{"id":2773,"date":"2015-09-21T07:15:43","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T11:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2773"},"modified":"2019-01-04T10:00:25","modified_gmt":"2019-01-04T15:00:25","slug":"the-best-adventure-ever-500-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2773","title":{"rendered":"The Best Adventure Ever – 500 Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Ye old Internets declares that my review blog is now four years old. I figure I\u2019ve read and written reviews for about 1,100 adventures, if I include One-pagers and Dungeon Magazine. WordPress and RPGgeek think I just hit 500 reviews. It\u2019s time, I think, to declare which adventure is The Best<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Declaring a Best Adventure is sure to be a nightmare. Best by what standards? Deep Carbon Observatory is a masters work, every word bent towards a purpose with a focus that\u2019s hard to believe until you see it. I frequently look back on the Bowman\/Sham levels in Fight On! magazine. Especially in the case of Spawning Grounds of the Crab-Men, it fits together elements that I can still recall years later. ASE1 brings to life the setting in a manner more vivid than a thousand other city\/region supplements have failed and in far far fewer words. Welcome to Mortiston gets the town environment, with events, more right than any other I\u2019ve seen. Stroh\u2019s creativity, especially in Purple Planet, brings things to life in the minds eye. I could go on and on about Bull King, Slaughtergrid, or many of Finch\u2019s work, Like Spire of Iron & Crystal. Naming all of those reminds me of how many I have NOT named but still rank as some of the best ever.<\/p>\n

Maybe instead I mean \u201cMy Favourite?\u201d I don\u2019t know. Maybe. My \u201cbest\u201d adventure is an adventure I always recommend. It\u2019s my favorite to run at conventions. It\u2019s my favorite for running with n00bs. It\u2019s a great first adventure that sets the style and tone of the games to come. I\u2019ve reviewed it before, but it was a part of a larger set of reviews and I don\u2019t feel I gave it the spotlight it deserves. In poking around a bit, researching it for this review, it looks like the author only ever published this one adventure. Two other people helped out just a little bit, but it is at it\u2019s core a one-shot DIY adventure from a person who never did anything else and only has a minor presence under their pseudonym. A nameless drifter showing up to do magnificent work and then disappearing has some romantic appeal as well, as does the appeal of the Everyman, representing all of those wonderful adventures that home DM\u2019s come up with.<\/p>\n

As of today, the best adventure of everything I\u2019ve see is …<\/p>\n

The Darkness Beneath Level 1: The Upper Caves
\nFight On! Magazine #2
\nby Hackman, Calithena and David Bowman
\nLevels 1-3?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The adventure is tight, focused. And it invokes wonder.<\/p>\n

More than any other adventure I\u2019ve seen The Upper Caves channels wonder. The amazement of small child seeing something new, or one of those baby animal video when they encounter something mundane that is totally unexpected. More than any other adventure this adventure invokes the wonder of the first time you played D&D. The first secret door you found behind the bookcase. The first time eyes stared back at you in the darkness. So many people have very fond memories of those early TSR D&D modules. Nostalgia plays tricks with you. As adults we know there\u2019s something false in nostalgia. The old adventures seem flat compared to the memories we have of them. This adventure fights that. Tomorrowland in Disney has the tagline the Future That Never Was. This adventure brings that nostalgia HARD. It does the impossible: it lives up to nostalgic memories we have of those first games of D&D.<\/p>\n

For example:
\n4. There\u2019s a small lake in this cavern with a waterfall going in reverse! The waterfall creates an anti-gravity effect in the lake which grows stronger the nearer one is to it.<\/p>\n

The text goes on for a bit, but you get the idea. In another room a ball of fire rolls around it. In another there is an alligator statue that eats gems. There is NO appeal, at all, to standard mechanics in ANY of this. The effects are described to the DM, not ruled upon. There\u2019s no explanation offered. In other adventures you\u2019d see \u201cBob the 99th level MU cast Light, and Permanency, and Trigger, and then Delayed Blast and \u2026\u201d Explaining something robs it of its power. In D&D you want mystery. The mystery for the DM translates to the mystery for player. It\u2019s open ended. No solution is presumed or implied. It Just IS \u2026 and the solution is yours to create. I fail. I utterly fail every time in trying to describe just what it is that makes those mundane descriptions awesome.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at how this thing starts. There\u2019s the opening paragraph that explains the setup \u2026 and that\u2019s it. Eleven sentences. The introduction does four things. First, it give the purpose. This is the usual \u201cfirst level characters\u201d stuff, and places this first level of the megadungeon in context. Imagine that for a moment. A sixteen level community megadungeon introduced in just 2-3 sentences. That\u2019s some tight ass editing. Focus. The second part of the introduction tells the DM what\u2019s going on. \u201cTroglodytes and Crabmen battle one another for supremacy, while a renegade Leprechaun and his ten Halfling minions play both sides against the middle. The Leprechaun will want to trick the party out of its goods (or use them to gain even more), but the Halflings are thoroughly evil and will probably try to kill the party outright if given the chance.\u201c Now the DM has the lay of the land. Factions. How the writer intended them when he put the words down. Perfect introduction to a dungeon level. It took two sentences. The third part of the introduction tells you how to the use the tables provided. The last sentence sets the mood. It\u2019s one of my favorite lines ever. \t\u201cMost of the areas are too large for a torch or lantern to fully illuminate, so the party will always feel exposed to the murky depths just beyond their present vision. I\u2019d not wander off\u2026\u201d Revel in that sentence. What\u2019s it bring to mind? The unknown. Danger. Mystery. Anxiety. It\u2019s the exposure. It sets the mood perfectly for the DM to then communicate to the party as they explore \u2026 muck-farmers on their first foray underground. I\u2019m going to come back to this theme, again and again.<\/p>\n

Eleven sentences. The rest of the adventure doesn\u2019t even need to be read. That\u2019s right, after those eleven sentences you can start running the thing. You don\u2019t even need to read the entire adventure and be familiar with it. You remember those words don\u2019t you? They start just about every adventure ever written. Not this one bucko. This one is tight. You don\u2019t need to read it ahead of time. Three pages of text and one more for a map. Two sheets of paper. The best adventure ever.<\/p>\n

The items are wonderful. There\u2019s this fist-sized orange gem. you can shoot fire bolts from it, for 6d6 damage. It you ever roll 12 or less damage then it burns out, melting the mage’s hand for damage. There\u2019s this cursed plate armor that yells \u201cHERE I AM!\u201d when you get within 60\u2019 of enemies. That\u2019s brilliant! There\u2019s a gold & ruby necklace worth 5000gp \u2026 an heirloom of a powerful lord in the area \u2026 it will draw attention is pawned. That\u2019s great! Illuminator is a +1 sword, lawful, intelligent, ego=8, detects evil & gems and chaotic foes must save vs paralysis. it\u2019s mission is to expose corruption among nobility, and it will withhold its powers if players don\u2019t try to do that. after a while. Wonderful! Items that provide hooks to more adventure, with the magic sword being the most \u201cnormal.\u201d Why adventures ever got away from providing interesting treasure is beyond me. Probably around the time got away from the players and began emphasizing the Plot. Bleech! I\u2019m sure plot can be done well, but not to the exclusion of the players, and hooks.<\/p>\n

I know I said you didn\u2019t have to read it first. Maybe. There tend to be 9 or 10 rooms to a page. The rooms STICK. You look at them once, maybe just skimming them, and the entire concept of the room is lodged in your skull. You KNOW. From then on you need only glane at it and you know how to run it and what\u2019s up. I really can\u2019t emphasize this enough. These rooms stick with you.<\/p>\n

There are fanciful appeals to old school tropes, like the random corpse table for the searching of the many corpses found on the map. It also defies a lot of what I conventionally note as Important Things In Design. In particular, some of the rooms can be wordy. But once read they stick. Forever more you understand, on a deep level, what that room is about and there’s no need to refer to text anymore while running … or minimal reference anyway.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of personal preference in this for me. What I like as Best may not be what you like. Deep Carbon Observatory, the Stroh DCC works \u2026 this may be more conventionally \u201cBest\u201d, or appeal to a larger group. But this adventure, with it\u2019s quiet understated fully realized environment, an introduction for n00bs no matter how jaded, is the one I always think about nostalgically, and the one that lives us to that nostalgic feeling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ye old Internets declares that my review blog is now four years old. I figure I\u2019ve read and written reviews for about 1,100 adventures, if I include One-pagers and Dungeon Magazine. WordPress and RPGgeek think I just hit 500 reviews. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-level-1","category-reviews","category-the-best","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/ali.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773","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=2773"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4631,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions\/4631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}