc), lack of specific gameplay permutations (Elysia can provide the players with ‘crucial leads’ and ‘hidden knowledge’. Nothing about how this relates to the events of the particular adventure. Another page is exactly like this.

After the DM has wasted the players time with scenes (oldschool games don’t have scenes), we may now begin the adventure proper with…generic bullshit. Please note that none of the strange occurences have any sort of measureable gameable effects and are just there to further pad out the adventure. Also: ‘This distortion can cause confusion and disorient those unfamiliar with the Sleepers slumbering influence.’ Its almost as if the author was some sort of elaborate language model that uses big data to predict the next word in a sentence without having any sort of awareness of the meaning of any of the words it is using.

Observe the subtle indication that you can actually skip the single encounter, which comprises 1/3 of the adventure, and move on to the last part if you want to do a ‘more streamlined, one-shot kind of adventure.‘ So this encounter is also padding. I feel it is worth discussing because it is, at least, an encounter, thereby implying something is happening, something the author conceived of that can be interacted with. In this case, we are informed we can heal ‘the guards’ (no stats) to ‘reduce the amount of enemies we will face’ who ‘arrive in waves of 1d4, with a minimum of 1.’ Excellent coverage, I was wondering what would happen if I had rolled a 0 on the 1d4, well done, chapeau! And then we are belatedly informed that if we ‘healed the guards’ the waves are reduced by 1, supposedly referring back to the minimum of 1. Why in the name of garl glittergold you would not simply give the guards some fucking stats is beyond me, and how many guards does Grindstone have? FUCKING TRASH GARBAGE. AN APE COULD SHIT A BETTER ADVENTURE. After that excitement, the players are rewarded with 50 gp per horse. This is the totally new and awesome monster btw:

Next three pages are all fucking long hooks AGAIN HALFWAY INTO THE ADVENTURE. ‘Offers them a request with the promise of a generous reward.’ Literal word salad padded nonsense. Completely irrelevant. Three fucking hooks to get players to investigate the 7 room dungeon, something that could be handled in a paragraph at the start of the adventure.

Two more hooks like this, braindead. Section where you hike up the mountain. Notice lack of gameplay. A paragraph of description. Nothing happens. No interaction with the rules. No random encounters. Nothing.

Something should happen but it does not. Again, nothing. Encounter on the top of the mountain. No gameplay. No duration. No map. No design.

20 pages in we reach the Maze of dreams. 8 rooms. Do we think they will have gameplay in them? We step through the magic fissure under the waterfall and are transported. 20 pages of complete nothing in we reach the maze of dreams.

Room 1, nothing happens. Notice reference back ot the lonely man section, which is approximately two pages ago. So much had happened that the author was unsure if you, the idiot that bought this trash, still remembered the thing that was described a page ago. ?

Room 2. A puzzle. Since there is no penalty or time limit to the test, anyone with knowledge of primary colors or sufficient persistence should eventually be able to solve this puzzle, although I am a bit concerned that the adventure does not include tips in case one is running it for the blind or achromatopsic.

Room 3. The hallway of distortion. I would have also accepted ‘walk forward with your eyes closed.’ This would be one typical encounter in a 34 room dungeon taking up 7 pages. I suspect also it was AI generated, but we shall see.

Notice use of doors already? What gives? I thought we were doing theatre of the mind? Now we suddenly have a choice? We are treated to generic combat with a generic antagonist. Notice fucking bullet point descriptions of rooms content, priming the user for a 2 paragraph room with 3 doors and a combat.

Gee thanks for the permission. I really want to use all these wonderfully creative monsters like ‘mist monster’ and ‘fire horse’ in my campaign, but I was not sure if Luiz Eduardo Ricon, author and possibly non-sentient AI language model, would permit me to do so.

This looks like game design because the PCs might suffer some sort of random effect with game mechanics but since there is no procedure for movement through the abstract, 0-dimensional dungeon the 1 hour time limit is arbitrary. In addition, some of these effects have no listed duration. The strange creatures are of course not defined, and the room is pointless.

This is the second room 5, but since this is a place of non-Euclidean geometry, this can happen. There is now a maze, and in order to traverse the maze, you must roll high enough times. No decision that the players make will affect their progress through the maze. Horrible.

2 pages for a pointless random table and a set piece combat. There is a sort of theoretical game design because you must use the item from this room in room 7 to collapse the dungeon. Why is the number of statues random btw? You incompetent poltroon. Can you not even fathom the purpose of random encounter numbers when you penned this imbecilic doggerel and put it up for sale you stinking subhuman ape?

I’m cautiously optimistic that 6 statues with two attacks per round, sleep immunity and AC 4 against a 1st level OSE party of zoned-out coomers could be a potential TPK so perhaps there is hope to be found after all.


The last room you have to dunk the item in a pool and then run away because the cave will collapse. In order to simulate a sense of urgency it apes Holy Mountain Shaker and you must roll on a table every room for a generic hazard, only unlike Holy Mountain Shaker, which is not a good B/X adventure but at least it was inspired and it tried something interesting, it fucking sucks. The PCs must give some sort of description of what they do and you just roll randomly. If they get enough 3 out of 6s, they make it, otherwise they die. That’s it, adventure over. I think I am going to be sick.

The party is given Garvil Thorblend’s treasure if they ‘helped him’ for a total of 4700 gp and a magic item, which is suprisingly generous.

This adventure, and others like it, are copper bestsellers on drivethru. Complete, utter, shite that someone with the aid of randomly generated text can put together in an hour that is lapped up by uninformed buyers. One well deserved Star, an OSR Crusade against Hexplore Publishing and a nelsonian Ha-Haaah to the customers who were tricked by this junk.

*

Postscriptum: Perhaps a useful illustration of the game design chops at work would be to consider the path of optimum risk/reward. If the party wishes to avoid tangling with the spooky scary monsters or die from random chance, their best recourse would be to simply escort Gavrin to the first room of the dungeon, watch him dissapear, then get the location of his strongbox, and thus gain all the treasure in the adventure. The difference between this approach and actually exploring the dungeon is approximately 600 xp, and avoids the chance of TPKs from high numbers of mist fiends (which have a blinding breath weapon attack) or Statues (which are only 35 xp despite having AC 4, 3 HD, sleep immunity and 2 1d6 attacks per round).