{"id":10330,"date":"2026-04-08T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10330"},"modified":"2026-03-17T18:40:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T22:40:26","slug":"the-faceless-howl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10330","title":{"rendered":"The Faceless Howl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Patrice Crespy
Kabuki Kaiser
OSR
Levels 1-4<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
It was bound to happen. Too many relics. Too many books. Too much past stacked in one place, the Monument Valley of scrolls and mouldy tomes. The Lucubrarium of Unobsolescence has gone wrong. In Bec\u2013de\u2013Corbin nearby, folk forget their names mid\u2013sentence. Chalk\u2013pale, traits blurred by scratches and hollow wrinkles, eyes sunk. Static. Howls in the night. The militia still stands at the keep and demands tolls, then forgets what it\u2019s doing. The rain just won\u2019t stop. Thugs move in, bold as daylight. And when night comes, the lights go out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 44 page digest adventure uses seven or eight pages to describe about forty locations in a town and in a two level library\/abbey. You can tell what it is trying to do, but in spite of some great specificity it mostly fails to create the environment it is going for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s this library place, including relics, with a small town around it. Some kind of memory eater\/void monster shows up and people start forgetting their names. Some of them no longer have faces. Others are worse, their heads a ragged black blob and howling continually. You show up in town, make it to the library\/abbey, and \u2026 do whatever. Loot the place for relics I guess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kabuki has some decent ideas and can conjure up some great imagery. The whole \u201cforget your own name\u201d is a nice touch. The ragged face monsters and howling and so on are quite appealing to me, personally (ever since The Void supplement for 3.0, I was captivated by it. Who doesn\u2019t love Munch? At one point one of the random atmosphere tables has \u201cA white noble dress fit for a young lady, nailed to a wall, torn. THAT\u2019S NOT ME, written across the chest in coal.\u201d Well now, that\u2019s a statement, isn\u2019t it? There are little bits and pieces of shit like this scattered throughout that are just great imagery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us transition somewhat to the following entry. This particular location is a part of the \u201cin town\u201d section. \u201cFalkenrot Manor Earl Falkenrot\u2019s a ghoul \u2014 kept secret for ages by his family. When the Faceless came, they wandered off and left him here, locked down in the cellar. Half\u2013 Faced, black pits for eyes, ravenous.\u201d Nice concept. Decent ghoul description. Mostly backstory. As a concept for something it\u2019s great. As an actual place, meant to adventure in, it\u2019s pretty lousy. And there is A LOT of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The town map is irrelevant, just a kind of conceptual thing with some numbers on buildings. The descriptions are short and=, again, just concepts. \u201cWatchtower Deserted. An alarm fire atop has been spent. Did anyone see it?\u201d Well I don\u2019t know, did they? Are there consequences one way or another to that? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That bit at the end, it\u2019s some kind of hipster pretension. And THAT absolutely IS prevalent everywhere. The whole \u201clet\u2019s put in a meaningless question under the pretext of giving the DM possibilities!”  There\u2019s a forest wolf encounter. The wolves are hungry and want to steal food and run off, mostly. That\u2019s great! Except we also get \u201cNo food, they come in.\u2019 This is supposed to, I think, convey a sense of menace. It does not. Nearby this, in a description meant to be atmospheric, about the journey to the town, it ends with something meant to convey the inclusion of the party in the description. \u201cChatter about the heist, maps, treasure. Or dead silence. Up to the table.\u201d Why, yes, it is up to the table. But also, what\u2019s with the sentence \u201cUp tp the table?\u201d Ol Craig used a cut down sentence, with dropped words and fragments, in order to save space. Space clearly isn\u2019t an issue here given the \u2018luxurious\u2019 room given to simple tables. A couple of pages for \u201cWhich of the six howlers show up\u201d could be compressed to maybe six short sentences. Or, the text implies that only three howlers exist, so, perhaps not having a table at all? This sort of needless randomness drives me crazy; an adventure is almost always better when the locales are themed around the specifics of a creature rather than just giving a random determination, for these sorts of encounters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And how about those dungeon rooms? \u201cPortcullis: Disjointed and stuck shut. S7 STR with up to 4 characters adding their STR to lift\/bend. One attempt only.\u201d Great! That\u2019s how we get those thirtyish rooms down into the quite small page count devoted to locations, with the bulk of the text being other tables. The interactivity here boils down to finding, say, the wormacide that helps you fight the giant bookworms, or being confident in answering a forgetful sphinx’s riddles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not Kabuki’s best work. It feels like it needs another couple of polishes to make everything come together and work as a cohesive whole. Better integration of the various major enemy groups, and a more solid effort in brining out the \u2026 joylessness? Melancholy? The forgetful nature of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at DriveThru.The preview really shows off the worse parts of the adventures, the sparse table nature. Things change, the text style and descriptive style, deeper in and that, being the bulk of the adventure, is where the preview should have focused. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/556896\/the-faceless-howl?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Patrice CrespyKabuki KaiserOSRLevels 1-4 It was bound to happen. Too many relics. Too many books. Too much past stacked in one place, the Monument Valley of scrolls and mouldy tomes. The Lucubrarium of Unobsolescence has gone wrong. In Bec\u2013de\u2013Corbin … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10326,"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-10330","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\/556896.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10330","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=10330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10331,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10330\/revisions\/10331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}