{"id":3026,"date":"2016-05-11T07:20:37","date_gmt":"2016-05-11T11:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3026"},"modified":"2019-02-24T10:17:23","modified_gmt":"2019-02-24T15:17:23","slug":"the-goblin-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3026","title":{"rendered":"The Goblin Market"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"gobmar\"<\/a>
\nBy Dave Tackett
\nQuasar Dragon Games
\nOSR
\nLevels 10-12<\/p>\n

A wave of pain and death sweeps over the town of Sligo during a festive faire and
\nmarket, causing fear and panic. As the characters investigate this horror, they find that is just part of an ongoing, multifaceted plot to drive away all humans and their allies. With giants, demons, hags, undead, and more lined up against them, the characters will have their work cut out for them.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of enthusiasm in the OSR community. That\u2019s not always matched by focus and sometimes a vision doesn\u2019t get translated on to paper well. Our 10-12th level characters experience the impact of an evil energy wave and, presumably, set out to find the cause out of the goodness of their cold cold murderhobo hearts. There are several smaller encounters that lead up to the big bad, and programmed ending. The adventure has A LOT of text, which is almost uniformly unfocused, meandering and verbose. It also has a couple of nice encounters and generally handles the monsters more as NPC\u2019s, which is very nice to see. The writing needs to be more focused and there needs to be more ADVENTURE and less mundane.<\/p>\n

The adventure is verbose, and more than that it\u2019s verbose in describing the mundane. Lengthy descriptions of the mundane, lengthy read-aloud that add little to no value, lengthy descriptions of actions taken by NPC\u2019s and monsters. None of this is interesting. None of this adds anything of real value. Here\u2019s a read-aloud that, at least, is short: \u201cBare stairs lead downward. On one wall is a tapestry showing a traditional brewery.\u201c This is the soul of tercity compared to several f the other read-alouds, and the read-aloud is then augmented by lengthy DM paragraphs. Needed information gets lost in the text. The read-aloud assumes. That you have torches. That you did X. That you woke the orcs when you came in. Not good. And a textbook reason why read-aloud is generally bad, especially in higher level adventures. This lengthy text, the filler information, is the primary reason that the adventure is 62 pages long. Well, the last 22 or so pages are just appendices for magic and monsters and maps, but, still, seven or so mini-dungeons in 40 pages is not a tight adventure. And it long for no reason. One underground area is little more than a single long hallway with jail cells off to each side, packed in. Skeletons in one, wraiths in another, more skeletons, vrocks, etc. Original it is not.<\/p>\n

It does do several things right. The rumor table is exactly the sort I like to see to see in adventures. It\u2019s specific. It\u2019s bits of overheard conversation. \u201cThere\u2019s no invisible pig, Ealga. It\u2019s a friendly joke played on outsiders and children.\u201d or \u201cI swear I seen it, a giant cockroach the size of my daughters pony! Up fast the monk house!\u201d These add color, they are specific, they aren’t\u2019 just boring fact communication. It\u2019s that idiosyncratic nature, the specificity, that makes an adventure worth running for the DM as a play aid.<\/p>\n

Likewise it does a great job in the way it treats the monsters. No fighting to the death here, mostly. You can bribe monsters, they will plead, even the bosses! In particularly there\u2019s a nice lich, one of the bigger bads in the plot, who doesn\u2019t really give a shit to die. That\u2019s quite nice, as is the devil you can rescue you will then pledge to serve you .. and follow through! OMG! A monster that doesn\u2019t backstab you!<\/p>\n

Every once in awhile there\u2019s a small nugget of a nice scene. The inciting event is the evil wave of energy that kills the old and infirm and turns them into zombies \u2026 including babies and toddlers. That\u2019s a nice little bit, as are a couple of the flowing-red-eyes zombies.<\/p>\n

Mostly though, this feel unnaturally long. And weirdly non-OSR. Lot\u2019s of low-level undead. MAYBE a little light on the treasure front, and most of it is book magic items. There\u2019s none of those \u201cconversion mistakes\u201d like long rests and DC checks that would give this away as a conversion. It\u2019s more like \u2026 mundane?<\/p>\n

This is available at DriveThru.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/181178\/PO2-Goblin-Market?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dave Tackett Quasar Dragon Games OSR Levels 10-12 A wave of pain and death sweeps over the town of Sligo during a festive faire and market, causing fear and panic. As the characters investigate this horror, they find that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/gobmar.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3026","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=3026"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5717,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3026\/revisions\/5717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}