{"id":10035,"date":"2025-11-05T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10035"},"modified":"2025-10-14T10:29:31","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T14:29:31","slug":"the-fall-of-willowdell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10035","title":{"rendered":"The Fall of Willowdell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Martin A Cubas
Weird Adventures by Martin A Cubas
Castles & Crusades
Level 1<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Willowdell was once a quiet halfling village hidden deep in the forest. Now, a blood pact with a vengeful spirit has transformed its people into fiendish predators, and the land itself twists with corruption. The characters must navigate the village\u2019s haunted streets, face warped townsfolk, and uncover the truth before the horror spreads beyond the trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 54 page adventure uses about 22 pages to describe twelve locations in a ruined halfling village full of crazed halfling-fiends. It\u2019s padded out, and tries so hard to explain things that it comes full circle and is now HARDER to understand. It\u2019s just a basic hack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The local halfling villages have appealed to the human castle for help. It seems they think there\u2019s gonna be \u201ca humanoid invasion.\u201d Rather than respond with the army, some scouts and mercenaries are sent in to look around and see what is actually going on. You make your rounds and when reaching one particularly isolated village you see a bunch of bodies on the road. Gnolls and halflings, with most of the village razed. Rather than just go home and say \u201cyeah. You lost a village, better send in the army!\u201d the dogooders poke around, find some  crazed halflings as well as a survivor or two that tell you about the local \u201csacrifice a child for a great harvest and safety\u201d tradition. Looks like it went wrong. At the site of the sacrifice a local specter fills you in via an exposition dump and points you to a small buried token. Taking the token to the town hall, you confront the evil forest spirit on the other end of the bargain, destroy the token, kill the spirit, and free the crazed townsfolk. Yeah! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is all a REALLY basic adventure. There are really only a couple of locations of note. The tavern with a survivors locked inside. The mayors house with the same, and some clues. The center of the cornfield where the sacrifice took place, and the town hall that contains the possessed mayor. The other eight or so locations add a little color but not much else to the way of the plot. There\u2019s the required \u201coh no, what has happened here!\u201d location when you first enter the village, and then the single crazed halfling that was partially lobotomized they transformed, so now he\u2019s just banging his head against the wall. Literally. You\u2019ve seen enough zombie movies to know what the score is. Err, I mean crazed halfling-fiend movies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s an art pack that comes with this adventure that is rather better than most. I\u2019m a little confused why it\u2019s stand-along pieces and they don\u2019t appear in the text. Maybe to use as handouts? Anyway, it gives a pretty nice rural halfling creepy vibe. Only when you hear the wind blowing through dry corn stalks, or the liminal nature of farm fields and orchards can you truly understand the kind of \u2026 hollowness that the art communicated well. Anyway, it does a good job and it should have been included in the adventure proper. There\u2019s no real art nin the adventure, just some full collor textured battle maps. I fucking hate that trend. They are confused and hard to read. I dare say that its not the fact that they are full coloror textured, just that the full color and textures are badly done., in the same way a hand drawn map could be clear or illegible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m rather fond of the hook here. It\u2019s rare for an adventure to offer a pretext as to WHY the adventurers are doing the work instead of the local lord, but in this case it does make a little sense. Or, maybe, I just read Pillars of the Earth.  Anyway, the locals think they are going to be invaded \u201cby humanoids\u201d and so instead of committing the troops the local lord send out someone to see if he needs to send in the troops. \u201cThe castellan is now recruiting mercenaries and adventurers to scout for signs of hostile activity before committing regular troops.\u201d And, then, when you reach the main halfling village, \u201cThe adventurers are received in Greeneye with every courtesy and comfort the humble village can muster.\u201d Well, there\u2019s a pleasant change. You\u2019re treated like you\u2019re there to help and that they\u2019ve asked for your help. It\u2019s a nice start. I am pleasantly surprised and looking forward to more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, of course, it\u2019s gonna suck. And it does. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two pages of backstory. A lot of appendices, as the page count would suggest. The wanderers take a page to describe even though it\u2019s just \u201cyou might run on to a roving band of halflings while going from one location to the next. (Which is a 33% chance every five minutes \u2026) This is an insane amount of text for something so simple. And the only color here is a suggestion that the DM might make them come from a nearby house or something, in almost those exact words. There is no specificity. There\u2019s epilogue, which I\u2019m usually glad to see, except in this case there\u2019s nothing much going on. You won! Yeah! The mayors wife is the new mayor. And if you lose? Nothing much happens, in terms of specific outcomes. \u201cEpilogue – The conclusion of this adventure will depend on the characters\u2019 actions and decisions. While there are multiple possible outcomes, these are the primary scenarios, which you can adapt to t your campaign:\u201d Yup, that\u2019s what an epilogue is and how you got there. I\u2019m surprised, a bit, that each word used is not defined. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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But the major problem here, beyond the simplicity of the thing, just hacking, is that it is wordy and padded out to a pretty extreme degree. 22 pages to describe twelve locations gives us an average of two pages per location. And some are much longer, with the majors house being five pages long. And that\u2019s not a bunch of room s being described. How do we get here? \u201cCK Notes. This is the village mayor\u2019s residence.\u201d Yup, that\u2019s what \u201cMayors house\u201d usually implies. We get a bunch of backstory in it. And we get a SHIT TON of backstory and exposition. Everything is padded out. Every \u201croom\u201d, every creature, everything that you could come across. And every entry n the adventure is like this. Single column everywhere. The presence of bullets doesn\u2019t really help, with information being spread out over so many pages. The effort to make it more approachable has resulted in it being infinitely more confusing. For a relatively simple hack adventure. And it comes off as rather generic. While there\u2019s backstory and explanations on the hows and  whys there is little in the way of speciality to ground the adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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It\u2019s a simple adventure, padded out to an extreme degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, and you get to see a bit of the first couple of locations, so it\u2019s an ok preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/533161\/c-c-the-fall-of-willowdell-c-c-compatible-edition?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Martin A CubasWeird Adventures by Martin A CubasCastles & CrusadesLevel 1 Willowdell was once a quiet halfling village hidden deep in the forest. Now, a blood pact with a vengeful spirit has transformed its people into fiendish predators, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/willowdell.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10036,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions\/10036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}