{"id":10493,"date":"2026-06-29T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10493"},"modified":"2026-06-09T10:22:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T14:22:43","slug":"the-hills-have-screams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10493","title":{"rendered":"The Hills have SCREAMS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Dinko \"Salty Nick\" Galeti?
Salty Nick's Tavern
Generic\/Universal\/D&D
Levels 5-6<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Strange phenomena plague the land: saltwater rain, shared dreams of a tide covering the land, shallow puddles reflecting deep, strange oceans. Some people have even fallen into puddles and disappeared entirely. The epicenter of the phenomena has been traced to the mausoleum of an eccentric who believed the whole land was once under the sea. Whether to stop this, explore it, or just to loot the tomb, the players have arrived to the mausoleum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This eleven page adventure uses two-ish pages t describe about five-ish rooms in a mausoleum being invaded by an aquatic entity. There are hints here of sophisticated play, and maddeningly abstracted text that somehow is also wall of text. The theming never comes through well and it\u2019s hampered by it use of a 5e style guide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What can i say, I found the title appealing. Alas, there are no hills or screams, much less SCREAMS. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some dude really thinks the world was underwater at some point. He has a massive tomb built, is buried in it, and then his belief in that idea is so strong that a water-plane entity uses the belief to try to force its way through to our plane. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s an interesting concept in this adventure in the way it handles illusion. Basically, the tomb is full of illusions, or, maybe, altered realities, but the adventure uses the word illusions. Before the first room you make a choice, after talking to the dudes friendly spirit, as to if you believe his theory or not. If you do believe then you treat the illusions as real and the non-illusions as illusions. If you do not believe then the illusions are illusions to you and the real dungeon is real. Like one of those scifi episodes where half the cast is out of phase or some such.  Some of the sections of the dungeon are filled with water, and there are shafts, so if you believe then you can swim up a shaft, and things like that. (And need water breathing!) The concept is haltingly implemented and not leaned heavily into, but the idea is an intriguing one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s one or two spots where the some interesting things come in to play. The standard \u201cclear the rubble away\u201d thing in one room has the note \u201cClearing it without precautions causee another collapse.\u201d Excellent cause and effect there and a lack of punishment for players who are not on autopilot. In another section, where you meet the dudes spirit at the start \u201cHow to summon Sutton\u2019s spirit is up to the PCs. As a rule of thumb, spending a resource such as a spell slot should work. Actions such as meditating on the bench or lighting the statue\u2019s pipe reveal that the spirit wants to manifest but is struggling to.\u201d Again, pretty decent old school sensibilities. Nothing prescribed but some direction to the DM to have some latitude in their judgements. This is akin to something like the Bless spell being a good catch-all for solving many problems. Rulings, not rules, yes? I suspect, from this, that the dude is a decent DM. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But author \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are a few quibbles here before the major issues. We\u2019re told that people are missing, strange things going on, etc, and \u201cThe epicenter of these phenomena has been traced to Lubber\u2019s Rest\u201d with nothing more beyond that. In spite of the intro background, which is non-trivial, this is essentially just a site in the middle of nowhere for you to explore, even though \u201cthe PCs arrived to Lubber\u2019s Rest with hopes of stopping these events and finding the missing people.\u201d So, the framing to support the intro is just not present. At all. Which would be fine if the intro didn\u2019t imply that it SHOULD be there. We\u2019re just looking at a site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, more than that, there are some issues with the presentation and abstraction. The \u201c5e template\u201d was used here. This means sections of italics that are longer than they should be. This means long paragraphs of text with little in the way of formatting to help you scan the adventure. You\u2019re digging through A LOT of text in this, with little to separate things and help you locate information. It is, I think, an issue with Wall of Text, even though there are line breaks and some bullets, there\u2019s not section headings or bolding to help a DM figure out where to look for what. And that\u2019s a major problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Second is a frustrating amount of abstraction and things simply left out. You will run in to weird symbols that are being used to help summon the aquatic planer entity \u2026 but no mention of destroying them. And this is theme, the lack of even minimal guidance for things you WNT to fuck with. When you combine this with the amount of text used to describe and denote other, trivial things, it makes you wonder why the emphasis was placed where it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eleven of the rooms are simply abstracted away. Roll on a table to add a couple of features and then roll on a table for an encounter. An encounter like \u201cAggressive illusory creature swims in. (Submerged rooms only)\u201d Uh. Ok. And, yet, here\u2019s room nineteen \u201cContains a heap of rocks, with 4d8 embedded raw rubies. Dumped here by thralls.\u201d This is aggressively terse. Was there not enough room in the adventure for the other rooms, given the terseness of this one? And no value for the rubies? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, further, note the lack of evocative text. Nothing about a tomb or aquatic\/semi-aquatic environment comes through here at all. And this is par for the course in the adventure. There\u2019s a hefty intro. There\u2019s a hefty appendix. But the actual rooms are terse without actually giving much of an impression at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s a DM to do? There\u2019s little favour here. And I can roll on a table out of a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. The preview is ten of the eleven pages, so, a decent preview. You can see both the wall of text in the rooms at the beginning as well as the overly terse ones at the end, and the lack of specificity and lack of formatting to help locate information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/569157\/the-hills-have-screams?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Dinko “Salty Nick” Galeti?Salty Nick’s TavernGeneric\/Universal\/D&DLevels 5-6 Strange phenomena plague the land: saltwater rain, shared dreams of a tide covering the land, shallow puddles reflecting deep, strange oceans. Some people have even fallen into puddles and disappeared entirely. The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10491,"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-10493","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\/06\/569157.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10493","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=10493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10494,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10493\/revisions\/10494"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}