{"id":10467,"date":"2026-06-13T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10467"},"modified":"2026-05-20T09:24:49","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T13:24:49","slug":"the-lost-tomb-of-kazcuk-mot-the-undying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10467","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Tomb of Kazcuk Mot the Undying"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Greg Gawron
Advanced Fantasy Games
OSRIC
Levels 2-4<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Hidden within a long-forgotten cemetery stands an abandoned mausoleum, once a place of grand splendor and solemn reverence. Now it lies broken and rotting \u2014 its roof collapsed, headstones shattered, and its glory buried beneath decades of neglect. But decay has not left this place empty. A new evil has claimed the ruin as its lair, and by fate or folly, you have found its resting place\u2026 and it now awaits your party of adventurers in The Lost Tomb of Kazcuk Mot the Undying\u2122.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 28 page adventure presents a small tomb with fourteen rooms that is primarily aimed at tournament play. There is a certain, physicality? to it that I find interesting, however, it\u2019s a bad tournament adventure, with mucho read-aloud and padded out DM text with rather simplistic challenges. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not every day you see someone thanking both Finch AND Taormino in the same breathe, like the credits page to this one does. I assume he went to a con and they both said some kind of Gandhi shit to inspire him to publish? I hope that\u2019s the case. I don\u2019t know, Taormina cranks his shit piles out so maybe it was publishing tips? Anyway, this is a tournament adventure. Tournament adventures need a few things special going on so you can judge them similarly, fairly, amongst different tables. I think that\u2019s all bullshit and it\u2019s like comparing a Rothko to a Picasso. \u201cYou get a prize!\u201d Fuck that shit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, therein, is the issue, at least with regards to the tournament aspect to this. Let us consider two different scoring systems for a dungeon. In the first, I give you one point for each room you enter. In the second I roll a d6 for every room you enter and if it comes up a \u20181\u2019 then I give you a point. IE: what are we measuring? The ability to penetrate the dungeon by any means possible or are we measuring how lucky the dice are for the party? Further, we must be up front with the players on what we are measuring. SHould they be tearing the place apart looking for treasure, or defeating monsters, or \u201cwinning\u201d the plot, or trying to roll as high as they can on their dice? This adventure, of course, does not disclose the scoring to the party other than to say you get a point for accomplishments and lose a point for mishaps. And then it does things like \u201cif you search the room then roll a d6. If you roll a 1 then the party finds a pearl necklace. They get a point.\u201d  I seem to recall that some tourney adventures went so far as to have die rolls prepared for the DM in order to make things as fair as possible across tables. Rothko does not approve. So, as a tournament adventure I think this fails to do a decent job with the scoring. The answer is not more prepared die roll and less randomness, but a different axis of scoring, I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, the adventure intro also says we can use this as a stand-along adventure. How was the play Mrs Lincoln? Not as bad as one might think, given the murder of the president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not happy with the adventure, or the interactivity as a whole, but there is a certain physicality to the interactivity that I think works well. One of the entry rooms has a door under a sarcophagus that flips up. There\u2019s a grate in the floor to go down. There\u2019s a portcullis to lift. There\u2019s a decent amount of this kind of physical interactivity in the adventure. Or, maybe, environmental? Whatever. There are other classic elements as well, such as yellow mold, the old water monster in a pool of water thing, and so on. They don\u2019t feel tired in this, but I\u2019m also open to this being because the amount of text that surrounds them. Interactivity, beyond that physicality, is generally limited to stabbing. And, even that is a bit iffy. The wanderers are bats, rats, and centipedes and they show up a decent amount. One wonders at the boredom of it all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Otherwise, the adventure has some of the long standing usual problems with the untrained. The read-aloud can be quite long. And, of course, players don\u2019t listen to long read aloud. It\u2019s not a new thing. You\u2019re boring them with read-aloud. Keep it short. It\u2019s the designers job to figure out how. Further, the read-aloud over-reveals the rooms contents. You want the read-aloud to hint at things for the players to have their characters follow up on, not to just expo dump every little detail. at the party. You want the back and forth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
EVerything here is padded out. Every read-aloud ends with \u201cWHAT DO YOU DO\u201d and then immediately we get a \u201cDM NOTES\u201d heading. Yeah, got it man. It\u2019s not read-aloud so it\u2019s DM notes. Yeah, got it, the read-aloud is over so now the party and do things. The first trap takes like three paragraphs to describe, and it\u2019s a simple stair foot pit. Ok, so, I take it back. Four paragraphs. This is a quarter of a page. For a simple trap. It\u2019s not complex. It\u2019s just padded out. The wanderer text is padded out. \u201cInside the mausoleum the characters will find ample space to move about and it may appear to be a safe place to rest and take shelter. It is not.\u201d Jesus man, that did nothing for the adventure. It is just worthless text. You didn\u2019t actually say anything. All you\u2019re doing is adding words to the adventure. And these filler words and paragraphs get in the way of the ACTUAL meaningful text that the DM needs to locate in order to run it at the table. The DM needs to be able to quickly scan the text, and right now they have to dig through shit like that in order to get to the stuff that matters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s just relentless. The editor is the designer, which is either magnificent, if the designer knows what the fuck they are doing, or a disaster is they do not. The designer was not born with some a priori knowledge of how to write an adventure and do layout and what makes it fun and so on. Ideally, an editor, a decent one anyway, can help with some of that. YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. You might be a decent DM. You are probably an ok guy But YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Seek help. Seek an editor. Learn what makes an adventure a good adventure and also an easy to run adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $20 at DriveThru. I think that\u2019s because it was kickstarted. I\u2019m going to, rather generously for me, NOT say this is a fucking cash grab, even though the first thing published was kickstarted at $20. That advice above? Learning what makes a good adventure, getting an editor, etc? You can ignore that. You can go down the path of filthy lucre. Just crank shit out on kickstarter the most efficiently possible and build your market. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/562629\/the-lost-tomb-of-kazcuk-mot-the-undying-osric?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Greg GawronAdvanced Fantasy GamesOSRICLevels 2-4 Hidden within a long-forgotten cemetery stands an abandoned mausoleum, once a place of grand splendor and solemn reverence. Now it lies broken and rotting \u2014 its roof collapsed, headstones shattered, and its glory buried … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10467","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\/562629.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467","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=10467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10468,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467\/revisions\/10468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}