{"id":2619,"date":"2015-06-17T07:07:57","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T11:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2619"},"modified":"2017-03-15T11:25:28","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T15:25:28","slug":"the-fungus-that-came-to-blackeswell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2619","title":{"rendered":"The Fungus That Came To Blackeswell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pf3\"<\/a>
\nby Yves Geens
\nPsychedelic Fantasies
\nD&D
\nThird Level?<\/p>\n

Publisher’s Blurb: \u201cThe inside of the detached cover has the map of the subterranean village of Blackeswell. It’s a site-based module. No quests or plots. The word “Fungus” is in the title for good reason. This is a creepy, mushroomy, fungusy adventure. If you are like me, you love that squishy, slimy, over-ripe botanic feel of lots of vile, rotting fungus in your D&D. This module has you covered. This is the best, most original fungus module of all time. It gave me some shudders. This is definitely the scariest of the three Psychedelic Fantasies modules.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a tight and dense ten page adventure, packed and delivered like a UPS truck. DCC does a great job providing kick ass adventures. Psychedelic Fantasies does the same great job, but in a different manner. Looser and denser than DCC and providing great value, this line brings to life a \u2026 freer? form of the game. It describes situations, without the need to appeal to mechanics. As a result we get an adventure of imagination. No explanations of WHY the X is Y. No attempts to describe everything in sight. It IS \u2026 now deal with it. This is a refreshing view, and is closer to my platonic ideal of a prepublished adventure than the vast majority of published material. SHOW, don\u2019t tell, is the phrase of the day, and this adventure shows us. Because it shows it supports the DM during during play. \u201cBob is evil\u201d only tells us Bob is evil and communicates nothing. \u201cBob is pulling the legs off of a spider\u201d shows us that Bob is evil and tells us a LOT about Bob. This adventure shows.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a village with something going on \u2026 a fungus infestation. There\u2019s no overarching quest, or plot, or anything else. Nothing is assumed about why the party is there. You can drop this into anything you\u2019ve got got going on and use it. At best, it\u2019s implied the party has heard about the infestation of fungus and is getting there before the authorities cordon off the place \u2026 getting in to do some looting before The Man stops you.<\/p>\n

In one quarter of a page we are introduced to the background. In one quarter of a page we have the rumor table. In one quarter of a page we are presented the current situation. The encounter locations start. No muss. No fuss. This is the perfect sort of thing for an adventure of this type. Essentially, you are presented with what everyone nearby knows about the village. Then you\u2019re presented with a series of rumors that can be used as hooks. The innkeeper is a miser with a hoard. There\u2019s a powerful wizard with an apprentice. There\u2019s some high-value mining going on. Once the party gets to the village they can use the rumors as a springboard to adventure. Go find the wizard. Go loot the gems, or the innkeepers hoard. This is gameable content. It\u2019s not trivia. It helps drives the adventure forward and gives momentum. This is so, so important. The rumors, and the background, are directly related to pushing the adventure forward. They point you towards areas of the village where interesting things may happen. Likewise, the current situation of the village provides the general background of the CURRENT status of the village. This part could be slightly stronger, but it does a decent job of laying out the general descriptions that can be used for the rest of the adventure.
\n\u201cLying facedown in a puddle of his own face.\u201d Oh my. That\u2019s visceral. The encounters here tend to two sorts. Either they are quite brief, like a burned down oil merchant, or an infested green grocer, or they are more involved. Even the briefer ones are interesting, like the barbershop with a bloody torso, the extremities torn off and playfully hidden around the shop. The shorter ones tend to be a monster encounter (the barbershop) or a treasure, maybe with a tick (the grocer, or the abandoned homes.) The longer ones tend to have something more involved going, and also tend to be Places of Note, such as the Inn, the Church, or the Wizards tower. There are a smattering of NPC\u2019s still around to interact with, rescue, and get help from. There are others that, while lucid, need mercy killing. The descriptions here are all good ones. Each paints a scene, showing instead of telling. They act as springboards to imagination. <\/p>\n

As with everything else in this line, the monsters and treasures are all unique. Nothing from the book and everything wonderfully mysterious. The Putrid Supper monster forces rotten bits down your throat, causing you to gag and retch. The magic thimble and needle repairs even magical garments. Blaster rifles blast (and even an NPC has one!) You can climb inside a robot and maybe even fuse with it. There are fungus-ish healing pods. As the tagline says, No Orcs, Fireballs, or +1 swords inside this baby. <\/p>\n

On to the negatives, and there are a few. There\u2019s a wandering monster table, and, being Petty Bryce, this is the worst thing in the adventure. It\u2019s just a series of monsters. I like my wanderers doing something, as a kickstarter for the DM building on the action. Petty complaint #2: \u201cCheck for wanderers every turn\u201d could be instead written as \u201cCheck every turn for wanderers, 1 on a 1d6.\u201d The various ways to check for wanderers is a pet peeve of mine, along with travelling and sight distances in overland maps.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also at least one encounter, a very hard one, that could be telegraphed better. ZOG is 12 HD. Everything in the adventure is bizarre, so it\u2019s hard to tell is bizarro #1 is tougher or easier than bizarro #2. Sprinkling a few dozen corpses around the building should do it. Otherwise it\u2019s a random death trap roll out of nowhere. I\u2019ve got no problem putting in a tough monster or a deathtrap, but the players should make a conscious choice for their characters to engage it. Otherwise it\u2019s random and unfair. <\/p>\n

Finally, the map could be better. It\u2019s a simple line drawing on a piece of graph paper, handmade. I don\u2019t care at all about that. What I\u2019d like t see on the map are more \u2026 annotations? Sights, smells, piles of corpses. It is, essentially, just a village map drawn in rectangles. There was a serious opportunity missed for the map to add more to the adventure. I\u2019m big on published adventures being a Play Aid for the DM. The map should communicate more than just the numbers to look up the room. This one doesn\u2019t do that. <\/p>\n

I like this adventure; it meets my high standards. I\u2019m keeping it AND am a bit disappointed I can\u2019t get these in print form anymore, but must rely on PDF\u2019s. Now the hard part. There\u2019s something wrong with it. I\u2019m not sure I completely understand what it is. I\u2019m generally pretty solid in my opinions, but from here on out in this review you are encountering some assertions that I\u2019m writing down in order to see if I believe them. The room descriptions are dense. They are also shortish. That\u2019s what I want. There is also some kind of wall of text thing going on, if you can describe a four sentence room as \u2018Wall of Text.\u2019 Adventure design is, I think, a delicate balancing act. You are presenting as the publisher states \u201cunconstrained imagination\u201d and yet you need to do so in a way that\u2019s easy and convenient for a DM to use during play. Do you need to use a highlighter in preparing the adventure? If so then something is wrong. Usually the room descriptions are full of trivia and you need a highlighter to pull out the one sentence that is critical. In this adventure things are so dense that \u2026 I don\u2019t know. My head is spinning. I THINK there\u2019s some kind of additional \u2026 organization? structure? convention? needed in presenting the unconstrained imagination to the DM. Certainly, I\u2019ll take this over industry norm any day. Unconstrained Imagination is what you should be paying for, not well organized (ha!) generic trivia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Yves Geens Psychedelic Fantasies D&D Third Level? Publisher’s Blurb: \u201cThe inside of the detached cover has the map of the subterranean village of Blackeswell. It’s a site-based module. No quests or plots. The word “Fungus” is in the title … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2620,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-level-3","category-reviews","category-the-best"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/pf3.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619","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=2619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2621,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2619\/revisions\/2621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}