{"id":10423,"date":"2026-05-16T07:18:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T11:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10423"},"modified":"2026-04-22T12:19:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T16:19:54","slug":"ghost-crest-peak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10423","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Crest Peak"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Taron Pounds, Lawrence Schick
Landof the Blind
OSR
Levels 5-10<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Three relics have been stolen from their owners, and worries have spread about the power one person would have with all three in their possession. Word of a substantial reward for their return spread, with a poem as the only clue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 36 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe the eighteen rooms of White Plume Mountain. A homage\/updated version with the serial numbers scrubbed off, it is trying hard on the ease of use front but loses the charm of White Plume by under-describing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m down with the overall goal here. Updating some of the classics to improve upon them seems like a fine idea. I mean, I still have several Dungeon adventures on my ToDo list to overhaul and update for when watching paint drying becomes too exciting for me. As an experiment to understand layout and formatting and what\u2019s important I think it\u2019s an interesting idea. It also gets some eyes on older adventures, many of which forged new conceptual ground. And then also I suspect time would be better spent on new adventures, but, who am I to tell someone how to spend their few remaining precious moments of life? There\u2019s another aspect to this as well: the system-neutral thing. It\u2019s not really system-neutral, it\u2019s aimed at D&D-like systems, with stat blocks to prove it. I\u2019ve never really found a problem using adventures for other systems in whatever I\u2019m running (which is generally B\/X based with a heavy bend to oD&D) however I suspect there is a certain market limitation, or advantage, to saying \u201cWorks with Mork Borg!\u201d in any event, I think this is the proper way to do it; stat it for a B\/X as the foundation of most systems follows, and then note what it can be used\/adapted for. Perhaps a little disingenuous in the marketing, but, meh, at least you planted a stake in the ground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s pretty obvious what they doing with the formatting. Bolding, bullets, icons, headers and so on. There\u2019s a little intro section, a few sentences or so with some bolded words and then some bullets to follow up on those. The icons are probably overkill, meant to tell you \u201cthis is a trap\u201d or \u201cthis is a monster.\u201d All in all, I think there\u2019s too much here. The pages end up busy and your eyes tend to glaze over a bit. This is a not uncommon problem in some adventures. Folks recognize that formatting and layout can bring clarity but they they take it too far and it can contribute to obfuscation. If everything is important then nothing is, or something similar to that saying. I\u2019m going to list the lighting condition, door, stone texture, etc in every room, would be a similar problem. No. You have to craft these things carefully. Adventure design, or, room formatting and layout, is not a one size fits all issue. You can have go to techniques but you have to use them carefully to highlight certain aspects to bring clarity. When something becomes rote and is generically applied then it can lead to problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the major problem here is that this comes off more than a little soulless. There was a charm in White Plume that came through and this doesn\u2019t feel like it has that. This feels like a bunch of rooms with challenges in it and little else whereas White Plume had just a little bit more going on to ground the rooms and encounters. S2 has a rather mangy and bedraggles sphinx squatting in the water. This, however has \u201ca sphynx stands on the other side\u201d [of the forcefield.] This has six globes of silver dangling from the ceiling, with bullets for their contents. S2 had silvered glass globes dangling from the ceiling on unbreakable wires, that a good crack would shatter, dumping their contents in to the muck below. It\u2019s a much fuller picture and paints a much more evocative scene than just a mostly fact-based list of the challenges in the room. And this is not cherry picking, it happens over and over again. I ofton encourage folks to think about the room, devoid of mechanics, and create it, then adding mechanics, instead of the mechanics leading the charge. This is how we get the slim strands they hang from and the good crack and the dumping the contents in to the muck. Further, we can see a word choice in S2, spartan but present, that brings this room to life, and that just isn\u2019t present in this adventure respin. While we do get the \u201csilvered\u201d globes, it feels like an extra adjective was just thrown in for the sake of having one rather than painting a complete and evocative picture of the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do like the cover, but that art style is one I find personally appealing. And an attempt is made at the wanderers, with the gargoyles flying a corpse somewhere, for example. It lists factions, but, these are not really factions with a factions game and things they want, it\u2019s just a list of major monsters. I not, also, there is a disconnect between the text and the supplementary pointcrawl map. (The adventure has a \u201creal\u201d map also.\u201d The pointcrawl map point out rooms with the mucky water in them, but it disagrees with the text on rooms 13\/14. No so great when the reference material is off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, it\u2019s White Plume, explicitly, with updated text and layout and the serial numbers filed off. But the updated text has removed the specificity that brought White Plume to life. Thus, it is just the wacko room challenges boiled down to mostly mechanics. And that\u2019s not the vibe I\u2019m looking for in an adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at Drivethru. The preview is the whole thing. Yah! Great preview. I might suggest checking out page ten of the preview\/page six of the product. That is the Globe room. I think it encapsulates the formatting\/layout and the derth of specificity in the descriptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/561058\/ghost-crest-peak?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Taron Pounds, Lawrence SchickLandof the BlindOSRLevels 5-10 Three relics have been stolen from their owners, and worries have spread about the power one person would have with all three in their possession. Word of a substantial reward for their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10417,"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-10423","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\/04\/561058.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10423","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=10423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10424,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10423\/revisions\/10424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}