{"id":10299,"date":"2026-03-02T19:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T00:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10299"},"modified":"2026-02-09T12:48:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T17:48:15","slug":"the-howling-tomb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10299","title":{"rendered":"The Howling Tomb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Andreas Wille
Medora Games
OSR
Levels 2-3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Endless is the punishment of those that dare challenge divinity\u2026 Deep within an endless steppe, a weathered mausoleum stands alone. Its ancient walls, once adorned with beautiful carvings, are naught more than blank stone, marked by time. It would be entirely unremarkable, were it not for the incessant howling spewing from its darkened depths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This eight page adventure uses four pages to describe seven rooms in an old tomb complex. I can get behind the concepts of a couple of the encounters, but the text is abstracted, the tomb small, and the treasure pretty much nonexistent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Endless punishment for those that dare challenge divinity?!?!  Qui audet adipiscitur!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a small tomb that always has a howling sound coming from it. It\u2019s got a couple of things inside of it that are almost quite good. We\u2019ve got some undead trapped in a room, screaming, their hands reduced to bloody stumps from clawing at the walls to get out. In another, undead beg to be released from their curse, holding armsfulls of charms and amulets and stuff draped from their hands. Very nice specificity there. That\u2019s a great example of brief specificity that can really ground an encounter and make it come alive. IN another place you\u2019ve got these two desert nomads trapped in a room, jailed there, so to speak, by the local nomads while they try and figure out what to do with them. One \u201cKidnapped multiple infants and left them to die in his anger about his own lack of children.\u201d and will backstab the party if they find any significant treasure, while the second killed her brother in cold blood and \u201cStands by what she did, will help in a fight but is headstrong and does not like being challenged.\u201d Again, great specificity that really gives the DM something to run with while playing them. If the entire adventure was like this then I\u2019d be in a much different mood this morning. There\u2019s also this little wandering table for an encounter in the desert leading to the tomb. The people encounters on there are integrated in to the rumor table, so, if you give the nomad, who is asking for water, some then he will give you a rumor. That\u2019s a nice touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, alas, it is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tomb is quite small, with its seven rooms. These small adventures don\u2019t really have room to breathe, so encounters like those two nomads are not really going to have much room to play out. There are these limitations that come with these short dungeons and they don\u2019t mesh really well with the more dynamic and potential energy that something like the nomads could bring. And, of course, there\u2019s not much exploration complexity here with only seven rooms. You\u2019re looking at a simple star design, with a central room and six rooms hanging directly off of it. The central room has a puzzle that opens the last door, to the core heretic, so there is at least some not stabbing here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a disconnect here between the dungeon environment and what\u2019s actually going on inside. The setup is that the tomb \u201chowls\u201d, but you don\u2019t really get any howling until you open the final door. Those undead clawing at the doors? Nope. The nomads locked in their room? Nope. This should be a noisy place but you\u2019d never know it from the text. I really don\u2019t like a \u201coh, yeah, you hear a lot of yelling\u201d that only happens once you open a door and the DM gets to the text they need to read. This kind of light\/noise\/monster reactions are a sort point for me, in review after review. A room is not stand along thing, it exists in an environment and the DM needs help understanding that environment without making a lot of map and margin notes themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each room leads off with a short one to two line sentence (in italics. UG! Tis the old wound ..) that is \u2026 I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s read-aloud or a summary or what. \u201cThe mausoleum’s ancient stonework is slowly succumbing to the elements. Spine-tingling howls echo from the decaying doorway.\u201d This is not the most evocative description ever. \u201cAn angelic statue sits behind a stone sarcophagus that emits the constant, ear-piercing howl that gives the tomb its name.\u201d Nor this. \u201cFour statues of ancient gods adorn this long, dry chamber. Their judging gaze falls upon an elaborately carved door at the far end.\u201d It just seems abstracted to me. A summary of the room, not a brief description. Maybe the lack of adjectives or adverbs to liven them up? The entrance is super bring, that \u201cslowly succumbing to the elements.\u201d It has a bend of fiction writing to it, rather than adventure writing, a common ailment with designers. I know evocative writing is hard, but this is something else. Like people are afraid to actually write a description of the room that means something. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the details of the room fall in to this same problem. Ancient gods? Which ones? How do I know they are ancient gods? Gods of what? It\u2019s like someone write \u201cthere\u2019s a temple to a god here,\u201d Uh. Ok. That could mean anything, and it\u2019s little better than \u2018you enter a room.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trease is light. VERY light. This is, I think, a symptom of \u201cOSR.\u201d It can mean just about anything these days, from treasure light to gold=xp or something similar. \u201cEach deserter holds d4 religious paraphernalia such as charms and rosaries worth 5gp each.\u201d We all know the real treasure is in the lairs, but this IS he lair. The final room does get you some magic plate and sword, but up till then it\u2019s mostly drinking money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s constrained by its size and the descriptions tend to be abstracted. Good bulleting to help the DM run it, but the lack of specificity is jarring. And, space is wasted on explanations. Spending a third of a page on the heretics backstory buys us nothing. Wasting space on a shrubbery table doesn\u2019t help us. This needs to be trimmed and the extra space focused in. The end result of this is a rather bland adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $1.50 at DriveThru. No preview. Boo! Show us an encounter so we can make an informed purchasing decision. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/555055\/the-howling-tomb?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Andreas WilleMedora GamesOSRLevels 2-3 Endless is the punishment of those that dare challenge divinity\u2026 Deep within an endless steppe, a weathered mausoleum stands alone. Its ancient walls, once adorned with beautiful carvings, are naught more than blank stone, marked … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10302,"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-10299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/555055.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10299","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=10299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10303,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10299\/revisions\/10303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}