Review: "The Lamp"
Hello again, friends! Today I'm back with another small-creator product review! It's a short-ish adventure module called The Lamp published by Halfling Caravan Games. It's compatible with both 5th Edition D&D and 1st Edition Pathfinder. You can buy it on DriveThruRPG HERE for only a couple of bucks. The author gave me a free copy for the purposes of this review.
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What's the product?
The Lamp is a 35-page adventure module, including a front cover and other necessary non-content pages (as is normal). Toward the back are several pages of stat blocks for monsters, featuring game statistics for both D&D and Pathfinder. There are also several full-color maps illustrating the adventure location and the interior of the titular "Lamp," which is a dungeon tower vaguely resembling a lamp or candle, earning its nickname from local tourists.
The basic idea of the adventure is that a small hot spring resort draws in tourists (and your adventuring party) to a mountainside where the Lamp is visible. This mysterious tower shows no doors or windows and there are no stories of anyone entering or leaving, but a signal fire burns at the top of the tower. The Lamp is the subject of local folklore and superstitions, and the adventure involves the players entering the tower, dealing with its contents, and getting out again.
Okay, so is it good?
The Lamp is a bit of a mixed bag, containing both cool ideas and very rough implementation.
Let's start with the technical elements. There are some imperfections that I won't take points off for — like less-than-stunning maps — because that's just a matter of how much money the creator has to hire a skilled freelancer. However, there are other issues that are within the creator's control. For example, the various bits of "read-aloud text" are marked only by being in a different font, which is an awfully small and easy-to-miss visual cue. Additionally, the writing is a bit sloppy, sprinkled with missing words and bizarrely constructed sentences that make it a little bit hard to follow.
Moving on to content, I like the idea. It's an intriguing side quest that you could drop into your campaign. It has a clear theme and a unique identity that can help make it memorable for your players. Unfortunately, the implementation of that idea into a product leaves quite a bit to be desired.
For example, the information provided to the GM is painfully minimal. There was something about sticks to get in a door, but no explanation of what that means, or what the "sticks" are, or where they're found, and so forth. Also, rather than creating robust scenes that account for what players might do (or provide incentives to entice them toward the intended actions), it just tells the GM to have all off-script plans fail until they eventually take the "correct" action. At other times, it just sort of dumps you into a scenario and then the next page assumes you've done a session or two of progress all on your own before coming back to the product.
The Verdict
Overall, this feels like the product of someone who had a cool idea for an adventure but lacked the experience to know how to translate that cool idea into the materials needed for someone else to run a fun adventure from it. As a result, it'll only be useful for you if you're an experienced GM whose idea of buying "an adventure" means buying a general concept and creating the tangible gameplay content yourself — because that's what you'll be doing if you buy The Lamp.
That said, there are plenty of GMs whose preference is exactly that! If the product page had presented The Lamp as being a niche product specifically for those types of GMs — effectively a bullet list of plot points and some maps — then at its two-dollar price point I'd give it a solid B+ as a cool idea held back mostly just by the sloppy writing. However, being marketed more broadly as an adventure module, it fails to live up to what a prospective customer would think they're getting, which takes the grade down to a C–, as anyone except the most extreme all-I-want-is-ideas-and-maps GMs are going to feel let down.
Would I recommend buying it? Maybe this will surprise you, but YES! Absolutely! For starters, it's only two dollars! Hell, a pack of maps alone is worth that price, so the fact that you also get some cool adventure seeds is just gravy. As long as you know what you're getting (and if you're reading this, then you do) then yeah, it's worth buying!
Honestly, I think a more fair price for this product would be $4.00 — twice what they're charging. And if you're the type of GM it's best suited for? You should definitely be buying this. Here's the link again to The Lamp's product page: LINK
That's all for today. Until next time, take care of each other, okay?
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