{"id":3050,"date":"2016-05-23T07:12:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-23T11:12:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3050"},"modified":"2019-02-25T10:58:16","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T15:58:16","slug":"night-of-the-mad-kobold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3050","title":{"rendered":"Night of the Mad Kobold"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nmk\"<\/a>
\nBy Dave Olson
\nCut to the Chase Games
\n5e
\nLevel 1<\/p>\n

The town of Cresthill enjoys a favorable location along the winding Graywand River. Trade is good, and the prominent gnomes of House Kelver run most of the businesses to the prosperity of the people. Now, however, a dangerous lunatic\u2014a kobold from the nearby Talon Hills\u2014has decided the gnomes of House Kelver need to be a taught a fiery lesson, and only a band of heroes can stop his plot.<\/p>\n

There are about six different versions of this, each for a different system. I somehow managed to end up with the 5e version instead of the S&W version. This is a magic ren-faire adventure, in a gnome city with an alchemist kobold constructing bombs of flour and fire beetle. It\u2019s mostly linear, with a brief free-range element in the middle, and a lot of contrivances to make up a plot. It\u2019s also quite lengthy, and I\u2019d say boring\/uninspiring, for the amount of content.<\/p>\n

Only about six of the twenty pages are the core content of the adventure. There\u2019s quite a few pre-amble pages with instructions and backgrounds, and quite a few pages in the rear for NPC stats and personalities, maps, and so on. I\u2019m not sure when this \u201clots of useless shit and not much adventure content\u201d began, but I suspect it has something to do with the Pay Per Word scene. If I can provide the same content three different ways then I only have to be original once. For some definition of original that I may not agree with.<\/p>\n

This verbosity-to-little-effect continues in the adventure proper. The key NPC\u2019s get little offset boxes with their personalities and motivations noted. That\u2019s great, in theory. It helps you find the content during the adventure. In practice, these sections are a couple of paragraphs long and drone on and on, using a maximal number of words to convey simple concepts. The guard captain is a family man, dedicated, and dislike his corrupt boss. The adventure takes two paragraphs to tell us those three things. The added words do nothing. In fact, they detract from the adventure because now the DM has to read the lengthy ass paragraphs when running the adventure instead of just scanning one sentence that says: family-man, dedicated, hates lazy corrupt boss. My language isn\u2019t that good. It\u2019s too fact based and doesn\u2019t take advantage of the wealth the english dictionary provides. My language is also AT LEAST ten times better than the two paragraphs provided, because my language is usable to run the game.<\/p>\n

There is a paragrapgh or so in the beginning that tells us all about kobolds. Their history in D&D, that these kobold sin this adventure are a different common brown type, and so on. It goes on and on, adding nothing useful to the adventure \u2026 until finally it says: And don\u2019t forget, they \u2018Yip!\u2019\u201d Once decent thing to help the DM bring the adventure to life. They Yip, in a paragraph of text. And I should say that that kind of direct game-enhancing content (such as, They Yip) is few and far between in this adventure. When there\u2019s read it\u2019s lengthy. The DM sections are lengthy. The NPC descriptions are lengthy. Seldom do they contain useful things and seldom still do they provide content like: They Yip.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a \u2026 railroad? Or maybe it\u2019s just very linear and full of contrivances to advance the plot. Hmmm. I think that means railroad. Anyway, the inciting event is an explosion. It\u2019s assumed the characters help out, I guess out of the kindness of their hearts? If they ask around the milling crowd they get a description of someone seen entering several weeks ago. Giving this to the guard captain causes him to recognize the dude. You go find the dude in a bar, only to be attacked by some thug buddies. The dude conveniently falls unconscious so you can question him. You run around town, in the \u201cfree play\u201d portion, finding the other bombs. It\u2019s assumed that somewhere along the route you meet the mad kobold bomber and find out there\u2019s a fifth bomb.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s fair to say that this is pretty typical adventure schlock.First you ask around, then run around, then finally fight the baddie. It\u2019s boring, lame, and not very interesting, providing the barest of ties to try and connect things. You have to question the crowd. Twice. You have to then talk to the captain. You have to not kill the corrupt guard and not kill him. You have to accidentally run into the kobold while going from place to place in town. Why is the town gnomish? For no particular reason, and it doesn\u2019t really feel like a gnome town at all. Why is the bad guy a kobold? For no particular reason. It\u2019s this sense of the generic that comes from applying fantastic tags to the mundane that rubs me such the wrong way with these magical ren-faire settings.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also this weird vibe around defusing the \u2018bombs.\u2019 The players are encouraged to be creative, by the text, and then it goes to great trouble to say what WON\u2019T work. The bombs have a fire beetle in them. But if you kill the beetle then the reagent still goes off and the thing explode. This means that there ARE right answers. On the one hand limitations should be fine. On the other, making them arbitrary seems counterproductive to encouraging the party to think freely.<\/p>\n

The amount of DM fiat to make the thing work right, the linearity, verbosity, and dullness of the general text make this a skip for me. The addition to gnomes and kobolds, for no particular reason, and the magical ren-faire alchemist stuff is just a turn off. I wish the adventure had not tried to explain things. It\u2019s a magic bomb. It\u2019s doesn\u2019t need a flour\/fire beetle explanation. Exploding skulls, yellow with flaming eyes that cackle manically as they get close to *BOOM* time? That I could accept without question.<\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/153213\/WK0-Night-of-the-Mad-Kobold-5E?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dave Olson Cut to the Chase Games 5e Level 1 The town of Cresthill enjoys a favorable location along the winding Graywand River. Trade is good, and the prominent gnomes of House Kelver run most of the businesses to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3048,"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-3050","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\/nmk.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3050","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=3050"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5725,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3050\/revisions\/5725"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}