{"id":10620,"date":"2026-09-14T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10620"},"modified":"2026-08-24T12:00:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T16:00:17","slug":"shadows-and-flesh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=10620","title":{"rendered":"Shadows and Flesh"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Noah Green
Necrotic Gnome
OSE
Levels 2-3
<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
he shattered remains of the arch-wizard Rakius’s tower have long stood silent\u2014until now. Gnoll fugitives seeking refuge have unwittingly unleashed the restless horrors that linger in the ruin. Can players unravel the wizard’s forgotten doom and escape his labs with arcane treasures and their souls intact?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 24 page adventure uses about twelve pages to describe 25 rooms in s small five level ruined mage tower. You\u2019re running around doing things for the undead as you stab some abominations. It\u2019s trying to keep som themes running, but it feels disconnected from itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meh. It\u2019s a small ruined wizards tower. Inside you\u2019ve got these gnolls, hiding out after they stole some gnoll artifacts. Except, all but one are now possessed by spirits that were in the tower. They now all hate each other, or have some quest inside the tower for you to go on, which could be something like \u201ckill the other spirit Bob\u201d or maybe \u201ccleanse the tower of the abominations\u201d! Because, yes, as a wizard tower there are some weird fleshy abominations. (Nice art for them!) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am just so Meh about this one. I can only point to a bunch of trifling things. There is a decent little outside portion, with multiple entrances inside and windows and thicket holes entrances and so on. There\u2019s a little read-aloud section and then some decent little interactivity in places. Let\u2019s open up the cold dome and find some brains and put them back in to skulls with bejeweled eyes! Or a toad statue in a fountain with a gemstone hidden in an eye, all in a kind of overgrown garden setting. Or, even, a room with paintings in it, one of which is a famous missing work! This should all be decent. I mean, even the shades and their entire fetch quest little bullshitty things, that should be fine also, right? Bring me the Jade Monkey! And I shall give you, I don\u2019t know,  a necklace hidden in a fireplace nearby. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, some of the magic items are not bad at all. \u201cLeonard: A life-sized, bald human male head sculpted of rubbery material. Pulling the nose or an ear causes it to scream for 1d6 rounds; all nearby suffer a \u20132 penalty to attack rolls.\u201d Or a little bonsai tree with litte fruits on it that provide full size rations. Not everything here is great, there are boring old +1\u2019s, but, it does have some objects with some creativity<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there\u2019s just something missing to all of it. Some life? Some joy? Some completeness?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s revisit that painting. It\u2019s in a room with like twelve other paintings. It\u2019s the only one mentioned, at like 200go, but, are the other worth something? It\u2019s like they don\u2019t exist. The whole possessed gnoll thing, and the stuff they stole, it just feel random. Why gnolls? Why possessed? Why do we care about the gnoll artifacts? The spirits, and their goals and wants and stuff, It just feels disconnected from itself. Maybe I mean passive? The spirits don\u2019t seem to give a shit about anything. And not in a cool \u201cIm from th beyond the grave\u201d sort of way. Yeah yeah, go kill my brother. Yeah yeah, maybe rid the place of monsters. They\u2019re boring. The entire thing is boring?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know why. A lack of active verbing? I mean, even in B2 the place didn\u2019t FEEL boring. It felt dynamic. Dudes were up to shit. Free room and board. Toss a bag of gold through the door.  The spirits, here, are the main \u201cperson\u201d interactivity. And they have some sort of enemies, friends, things they want done. At least theoretically. And I guess their rooms note what they could engage the party on. But there\u2019s nothing in this beyond that. They just don\u2019t seem particularly interested in getting what they want. As for the rest, it\u2019s just vermin and abominations. Oh, oh, there\u2019s a gnoll, a single gnoll left not taken over by the spirits. He\u2019d hiding in a garden room. The one with the fish statue\/fountain. It\u2019s got some blood moths in it, think of them as stirge. They\u2019ll attack him and if you save him then he;ll tell you that the eye of Utnapishtim is in the fish statues eye socket. It\u2019s all in one room. There\u2019s nothing larger or more grand, for the most part, than whats right in front of you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In another place you slap the brain of a dude back in a skull. That\u2019s it. No fun interactivity that it enables. No places to unlock. There\u2019s literally nothing else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I don\u2019t know. Is there some room interactivity? Yes. Is there some NPC interactivity? Yes. Are the room descriptions disasters? No. Is the formatting a disaster? No. Do I care about anything in this and\/or am excited to run it? No. As I noted, it feels disconnected, like the rooms exist in isolation, in spite of a few rooms, especially with the spirits, being tied loosely to to other rooms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not bad. It doesn\u2019t make me want to claw my own eyes out. So, you know, good job?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is twelve pages, with a handful of rooms in the dungeon at he end of it. More than enough, i think, to get  a sense of the dungeon. And my malaise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/580706\/quick-delve-4-shadows-and-flesh?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Noah GreenNecrotic GnomeOSELevels 2-3 he shattered remains of the arch-wizard Rakius’s tower have long stood silent\u2014until now. Gnoll fugitives seeking refuge have unwittingly unleashed the restless horrors that linger in the ruin. Can players unravel the wizard’s forgotten doom … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10616,"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":[40,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meh-its-fine","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/580706.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10620","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=10620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10621,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10620\/revisions\/10621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}