Strange mysteries abound… for the poor DM who needs to decipher Kurishan’s Garden and render it into a playable adventure.

Review Originally Appeared May 21st, 2001

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Kurishan’s Garden. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

WHAT I LIKE

I like the adventure hook: The PCs arrive in a town which is having problems. But the threat isn’t directly to them: They’re not getting food shipments from a different town which has inexplicably ceased communication. Carpenter adds a nice layer to a standard feature of fantasy adventures, and emphasizes the importance of the PCs’ actions by showing the widespread impact of the problem.

I like the premise: Kurishan, a reclusive mage who lived in the village of Darbin, has recently died. Upon his death a number of contingency spells were triggered, designed to transfer his consciousness to a beautiful eternal lily in his spacious gardens. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite right, and Kurishan found himself instead trapped within a mass of mold, decomposing vegetation, and other debris. Driven a little insane by this turn of events, Kurishan – no longer able to cast spells, but imbued with an ability to control and manipulate plant life – created a strange race of “brainvine”. The villagers, who had yet to realize that Kurishan had even died, were suddenly beset by these vines: Control of their bodies were taken away from them, but they remain awake and aware of what is happening to them (creating a spooky situation in which the PCs can be attacked by people who are begging them to save them).

WHAT I DIDN’T

I dislike the boxed text: It is lackadaisical and subpar. (We actually have small, 10-foot by 10-foot rooms, folks!) While I don’t consider boxed text to be an essential component of a good adventure (take Penumbra’s excellent Three Days to Kill for example), if it is present I expect it to be of high enough quality so that I can actually read it to my players without feeling embarrassed. Poor boxed text which has been made integral to the adventure’s presentation can also hurt the quality of the underlying structure – which is the case here.

I dislike the fact that the adventure fails to capitalize upon its premise: The horror elements are only loosely played with. The situation in the village is entirely static – despite the fact that the PCs are supposedly facing an opponent who is in control of the entire village (and should, therefore, be capable of presenting a dynamic opposition). The PCs are never really given a chance to figure out what’s going on – but are, instead, forced to simply keep reacting until something clicks and the problem goes away (this is a pet peeve of mine – great concepts which only the DM gets to enjoy).

CONCLUSION

Kurishan’s Garden has a good concept and set-up, but then falls down on the actual execution of its ideas. As an Adventure Booster, the low price of $2.49 means that – despite its flaws — Kurishan’s Garden is probably still a good buy as an idea mine if nothing else.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Author: Ken Carpenter
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Line: Adventure Boosters
Price: $2.49
Product Code: 8308
Pages: 16

The brainvines are a really cool concept. I should take this as a prompt to finally use them after all these years.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

From page one, Jerimond’s Orb has problems.

Review Originally Appeared May 21st, 2001

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for Jerimond’s Orb. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

I knew I was going to have problems with Jerimond’s Orb right from page one, when I read the following boxed text, which is specifically meant to be read aloud to the players (excerpted):

“My name is Arawn. I remember traveling home to Treefall, to my father’s inn, and then… darkness. […] Please, let me go home to my village. My mother and sister must worry for me. Arawn has no recollection of the encounter with the PCs, the beast he became, or anything that occurred after sunset the evening before.”

Dropping spoilers into the boxed text due to a layout error is a small thing, but it denotes a lack of attention to detail. This opening section of the adventure also betrays another pervasive problem: The assumption that the PCs will do completely illogical things to further the plot. This is one of the worst things a module writer can do, because it practically guarantees that the PCs will take actions which will either derail the adventure (thus rendering the module worthless to the DM) or force the DM to railroad the characters into the proper course of action (thus rendering the module worthless to the players). Specifically, Arawn shows up in the form of a terrible monster – which attempts to attack and kill the PCs. The adventure specifically assumes that the PCs will leave this monster alone and – at the same time – keep him around until morning (when he changes back to his human form).

You know, I’ve played RPGs for more than a decade – and I have never had the PCs in my games leave a homicidal monster alive. (Particularly in D&D, where you really have to go out of your way to capture an opponent alive.)

PLOT

Fifty years ago a wizard named Jerimond left a magical orb to protect his hometown of Treefall. The orb was designed to enhance the natural luck of any creature or area. If the orb is stolen, however, those who it once benefited will fall under a terrible curse: Condemned to turn into beasts (known as mathorn) when the sun sets and remain that way until dawn.

The orb was placed on a statue in the center of town, and has long gifted Treefall with good luck and plentiful harvests. A few days ago, local bandits stole the orb (which Jerimond used as part of a key-and-lock system to secure the treasure stashed at his old house). Now the crops are turning bad and random villagers are turning into vicious monsters.

When the PCs arrive in town, they will quickly have four mysteries to sort out: The missing orb, a dead girl, the plague of monsters, and the local bandits. All four, of course, have their red herrings and true clues – and all four, of course, turn out to be connected to one another.

CONCLUSION

Although Jerimond’s Orb is not without its strengths – most notably the interesting cast of characters that Ree Soesbee introduces – it’s dominated by its weaknesses. Its largest flaw, unfortunately, is the general lack of forethought and planning which Soesbee shows in constructing adventure. Time and again the PCs are asked to do irrational things, make illogical leaps of reasoning, and stumble upon the “correct” course of action.

All the building blocks of a good, solid adventure are here, but they are sadly disarranged and out of sorts. To render Jerimond’s Orb worth playing is an effort which its underlying quality most likely does not justify. There are better things to spend your money on.

Style: 3
Substance: 3

Author: Ree Soesbee
Publisher: Alderac Entertainment Group
Line: Adventure Boosters
Price: $2.49
Product Code: 8305
Pages: 16

Reading this review 20+ years after writing it, I’m left a little confused by ranking of Substance 3. But since I also haven’t revisited this adventure in just as many years, I guess I’ll trust past-Justin’s assessment.

The reprint of this adventure in the Adventure I collection notably corrects the boxed text errors mentioned in this review.

Next AEG Booster Review: Kurishan’s Garden

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

“If you were teaching a intro-level college class on roleplaying game design, what would be the reading list?”

Interesting question.

I’m going to design this as a survey/history course. And you’ll need to snag copies of these at the campus bookstore:

1974 D&D
Traveller
GURPS or Champions
Paranoia (1^st Edition)
Vampire the Masquerade
Amber Diceless Roleplay
Burning Wheel
Apocalypse World

And we’ll wrap the course up by comparing D&D 3E, 4E, and 5E, with a particular focus on how they responded to design trends.

D&D 1974

This is the beginning. The baseline for everything that follows and a frame for discussing the proto-history and origin of RPGs from Kriegsspiels to David Wesley to Dave Arneson.

TRAVELLER (1977)

Traveller does triple duty for me.

• It gives insight into the first generation of RPGs that were responding to D&D.
• One of the first science fiction RPGs, after Starfaring and Metamorphosis Alpha.
• Includes a Lifepath system, giving us a first step in looking at different approaches to character creation.

GURPS / CHAMPIONS
(’80s Editions)

The birthplace of the generic/universal RPG system.

A central thesis of this class will be that RPGs pretty universally pushed for “accurate simulation” as a primary design goal through the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Whichever one of these games we choose to look at it will serve as a great exemplar of that trend.

It will also give us point-buy character creation in its fullest flower, allowing us to clearly show the difference between character generation in 1974 D&D and the character crafting which would come to largely dominate the hobby.

PARANOIA
(1st Edition)

This is kind of an oddball choice. Every intro class has one of these on the reading list, right?

But it’s here for a reason.

On the one hand, Paranoia is a comedy game, which gives us a nice, sharp look at the emerging diversification of creative agendas in the ‘80s.

On the other hand, it also examines the unexamined “simulation = good” trend in the ‘80s. Paranoia is a lighthearted comedy game, but its first edition features, among other things, a Byzantine three-tier skill specialization system, because “simulation = good” even if it made no sense for what the game was actually trying to achieve.

(I will give extra credit to any student arguing that the incredible minutia of the system was actually part of the satire of a Kafkaesque government bureaucracy. They’re wrong, but it shows they’re thinking critically about this.)

WHITHER THE UNIVERSAL SYSTEM?

Universal RPGs were VERY popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and then they weren’t. There are still some around today, of course, but the only truly popular ones are 20+ years old.

One theory is that the niche was definitively filled by GURPS, and no other universal RPG could ever compete with GURPS’ library of support material.

The other is that universal RPGs were at their strongest because of the “simulation = good” paradigm. Once you move past the idea, as demonstrated in Paranoia, that “good system” is a Platonic ideal divorced from a game’s creative agenda, the appeal of a “universal system” is not eliminated, but significantly diminished.

VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE

This brings us to Vampire: The Masquerade, a hugely important game that grappled mightily with the idea of pushing a creative agenda other than simulation.

The Storyteller system is interesting to analyze because (a) it ultimately fails to achieve its storytelling goal (and analyzing failure is a great way to learn) and (b) it’s virtually impossible to understand GNS theory without the context of Storyteller.

AMBER

Before we get to GNS, though, Amber Diceless Role-Playing will be our exemplar of the snap-back against detailed simulation.

Emphasized by its diceless engine, Amber was one of many early ‘90s games that were fed up with complexity and bounced to the opposite extreme. It’s an elegant tour de force for designing mechanics customized to the creative agenda and setting of the game.

Plus, Amber features alternative structures for organizing campaigns and extending player beyond the session. So we’re getting a lot of mileage from this one title.

BURNING WHEEL

There are a lot of Forge-era indie games we could choose to spotlight GNS theory. One could argue that we should go with a game by Ron Edwards or D. Vincent Baker. (We’ll cover the latter with Apocalypse World.)

Burning Wheel is, ultimately, just a better game and synthesizes a wider range of innovations. So that’s what I’m tapping.

APOCALYPSE WORLD

Which brings us to Apocalypse World.

Powered by the Apocalypse is the single biggest non-D&D influence on RPG design in the last fifteen years, so it’s basically essential. And, as I just mentioned, D. Vincent Baker is a seminal figure and his design philosophy should be highlighted. So this is another game that’s doing double duty.

WotC-ERA D&D

The big wrap-up for our course is a comparison of D&D 3E, 4E, and 5E.

D&D is, of course, the 10,000 lbs. gorilla in the RPG design room. If we’re teaching an intro course, we absolutely need to cover its evolution.

Post-1974, however, D&D has been extremely reactive in its design. It largely does not innovate, but its massive gravity means anything it refines is reflected back into the industry in a massively disproportionate way. (Take, for example, the concept of advantage/disadvantage as modeled by rolling twice and taking the better/worse result. This was an exceptionally obscure mechanic pre-2014, but after D&D 5E used it, you can find it everywhere.)

Having broadly covered the history of RPG design, therefore, looking at how D&D reacted to (or didn’t react to) those design trends is a great way to review and critically analyze everything we’ve learned in the course.

The final list also gives us (coincidentally, I didn’t actually plan this) wo games from each decade (‘70s through ‘10s) with an extra dollop of D&D. That’s a good gut-check to make sure I wasn’t getting too biased in my selections.

NOTABLE ABSENCES

There are a few notable things missing from this reading list.

FATE, which had a massive influence in the decade before Powered by the Apocalypse, serving as the system for any number of games.

Storytelling Games. Only peripherally looking at how STGs have influenced RPG design is iffy. You can easily make a case for throwing in Once Upon a Time or Microscope or Ten Candles.

RPGs in a Box. These are games like Arkham Horror, Gloomhaven, and Descent. They aren’t actually RPGs, but they’re in the same design space.

Starter Sets. There are unique design considerations in making an effective starter set, but we didn’t cover them at all.

Organization-based Play. This would be a game like Ars Magica, Blades in the Dark, or Pendragon. This has been a persistent design goal for RPGs since Day 1. I can touch on it a bit with Traveller, but it’s really exploded in the past decade and not having a more recent example is a limitation.

Call of Cthulhu. Just because it’s Call of Cthulhu. But my goal wasn’t Most Important RPGs (Call of Cthulhu is easily Top 5), it was Introduction to RPG Game Design. There’s stuff that I could use Call of Cthulhu to teach, but not enough hooks to knock others off this list.

After all, there are only so many hours in a semester.

FURTHER READING
It’s Time for a New RPG
A History of Stat Blocks

APRIL 25-27, 2025
Bloomington, MN, USA

I’ll be a Special Guest at DaveCon later this month! The convention celebrates “all the Daves who were there at the beginning,” including Dave Megarry (designer of the Dungeon board game), David Wesley (creator of Braunstein, the game that inspired Blackmoor), and, of course, Dave Arneson (creator of Blackmoor, co-creator of D&D, and the father of modern roleplaying games).

Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster  – Friday @ 4 PM
Book Signing – Saturday @ 2 PM
DaveCon Q&A with Special Guests – 4:00 PM

MAY 1-4, 2025
Knoxville, TN, USA

You walk into a tavern… and see all your favorite GMs beckoning you to their table!

I’m returning to Green Dragon Fest as one of the Legend GMs. Play games with your favorite TTRPG creators in a vacation resort themed like a fantasy village, then feast on thematic meals while socializing with the GMs and other players.

This event was amazing last year, and I’m so thrilled to be returning this year.

See you in May, Dragonraiders!

GM SEMINAR – May 24, 2025
Minneapolis, MN, USA

I’ll be presenting at a GM Seminar event at Tower Games in Minneapolis on May 24th. This is a fun event organized by a great local game store which features talks from a bunch of different GMs and game designers, focused on creating and inspiring new and experienced GMs alike.

JUNE 13-15, 2025
Poznań, Poland

The exact details of my appearance are still being worked out, but I’ll be appearing at Pyrkon in June to help celebrate the Polish release of So You Want to Be a Game Master!

This will be my first convention appearance in Poland since 2019!

Are you looking for a book that actually teaches you how to a Game Master in exactly the way that the 5th edition D&D does not?

Heath’s Geekverse is introducing you to So You Want To Be A Game Master!

Watch now on Youtube!