{"id":10465,"date":"2026-06-10T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10465"},"modified":"2026-05-19T10:54:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T14:54:21","slug":"house-of-the-lost-shepherd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10465","title":{"rendered":"House of the Lost Shepherd"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Ben Gibson\u00a0
Coldlight Press
5e\/Pathfinder\/OSE
Levels 4-6<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
What’s going on in Morpheus’ villa? We’ve not heard anything from them for weeks, outside of the weeping, and the screams, and deep below, some kind of roaring…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This ten page adventure uses a couple of pages to describe a two level villa with about forty rooms in it. Overly terse, it leans hard toward the Vampire Queen style of writing, or perhaps Tegal, than a modern take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think I\u2019m missing something here. This is in the OSR section on DriveThru. It\u2019s listed for Pathfinder, 5e, OSE. The cover says \u201cWritten for 5e\u201d on it. There\u2019s one set of stat blocks on the back page that seems an awful lot like 5e. Is the assertion here that 5e\/Pathfinder\/OSE are enough alike that you can just run with it? I don\u2019t  know. I guess? Something feels wrong here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a two level \u201cvilla crawl.\u201d Some dude hasn\u2019t been heard from and you go in to find him\/loot the place\/whatever. Blah blah blah, there\u2019s monsters that drain your mental stats to represent \u201ddraining emotions.”  The mechanics are simple, you recover a point a day once the big monster is dead and if you reach zero you turn in a monster. Thusly you\u2019ve got former residents and servants now drained of emotions and monsterized and of course the usual assortment of cultists and others looking to cash in one way or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before I hit the encounters let\u2019s talk map. It fucking SUUUUUUCKs. It\u2019s hand drawn on \u2026 beige graph paper? The pencil weight vs the weight of the graph paper lines is too similar. You can\u2019t tell where a wall is and where a door is. Level two, the underground, is better, but level one is all \u201cclassic gygax\u201d map with thin walls and everything on top of each other. It\u2019s gotta be legible man, that\u2019s always rule number one. Handdrawn can work, but there\u2019s gotta be enough contract that you can tell what is going on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The encounter writing style here is terse. VERY terse. Like, twenty entries to a page terse. \u201cOuter Patio – Both doors wedged shut. Gives a numb feeling, cold.\u201d It just feels odd to me. Like, it\u2019s a ten page adventure and two and a half are devoted to the room keys. That\u2019s just odd. It FEELS like there is some artificial constraint going on here here. Like \u201cfacing pages\u201d or something else that Gibson is trying to do that is just NOT translating AT ALL. In another place we get the room description of \u201cSmells of rot, corpse of a slave who trapped both doors<\/p>\n\n\n\n
in here wearing a lucky band (one-use, reroll failed mental save)\u201d That’s the entirety of the entry, so I\u2019m not quoting things out of context. (And, I don\u2019t see anything in the intro\/other keys which this could play off of.) The corpse could use an extra word. The traps two more words. It\u2019s just sparse to the point of almost being barren. \u201cPassing between these glyph-etched columns drains all emotion during the walk (mental damage).\u201d I get it. I get what he\u2019s going for. Kind of. I\u2019d prefer this just be a little longer with a few more adjectives. I think I can make a case, also, for it being ambiguous in its effect. There ARE rules for draining emotion present in the intro. \u201cSeveral traps, effects, and spells inflict mental damage, dealing 1 point of damage to a random stat (1d3 for INT, WIS, or CHA) \u201c So, if we take that, then \u2026 the door traps are, what, these magic emotional traps? I didn\u2019t really get that vibe from the servant body thing. And, for the glyph pillars I\u2019m kind of stuck on the word \u201call\u201d, as in \u201call emotion.\u201d Does it mean all? As in this is a death trap? Maybe I\u2019ll chill with that at level six. Or, is it referring to one point?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there\u2019s the Big Bad, The Below. The stat block is just a stat block. There\u2019s no real description anywhere, just a reference to a spirit of earth and darkness in the intro. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t want to read too much in to the intent, but it FEELS like this is an experiment to write for 5e\/Pathfinder\/OSE in a way that makes an adventure possible for all three. And then combine that with this kind of very terse style. Theoretically I think both of these are possible. Nothing REQUIRES a mile long state block for Pathfinder. And it\u2019s all D&D based, after all, so with a little work I think you could do the ruleset thing. Similarly, I think you can get away with those very terse descriptions. I mean, fuck me, Stonehell is the king of this shit, but it leveraged a few pages of context for it\u2019s terse keys. I\u2019m also chill with some abstracted away mechanics, which saves TONS of space. \u201cPoison needle trap-1d6\u201d works for me. But it has to be done in a way that keeps that the enables the evocative. You have to WORK those keys, hard (and possible the layout) to stuff in enough vibe to not have this be a half step more than Vampire Queen. A few more descriptive words. Building a vibe in key after key that kind of leverage each other to create something greater than the individual entries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If that was going to happen here, if that was the intent, then the keys needed more work. I get that a kind of \u201cbasic outline\u201d is a different kind of structure, but I just don\u2019t see that as being as successful in running a game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is five pages and shows the level one map and keys and intro. Good preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/567820\/house-of-the-lost-shepherd?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Ben Gibson\u00a0Coldlight Press5e\/Pathfinder\/OSELevels 4-6 What’s going on in Morpheus’ villa? We’ve not heard anything from them for weeks, outside of the weeping, and the screams, and deep below, some kind of roaring… This ten page adventure uses a couple … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10458,"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-10465","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\/05\/567820.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10465","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=10465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10466,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10465\/revisions\/10466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}