{"id":2405,"date":"2014-04-23T19:22:44","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T23:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2405"},"modified":"2014-04-23T19:22:44","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T23:22:44","slug":"gygax-3-the-marmoreal-tomb-of-garn-patuul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2405","title":{"rendered":"Gygax #3 – The Marmoreal Tomb of Garn Pat’uul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"g3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ernie Gygax & Benoist Poir\u00e9
\nTSR\/Gygax Magazine #3
\nD&D
\nLevels 1-3<\/p>\n

This is a 33-ish room dungeon in an old dwarves fortress. It\u2019s a pretty decent little adventure with a great map and nice degree of variety. It perhaps relies too much on standard monsters and is light on the treasure. It\u2019s also a little verbose at times and could use a good edit to prune back some of the wordiness. It\u2019s got a good foundation but could use a little more personality and the insertion of some faction play would add a whole lot to it.<\/p>\n

There are almost three full pages of introduction and \u201cadvice\u201d to kick this adventure off. There\u2019s about one full page of background and history of the dungeon. This is WAYYYY too much for the length of the adventure. If this were setting up a megadungeon then maybe it would be appropriate, but its not really offering anything unusual or different. Dwarf stronghold. Invaded & massacred. Done. The should of the adventure belongs in the rooms and the text therein, not in a giant all of text up front that doesn\u2019t really do a whole lot to expand the adventure or offer opportunities. Every word has to add to the adventure. Every. Single. One. The background is then follow by just under two pages of advice. Not advice relevant to this adventure but rather the same general advice seen a thousand times before. Read the whole adventure first. \u201cWhen you feel ready, gather your players and have then create new characters for the campaign.\u201d Maybe also \u201cBreath in. Roll dice. Breathe out.\u201d? Yes, I\u2019m laying it on a bit thick but I can\u2019t stand this sort of thing. There might be two or three paragraphs worth of relevant and useful information \u2026 about the amount I would normally expect to see. I find everything else distracting and the \u2026 languid? Conversational style a turn off.<\/p>\n

This less than strong effort is followed up by a less than great wandering monster table. Stirges. Kobolds. \u201cChoose something relevant.\u201d \u201cDeath scream.\u201d This is not really what I want to see in a wandering monster table. I don\u2019t mind the stirges (especially since they come from someplace on this level) or even the kobolds (who are wanderers fresh to the complex exploring like the party. I like the addition of death screams and the like, especially for mood setting, although I\u2019d like to see a couple of more suggestions. That point, and the \u201cchoose something relevant\u201d are really what I have a problem with. As the DM you have to put A LOT of work in to an adventure to fill it out and run it. I\u2019m looking for just about everything in the adventure to provide inspiration to me to help me run the thing. \u201cor some such\u201d doesn\u2019t help me. Nor does \u201csomething nearby.\u201d If you\u2019re gonna put \u201csomething nearby\u201d on the table then I expect you to annotate the map with the creatures. Otherwise I have to go look up the room numbers of the stuff nearby, check the key to see if there\u2019s a monster there. There\u2019s not so I have to go check again \u2026 and so on. The map looks like Poir\u00e9 had a hand in it. I don\u2019t know if he did an original or simply tweaked Ernie\u2019s, but it is one of the best. The layout of the map is excellent, with lots of loops and features on it and elevation changes, all hi lighted by the color treatment I\u2019ve come to know from Poir\u00e9. This is exactly the kind of map you you hope to see when you crack open an adventure. What\u2019s that thing? Green blobs?! Cool, columns and rubble! The map inspires \u2026 exactly like EVERY part of an adventure should.<\/p>\n

The meat of every adventure are the encounters. The encounters here are a strange mix of interesting and not \u2026 quite \u2026 there \u2026 all in the same encounter. There\u2019s a great encounter with a huge ogre on a pile of junk, digging through it oblivious to its surroundings. There\u2019s a great piece of art accompanying this, showing a kind of ogre king on a throne, a little reminiscent of that final shot in Conan, showing Conan the King. Unfortunately there\u2019s not much else to this encounter. Just a couple of extra words, with a name and the role the ogre plays in the dungeon and his relationship to the other groups would have added an immense amount of life to the encounter \u2026 and to the dungeon. There\u2019s a decent number of encounters like this, needing just a little bit more. There are also pot-bellied gnolls who use a balcony as their toilet, a great little water spider encounter. There are A LOT of goblins here, in a colony, and even a quite large group of wolves and stirge. Thus there\u2019s a good variety of single and double creature encounters interspersed with large colonies of creatures. There does sometimes be a tendency to explain history and former uses, which are all wasted words. There\u2019s also a room or two that LONG overstay their welcome. The potters is full of smashed pots, a couple of which can be put back together if you try hard enough. The pots are described in an excruciating level of detail \u2026 which no visible pay off. Perhaps they refer to different levels or I\u2019ve missed something. Likewise a ghostly room has a journal with A LOT of detail. One of those long soliloquy\u2019s that no player can sit through. There\u2019s a decent amount of variety though and the real standouts are the things that are NOT from any book: a nest area of weird birds and a strange vampiric cloud. Those elements give portions a real weird\/OD&D feel, the kind I like so much.<\/p>\n

The magic items are motley consumable with a touch of the unique. Potions and scrolls of no unusual element with bog standard spells are sure to be used and yet don\u2019t provide any interesting opportunities. There\u2019s a unique magic item or two that add a nice touch and are interesting. There\u2019s also a common item or two that are nice mundane treasures, like an inlaid sword. The vast majority of the treasure is just not that inspiring. IN fact, I shouldn\u2019t use the words \u2018vast majority\u2019 \u2026 there\u2019s not really much here. The level feels a little light in the treasure department. That goblin horde has next to nothing and perhaps the only decent horde (1400gp) lies with a potential ally. I actually kind of like the moral quandary that provides \u2026 I just think that it\u2019s going to beVERY difficult to level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ernie Gygax & Benoist Poir\u00e9 TSR\/Gygax Magazine #3 D&D Levels 1-3 This is a 33-ish room dungeon in an old dwarves fortress. It\u2019s a pretty decent little adventure with a great map and nice degree of variety. It perhaps … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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-2405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405","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=2405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5606,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2405\/revisions\/5606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}