How the fuck does that work?

Our intrepid DriveThruRPG “Featured Reviewer” has 64 reviews listed. The breakdown is as follows: 5-stars [35], 4-stars [26], 3-stars [2], 2-stars [1]. I’m throwing out the 2-star review: it was his first ever review and it was posted at a time before he became active on the site. I’m also throwing out the 2 3-star reviews: they are both for products from Knightvision Games, which should be renamed Here’s-Some-Toilet-Paper-To-Wipe-Your-Ass-With Games. So it’s all 4′s and 5′s on Planet Tenkar, which is why he must be such a big hit at DriveThru.

Empire isn’t the first time he’s passed out a 5-star handjob to something he didn’t read. The Secret Fire gets a perfect score, even though “I’m still working my way through it.” Witch Hunter: Silver Wings gets a perfect score, despite the fact he does “not own a copy of the RPG rules.” How do you review an adventure if you don’t know the game? Oubliette #6: perfect score, despite his note “I’m going to have to read these [articles] closer later.” He admits several products get perfect scores because he was involved in their production, including Seal the Rift! and Knockspell #6. Thanks for being honest, I guess. Most of his reviews praise the hyperlinking, compliment the art, note how great it looks on his Kindle, and otherwise drop big hints that the products were never read.

Isn’t the minimum requirement for reviewing something to have actually read it? Doesn’t DriveThruRPG feel a little uncomfortable that their “Featured Reviewer” slobs 5-star knob on products that he doesn’t read? How fucking shamelessly desperate for attention — and free schwag — must you be to breathlessly hum cob without even taking a break to wipe the jizz from the previous review off your chin?

Also, did I read his blog correctly — is he responsible for these bed-shitting videos?

Burf Sandusky, Level 3 Priest of the Cosmic Catholic Church. Burf lurks in the plumbing at Star Base Shitstain — here he’s shown popping his head out of an astro-toilet in the boy’s changing room, hoping to catch a glimpse of some hairless cadet meat. Good luck Burf!

Swendy Hootcooch, Level 7 StarTard from planet Mongolo IV. Got those six pack rings stuck on her head as an infant. What accounts for the vacant-eyed stare, her rape by rampaging Poags or her INT3? Doesn’t matter — as long as she has her cheek-mounted cum deflector and hamburger wrapper cape, she’s one happy space princess!

What species of demon shat this abomination onto an innocent world? Seriously, this looks like something a prisoner makes from a bar of soap and Kool-Aid powder and then hides in his butthole.

The world’s most fucked-up trophy is once again up for grabs, here are your nominees:

Anomalous Subsurface Environment. 87 page megadungeon product, and the megadungeon doesn’t start until p.41 — Houston, we have a problem. The first 40 pages are devoted to the campaign world and nearby city/base of operations, both of which are completely uninteresting. Worse, a sizable portion of this crap content is given over to a bunch of random tables that are A) more jokey than usable, and B) poorly formatted with abundant wasted space. The dungeon itself is *okay*, nothing groundbreaking but capably-designed. The whole is waaaay too gonzo — would have much preferred more Algol and less Cinder. I mean, Cornstalk Warriors and ‘Dober’-Men? Fuuuuuuuuck. Would have also preferred no world-building and an extra level or two of megadungeon.

Realms of Crawling Chaos. I wanted to like this one, but it’s such a boring, tedious fucking drag that I get angry thinking about it. Dan Proctor is at it again with the cut ‘n’ paste routine, basically all he’s done is collate a bunch of Mythos content with nothing of his own to add. How he could write this and be incapable of mustering the dim spark required to add a Ghoul character class is beyond me. This book is also a hard lesson in Michael Curtis’ obvious limitations — his contribution is a handful of d100 lists, and the 2 seconds it takes to roll the dice is about how memorable any of it is. Stonehell and Dungeon Alphabet were cleverly structured but devoid of interesting content — this isn’t even cleverly structured.

Tome of Adventure Design. I hadn’t even heard of this one… I wish I still hadn’t. It’s 300+ pages of random tables. The book costs $42, which is outrageous. The pdf costs $21, which should be punishable by lynching. This book should be burned.

Stars Without Number. I can’t get too mad at this one, the pdf is free. But it doesn’t fit into this group. 2 Castles bills itself as a non-denominational rpg design award, but it’s obviously got its dick squarely in the OSR’s ass. Stars bills itself as old school, but other than abilities, AC, and hp it’s way outside the box. It’s got shitloads of skills and WFRP-style careers and a bunch of other shit that has no place here. The factions rules are dope as hell, that chapter’s a keeper.

ASE will win in a landslide. Stars gets booted because it’s not fantasy, Realms is dumped because they don’t want to give another award to Curtis, Tome is ignored because they don’t want to give another award to a book of random tables. How is it Loviatar is not nominated?

If you’re not willing to provide the community the service of writing a bad review when it’s merited, don’t fucking call yourself a reviewer. All this douche does is crap out one review hand-job after another, including for Chuggy Cumdumpster’s unrelenting stream of abysmal piss, which is free anyway so I hardly see the point.

Good lord this just makes me goddamn crazy, what a motherfucking hobbit-dicked POS.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!

Sorry guys OSRIC is worthless, but thank you for your diligent cut ‘n’ pasting work. When 5e is announced as OGL, OSRIC officially turns into a 400 page doorstop. Now let’s get an official OD&D reprint like the Frazetta version and really put a ranseur through the balls of the OSR.

Yes, I will be buying the new Carcosa. Just doing it to support Geoff, who lives in the middle of nowhere and rants about the federal government so he needs all the help he can get. Probably he’ll use the money to build a fertilizer bomb and blow up a post office, but he’s earned it in my book and if that’s what he wants to do, fuckin’ go for it, bro.

But I can’t imagine ever pulling this thing out and using it. J4 is all proud of himself that he’s filling the pdf full of hyperlinks and easy navigation shortcuts but when you supersize the page count from 96 pages to 288, you have to do something. I can pick up my Carcosa book and know instantly where to turn whenever I need something, but 288 pages is a fucking unwieldy special needs child that demands a padded helmet and sleeping restraints. Crowing about curing a problem that you created? I award you no points and may God gnaw your balls off. Also it looks horrendous. Kent called the redone cover a paw print, but it looks more like dook-smear on a wad of tp. The interior art is a bunch of wack-ass bullshit too, including the poorly-done map redraft.

But I’m drawing the line at Isle of the Unwanted, I can only support Geoffy’s Ayn Rand lifestyle for so long.

I think this happens somewhere in this adventure...

Apparently Dwimmermount will soon be inflicted upon an innocent world, which makes now the perfect time to examine one of James Maliszewski’s prior efforts. Thinking of taking the plunge into the wildly-creative imagination of the preeminent voice of the OSR? Perhaps The Cursed Chateau can provide a glimpse of what to expect…

Layout: Contemptible. Page count is 49, a cynical ruse that pretends to deliver value beyond the $4 cover price. Margins are criminally vast, consuming a full third of each page — the text blocks are almost comically tiny, hidden amid vast frontiers of glaring whitespace.

Art: Wretched. The cover shows a staircase… not the most compelling call to adventure. Erol Otus contributes what appears to be an unfinished piece on page 24. Can anyone explain the artist’s intent on page 31? The illustration on page 20 fails in every way possible. The 3-year-old responsible for the drawing on page 22 should be encouraged to play sports.

Maps: Childish. Thank cartographer Robert Conley for an autism-inspired level of detail that is cluttered and ridiculous. Style recalls hotel fire escape graphics, but with a bizarre and unwelcome attention to detail that sees fit to render every last carpet stain, stray bone, tiny patch of rubbish, and broken 2×4. Messy, unattractive, and unnecessary. Also printer unfriendly, with massive black borders and a pointlessly precise depiction of the grass outside the chateau — have additional ink cartridges close at hand should you desire a hardcopy.

Content: Tiresome. Common spells are disallowed to ensure the precisely-laid railroad tracks are not disturbed. Roster of opponents is age-old and presented without significant variation: the most common types of undead comprise 90% of the encounters in The Cursed Chateau. Maliszewski’s bursts of creativity are uniformly familiar: an underground cult of frog-like demon-worshipers, an iron maiden that comes alive, a demon with red skin, horns, and bat wings. Can ghasts accurately be included in the ‘New Monsters’ section? Such dull, reheated efforts fit comfortably into a movement that views cloned rules material as new and exciting.

Writing is poor and rife with hazards of clumsy sentence construction (“Lord Jourdain used the frogs as guardians for some of his treasures, which can be found submerged in the small lake inside a locked chest.”) and humorously inept prose (“Demonic frogs’ red eyes flicker with demonic intelligence and they can speak the language of demons.”).

Additional Gripe: Level 1 is numbered 1-13, numbering begins again from 1 for each of Level 2 and the Caverns. This is confusing and silly for a product so small, simply number the areas 1-40 and be done with it.

Rating: 0 feces-smeared Poag ogre dicks (out of a potential 5 feces-smeared Poag ogre dicks).

You’d think that if you were asking clients to pay for your services you could at least come up with some original material but it’s obvious that’s not part of Yax’s skill profile, nor that of his proteges. What do these dickwads charge for the pleasure of running commercial material? $400 for a 3-hour sesh. Four-frackin’-hundy to read from a pdf and play with little lead army men.

Chew on that fucking shit, homies.