{"id":3108,"date":"2016-07-02T07:21:31","date_gmt":"2016-07-02T11:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3108"},"modified":"2016-06-22T12:22:25","modified_gmt":"2016-06-22T16:22:25","slug":"dungeon-magazine-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3108","title":{"rendered":"Dungeon Magazine 89"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"d89\"<\/a>
\nHonor and Eta
\nBy David Zenz
\n3e
\nLevel 1<\/p>\n

OA! I Used to love OA in Dungeon! Used to …<\/p>\n

A seven scene linear adventure that pits level 1 characters against a were-tiger. This has some pretext about honor, but that doesn\u2019t really come in to it. The first few scenes involve the Eta, the lowest caste, and the systemic prejudice against them. That seems like something fun to game right? Next issue has orc babies and an adventure involving the trans-atlantic slave trade! Oh Boy! Anyway, seven encounters, and maybe three combats, the last with a were-tiger.Hope your level-1\u2019s all have silver! Perhaps the only good thing about this adventure is that the Eta village, maybe the third encounter, is the turning point where the adventure moves from reality to fantasy. After the village the encounters are all myth: tengu, were-tiger, goblins. That\u2019s a good transition to The Mythic Underworld. The adventure also does a good job in making clear the miserable treatment of the Eta and the hyperbolic class-based system in OA. Fun!<\/p>\n

Rivers of Blood
\nBy Paul Leach
\n3e
\nLevel 4<\/p>\n

Dark Age Russia! Cool!
\nWait, I meant to say \u201cEvent based Adventure! LAME!\u201d
\nJust a railroad, with maybe two interesting encounters in it. \u201cDefend\u201d a village from horseman raiders. Defend the village from other Rus. Have a couple of encounters on the river. Visit a town where the Rus dude who attacked the village is selling them as slaves, and challenge him to combat. Maybe eight or nine encounters, all in a line, with far too much boring combat. When your adventure has the line \u201cTo keep player suspense alive, roll some dice to make it seem like they are having an effect on the battle\u201d then you know you are a failure as an adventure writer. If the party doesn\u2019t capture a boat, during the raid, then a villager offers them a boat. *sigh* So the parties actions have no effect. There is a nice talky ogre that will chat with you and not be a jerk, and even maybe be helpful, if you pay the toll. That\u2019s refreshing. There\u2019s also a hag\/witch with a bridge of bones. Given my over of folklore in adventures it should be obvious I like that. The rest of the adventure is just boring and dull combats. With overwrought read-aloud. Joy.<\/p>\n

Headless
\nBy James Jacobs
\n3e
\nLevel 12<\/p>\n

Fifteen rooms in a derro undead\/simulacra fortress. There\u2019s this theory that says that deathtraps are ok in a high level adventure. The idea being that the party has access to a lot of magic, divination, and maybe even wishes and if they don\u2019t take advantage of all their capabilities then Fuck Them. I won\u2019t take a position on that, but I will note that this adventure relies heavily on the party using their abilities in \u2026 non-modern ways. They are going to need to scry\/commune\/etc just to find the adventure and even then it\u2019s 26 days away walking .. by which time the evil plan will have been enacted. Better have divined that and\/or used fly\/mount\/etc! So, expert players only. Once inside it\u2019s full of boring combats in a mostly linear, and small dungeon. Undead. Simulacra of monsters. Lots of nonsense text telling backgrounds and motivations useless to the adventure. The final encounter, in particular, will be quite rough, unless you have expert players who can think non traditionally. Then Orcus shows up and steals a major magic item, his scythe. LAME! I don\u2019t find the adventure interesting, because of its linear nature and focus on combat, except for the expert-player orientation of it.<\/p>\n

Rage
\nBy Bradley Schell
\n3e
\nLevel 7<\/p>\n

Enkidu-like barbarian is cursed with manners and the party needs to kill a troll priestess to free him. The barbarian with manners is a nice NPC, but the troll lair is only three rooms of mundane adventuring. IE: this is a five-page side-trek. Also, FYI: I have a brand on my left arm, in cuneiform, of Gilgamesh. Fuck you Doom of Man!<\/p>\n

Wedding Bells
\nBy Jonathan Tweet
\n3e
\nLevel 4<\/p>\n

This weird thing is almost like it was written to be the Included Beginning Adventure in a boxed set. It\u2019s very \u201cYou could do this or you could do this and if the party does this then you could do this.\u201d in the same way that many introductory adventures are written. But it\u2019s level four? It\u2019s primarily a social adventure, with only one real or maybe two real combats. It\u2019s also one of the worst fucking adventures I\u2019ve ever seen. I loathe almost every choice Tweet made in this adventure. I usually try and keep ideas and actions separate from people. What you say or what you do may be stupid, but that doesn\u2019t mean that you are stupid. Generalizations are evil. But I\u2019m also a hypocrite. If this adventure is any indication of Tweet\u2019s DM\u2019ing style then I\u2019m willing to say he\u2019s fucking shitty ass DM.<\/p>\n

The party visits a town for a wedding. Someone is missing. Out of the kindness of their hearts the party goes looking and fights a harpy in a tree. The end. Oh, on the way to the town the party is attacked by gnolls that the designers fully admits are not really connected in any way to the adventure and only exists to have a fight at the start. Wonderful. Upon reaching the town the party eats shit. Seriously, they eat shit. Over and over again. A hobgoblin guard shows up at the gates and belittles the party and makes petty (and not so petty) demands of them. Give me your weapons. It\u2019s all a test, to see what kind of people they are. I\u2019ll tell you what kind of people _I_ am, the kind that doesn\u2019t take shit from police state thugs. *stab stab stab* Police state? Oh my yes. You see, one of the dock workers (it’s a lake town) is a third level paladin and uses detect evil on the party, in order to inform the sheriff. There\u2019s a couple of encounters like this, including the little thief. A thief breaks in to the partes rooms at night. If the party hurts them, or god forbid kills them, then the sheriff probably kicks them out of town and the DM is encouraged to force an alignment check. Oh, and sick an elven strike force on the party. Even if it’s accidental, like a shot fired in the dark. The townsfolk generally treat the party like crap and then expect them to help find the missing person. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what Tweet is going for here. Pushing the party, repeatedly, and then punishing them for the action you\u2019ve encouraged is Not Cool. In RPG\u2019s the big red button exists to be pushed, because that\u2019s the fun thing to do. The enforced morality in this adventure, the DM pushing the party over and over again \u2026. This is not the way to DM your game \u2026 unless you are in junior high. It\u2019s this kind of shitty ass crap that gives D&D a bad name and it\u2019s this kind of shitty ass adventure publishing that encourages people to be shitty-ass DM\u2019s. \u201cThe due that write the game write the adventure and he clearly wants me to be a strict dick to the party.\u201d <\/p>\n

The adventure does have a brief NPC synopsis in the rear, but they have no personality. It has suggestions on wedding prep, but no complications to have fun with. It has a nice scene where the town folk to come to the party with petty requests, in a kind of hero worship\/celebrity sort of thing \u2026 that\u2019s not really taken advantage of at all. <\/p>\n

Beyond this, it\u2019s long for no reason. A page and a half for a gnoll ambush? It gets back to his Introductory Adventure advice and conversational style that the adventure has. It\u2019s also organized in a weird way. In particular, the Harpy stats and tree she lives in is at one part of the adventure, in the locales portion, and how the harpy reacts and what she does, etc when the party shows up is at the rear of the adventure MANY pages away. <\/p>\n

Fuck You Tweet. I reject. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Honor and Eta By David Zenz 3e Level 1 OA! I Used to love OA in Dungeon! Used to … A seven scene linear adventure that pits level 1 characters against a were-tiger. This has some pretext about honor, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeon-magazine","category-reviews","category-the-worst-evar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/d89.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108","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=3108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3109,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108\/revisions\/3109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}