{"id":10353,"date":"2026-04-01T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10353"},"modified":"2026-03-10T10:47:20","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T14:47:20","slug":"the-crypt-of-atan-thu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10353","title":{"rendered":"The Crypt of Atan-Thu"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By The Danger Forge
Self Published
OSE
Levels 6-8<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Tales of Atan-Thu are told to frighten both the bold and the meek alike. Necromancer without peer. Merciless tyrant of Zahal Keep. His evil stretched across the land like a malignant shadow. Though long dead, his legend persists. Ancient texts speak of a vast sepulcher hidden deep in the Dhar Voromal Mountains, where Atan-Thu and his immeasurable wealth and artifacts of power were entombed. But rumors hint that Atan-Thu yet survives, sustained by his dark necromancy. Protected by hideous guardians and diabolical traps, he waits for the very brave or the very foolish to enter his lair.  Do you dare venture into his ancient crypt and explore this testament to Atan-Thu\u2019s power, malice, and madness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 68 page adventure uses about twenty two pages to describe about seventy rooms in a tomb\/puzzle\/challenge dungeon. Long-winded tomb of horrors, at levels 6-8, with impossible puzzles and overpowered opponents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew I was trouble upon first cracking it open. Triple column. Small font. You are free, brothers and sisters, of the constraints of the print publishing world! You can make your product 6,000 pages long! Because it\u2019s a PDF and no one gonna buy the print copy anyway. And if they are then they REALLY want to so you don\u2019t have to cram your product in to some artificial page count constraint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lets see here \u2026 background information about scary dude, history b lah blah blah, overland area that briefly describes some large general regions with no real mention or support of overlands play, small village generically described with no import \u2026 more background information. Bulshit bullshit bullshit, madness and horror throw-away rules cause dungeon is so scary, bullshit bullshit bullshit \u2026 Ok, the dungeon starts after ten pages of padding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Room two: You\u2019ve got seven stone heads. Three face inward from the west wall, three from the east, and a seventh looms at the north end of the hall. Two doors, the one you came in and another one on the far side. The doors are immune to physical damage and are wizard locked at level 18. At the base of each stone head is a small bowl and in the center of the room seven orbs float above a seven pointed star, each inlaid with a different symbol. You put the orbs in correct bowl and the door unlocks. First failure and the doors lock. Second and ichor streams in to the room. Third and everyone takes 3d6 damage per round until you get it right. There are no hints. The symbols on the  orbs? There are no corresponding symbols anywhere. It\u2019s the second room of the dungeon (in a line until it opens up later), you\u2019ve learned nothing yet. It is truly random. You\u2019ve level 6-8. How much divination do you truly have? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did I mention that there\u2019s a level 7 undead dude running around, with dimension door and a wand of lightning bolts? He\u2019s doing hit and runs on your party. Oh, yeah, there are four of them, one in each quadrant of the dungeon. How the room with NINE 8HD AC2 dudes to fight? For your level 6-8\u2019s. At one point you\u2019re potentially attacked by 1d6 wights per turn. Which is fun except you auto-turn those at level 7 and turn on, what, a 4, at level six? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My point here is that this was not playtested. At all. I suspect the designer doesn\u2019t even play D&D. I don\u2019t see how you can and come up with this stuff. No one playtested room two. It can\u2019t be. I don\u2019t see how anyone is living through it. A party of six level eight clerics who filled their spell slots with divinations? Let\u2019s see, from 1e  (sorry, My kool aid stained 1e is at hand, not OSE\u2026) that\u2019s 3 3 3 3 2 spells at level eight. That\u2019s three Augery and two Divination per cleric, or eighteen Augury and twelve Divinations. For room two that\u2019s \u2026 a seven factorial? About 5,000 combinations?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, hey man, the treasure rooms has about 16k in gold and a ring with one wish. So, it was the friends we made along that was the real treasure!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Man, fuck this fucking shit! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Worthless fucking garbage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did you try? What is the definition of trying? There are words on a page. Someone used a professional map making tool to make the dungeon map. It looks nice. But it clearly wasn\u2019t playtested. And I\u2019m not even sure there\u2019s a basic understanding of what a level six (or eight \u2026) character is capable of. Rocks fall. Everybody dies.All of that fucking preamble bullshit is worthless. All of that appendix shit is worthless. The use of fucking italics is garbage. Long read-aloud is fucking garbage. No fucking treasure. Overpowered fucking combats. I\u2019m supposed to believe that this was lovingly handcrafted?! Backstory in the fucking dungeon rooms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a nice bit. The dungeon map is in four quadrants. A mat surrounds three of them. That\u2019s a nice touch, a little flavor and challenge to leverage for the party. Those 1d6 weights shows up for every 100 feet traveled on it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes I come across dungeons that could serve as platonic examples of what NOT to do. This is one of them. Looky there at that cover. And the layout inside. Pretty fucking nice.  But I will take a handwritten scrawl over this shit any day of the week. This is the chinese box. Emulation rather than understanding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m sure someone, somewhere, is making a bundle cranking this shit out at Kickstarter. \u201cLook! Just like the olden days! \u201c Indeed. Fuck nostalgia. And fucking reading shit. D&D is for playing. A high 2E dungeon. Is there a worse insult?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $9 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, You get to see the map, which is nice, but otherwise it\u2019s just the generic padding shit and little dungeon overview bit. Shitty preview. It needs to show some encounters so we can understand what the core of the writing is about before we make a purchasing decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/554398\/the-crypt-of-atan-thu-old-school-essentials?src=newest_recent?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By The Danger ForgeSelf PublishedOSELevels 6-8 Tales of Atan-Thu are told to frighten both the bold and the meek alike. Necromancer without peer. Merciless tyrant of Zahal Keep. His evil stretched across the land like a malignant shadow. Though long … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10349,"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-10353","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\/03\/554398.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10353","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=10353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10354,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10353\/revisions\/10354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}