{"id":10613,"date":"2026-09-12T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10613"},"modified":"2026-08-19T12:39:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:39:34","slug":"the-tomb-of-kallia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10613","title":{"rendered":"The Tomb of Kallia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Richard Barton
XRP
OSRIC
Levels 2-4<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Rumors of a lost tomb lying deep within the New Forest are starting to trickle into the ears of adventurers in Gosterwick and Newmarket. While the source \u2013 and thus the veracity \u2013 of these whispered stories remains uncertain, all of the third-hand accounts suggest that the tomb was the product of the Archontean golden age, and not a simple tomb delved by the local Thorcinga. A few rumors even imply that the tomb displays the type of exceptional craftsmanship usually associated with dwarven master masons. Could this lost tomb be the work of the great Zhorak? or of Zhorak\u2019s legendary master, the lesser-known Grishia Basalt? If Grishia was involved, might this tomb shed light on the location of the fabled Egg of Creation? Regardless of its creator, the tomb is sure to be filled with the treasure and lore of the ancients!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This one hundred page adventure uses about six pages to detail ten rooms in the Tomb of Kallia. There is also extensive coverage of a nearby wilderness area. Extensive being the watchword with this, as eighty words are generally used where one will do. Padded with backstory, I am bewildered by Arden Vul.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yo, notably there is no map, at all, in this.You have to download a separate map pack, The Maps of Arden Vul, which is  free download containing all of the Arden Vul maps and all related regions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, my summary is off. While this is titled the Tomb of Kallia that section makes up just a small portion of it. The tomb is actually sitting in the middle of a larger slavers camp which has about twenty locations and then about ten locations for the tomb proper, plus  few more in the slavers section for a false tomb. The bulk of this is a forest with about thirty locations, many with a small handful of sublocations. Thusly the adventure here is really the various intrigues taking place in the region that will eventually lead the party to the slavers camp and\/or the tomb that is a relatively minor part of the product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there is quite a bit going on in the region. There are a couple of groups with some larger intrigues, like the slavers, and a several smaller things going on, such as some scammy bills of lading related to a quarry and humanoid band with, ahem, elective raiding, that loosely, or strictly hint at the larger \u201cslaver\u201d plot, with slaver in quotes because of the various schemes going on. As a regional supplement, sandboxy, it has a decent amount going on in it. The level range here is, I think, a bit misleading when you look at things like all of the level sevens and nines in the slavers camp, which the adventure warns you about. The wilderness sites ARE dangerous as well, so this feels like a long slow adventure with lots of retreats to regain strength and recruit again, slowly making progress in clearing things and finding more sites. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look man, I know we\u2019re going to get in to it on these next comments. There are readers who will love this. There are fanboys who love this. There are contrarians who have an identity based on disagreeing and ignoring meaning. My platonic ideal of an adventure includes it being easy to run. That is the purpose of an adventure. To be run at the table. Ideally with little to no prep required. \u201cYou can run it without reading it!\u201d is hyperbolic but also the unreachable goal to shoot for. \u201cEasy\u201d to run. What is easy? We\u2019re not going to agree, some of you. I recognize that we read adventures before hand, we take notes and highlight things. We have to puzzle out the connections in the adventure and make reference sheets and all of that shit. How much of that should you have to do to run it? How much of that should, in fact, be on the designer to solve before it reaches your hand? The writer, designer, editor, it has to be \u201ceasy\u201d to run. We can disagree on the nuance here, but not on the premise. Except now I\u2019ll walk that back, there ARE adventures that come along, rarely, that are obtuse and ABSOLUTELY worth it to puzzle out and spend a lot of time prepping. And those adventures are exceedingly rare. It is far, far more likely that an adventure will be a disaster of writing, layout etc and not be \u201ceasy\u201d to run and not worth the effort you will put in. And that is, I think, the case with all of the Arden Vul products I\u2019ve seen so far. The fucking thing fights you, for no reason, and ultimately I\u2019m going to turn to some other product to run instead of this. Because the content, while decent, just isn\u2019t worth devoting my life to in order to make it to the table. I\u2019d have to go look at Thicket and Arden Vul proper to verify, but my recollection is that it\u2019s been the same with all of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writing here is dense, almost to wall of text territory. It\u2019s padded out with backstory inline and descriptions of why and irrelevant descriptions. You have to fight through mountains of text and loosely formatted paragraphs in order to suss out what’s pertinent in the various locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One section has a palisade with watchtowers. Palisades get an inordinate degree of attention in this. \u201cThe palisade is 9\u2019 tall and made of new wood bound together with vines, rope, and interior support timbers.\u201d9\u2019 tall? Sure. The rest of it, is that important?  How about a description of the watchtowers? \u201cFour observation and firing platforms are found along the length of the wall. These small platforms are 5\u2019 above the ground and accessible by ladders. They allow guards to watch the approaches to the compound.\u201d Well, I guess we\u2019ve defined what watchtowers are, yes? These, yanked out of context, don\u2019t seem terrible, but it is just relentless in the degree of detail everything is described in. How about an NPC? NPC\u2019s routinely get a quarter page description. \u201cPersonality: Orphaned at an early age, Happy was taken in, raised, and trained by one of the Elder Brothers of the Benevolent Brotherhood of Arcturus.\u201d Is this relevant to the adventure? No, it\u2019s not. Sometimes, like the palisade detail, these things can be used to add color to areas. But you can\u2019t do it everywhere. You can\u2019t take every single thing in the adventure fully describe it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know. Maybe you can. But you gotta WORK that formatting to do it. And this don\u2019t do that. We\u2019re relying on paragraphs here with some underlining and some light indentation in places. And then there are these long ass sections of supplemental information that just appear thrown in willy-nilly. You\u2019ll be in a room description and suddenly it will ballon to multiple pages and there will be this cumbersome page and half table just tossed in. How you can keep a train of thought here is beyond me. It\u2019s almost a wall of text broken by weird presentations of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is something here. More so, i think, than The Thicket. But it is so hard to get at that I can\u2019t possibly, after multiple read-throughs, think of a situation in which I\u2019d be pleased or excited to run this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $20 at DriveThru. There\u2019s no preview. This HAS to have a preview. You HAVE to know what you are getting in to before purchasing this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/577509\/the-tomb-of-kallia?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Richard BartonXRPOSRICLevels 2-4 Rumors of a lost tomb lying deep within the New Forest are starting to trickle into the ears of adventurers in Gosterwick and Newmarket. While the source \u2013 and thus the veracity \u2013 of these whispered … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10606,"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-10613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/577509.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10613","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=10613"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10614,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10613\/revisions\/10614"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}