{"id":3164,"date":"2016-08-08T07:19:20","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T11:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3164"},"modified":"2019-02-25T11:21:25","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:21:25","slug":"eyes-of-the-stone-thief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3164","title":{"rendered":"Eyes of the Stone Thief"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"eyesth\"<\/a>
\nBy Gareth Hanrahan
\nPelgrane Press
\n13th Age
\nLevels 4-8<\/p>\n

Can you kill the dungeon before it kills you? In 13th Age, living dungeons slither up through the underworld and invade the surface lands. The Stone Thief is the most ancient and cunning of its kind; a vast monster that preys on the cities and structures you love, swallows them, and remakes them into more deathtrap-filled levels inside itself. Now, it\u2019s hunting YOU.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s GenCon next week (which will have passed by the time you read this), so I borrowed this from a friend to kill time until I burn through my wallet in the dealer hall. Stone Thief does something that I don\u2019t believe any module has tried to do: build a campaign around a megadungeon. Sure, most megadungeons recommend you do that but Stone Thief provides the tools to help you do that. This is more than the city in ASE1, or the wilderness\/bandits in Rappan. This is all of the surrounding goals and motivations. Mini-quests. Things that could happen. Major hook and plot line suggestions. Less detail, like the wilderness sections of Rappan, but more Larger Context. It\u2019s like Hanrahan read all the advice possible about building a megadungeon and implemented 90% of it correctly \u2026 within the confines of the 13th Age system.<\/p>\n

For those not in the know, 13th Age is what modern D&D has tried to be \u2026 and failed at. 3.5, Pathfinder, 4, and now 5 (or, at least RPGA 5e.) It\u2019s the ultimate evolution of the set-piece combat and linear plot and balanced parties and so forth. And it\u2019s not bad. If you want that kind of thing then 13th Age does it much better than any other modern version of D&D. Wha 13th Age does better than those other version is provide some grounding. Rather than pretend Anything Is Possible it instead provides an opportunity for the players to ground their characters with motivations and relationships to some \u201cIcons\u201d, things like the rules of known world, the lich king, the elf queen, or the orc lord. This grounding helps everything get in to things much faster, IMO. Needless to say, you\u2019re gonna have to re-stat this thing for a non-13th Age game. That shouldn’t be hard for anyone who\u2019s not a stickler.<\/p>\n

This dungeon, like all in 13th Age, is alive and travels underground until it pops up and eats a town. This is the pretext used to both the plot and to justify the various heavily themed areas of the levels found in the dungeon. And I use the word \u201cplot\u201d loosely here. The back third of the adventure describes how to integrate the dungeon in to your game. It\u2019s got a lot of suggestions, a lot of variations, and some major themes. It definitely has an idea of how things should go, but I would argue that the \u201cplot\u201d here is lighter, much lighter, than about 90% of the adventures I review. It comes across os tools and ideas.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to say some things that I generally refer to negatively, as I describe the actual dungeon: linear and set-pieces. Not only linear, but the DM is encouraged to throw in some little minor encounters along the way (which are outlined at the beginning of each level, in about \u00be of a page. Nice touch to spice things up.) and also to rearrange the rooms and levels as the players explore the dungeon and re-enter on other quests\/adventures. Remember, the dungeon is alive and a thinking being so it can do this \u2026 or at least that\u2019s the pretext. The encounters tend to be set-pieces. Good set pieces, generally. I\u2019ll remind you that I\u2019m a hypocrite and also liked many of the newer DCC adventures that are, essentially, linear and full of set pieces. The encounters here are interesting and not throw-aways. They remind me a lot of the encounters from Tower of Gygax or the DCC funnels at cons \u2026 with a far lower mortality rate. \ud83d\ude42 It\u2019s going to be hard for someone to argue that the room encounters here vary significantly from the types found in Maze of the Blue Medusa. Certainly less talking than Medusa, and certainly fewer \u201cchoices\u201d than Medusa, but the varied rooms do have a \u201cfree form\u201d nature to them, even if they really are just mostly combat. Combat in pipe rooms with goblins dragging bodies in to them. A giant octopus with swords in its tentacles. The thing is packed with stuff. Let\u2019s say something like seventy or eighty different encounters in the dungeon, almost all of which can be ripped off.<\/p>\n

13th Age does a good job with mysteries. Both the core book and this adventure have a kind of open ended writing style that alludes to things but doesn\u2019t come right out and explain in, in all cases. This makes the DM think. Or, rather, it encourages them to think. It gets their mind going. You start to think of explanations and possibilities as your mind races to fill in the details. Which is exactly what should be happening when you prep something for running it. It does some other similar things. There\u2019s a very clear entrance to the Mythic Underworld present, you KNOW you are going SOME. PLACE. ELSE. It also has some great advice for changing the dungeon when the party returns to the same areas, and other advice for dealing with certain situations, and a great index\/glossary that helps summarize things in the dungeon. You know how much I like reference data!<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a perfect product by any definition. The faction play elements or the dungeon are talked up however they are not really present in any meaningful way. Sure, there\u2019s different groups in the dungeon, and you can talk to a couple of them, but the interconnected nature is not really present. So it\u2019s faction play at its most abstract in that one or two groups, out of a dozen or more, are not immediately hostile. It also uses the old \u201cit kills something\/someone you love\u201d as a hook. The DM is encouraged to make the players want to take revenge on the dungeon. From an old school standpoint this is an overused crapfest of a trope that is almost ALWAYS used incorrectly \u2026 and thus puts me on edge every time I see it. In 13th Age \u2026 well, it has an element of story gaming to it as you create your character, so revenge and character arcs, set up in advance, are not exactly out of the question.<\/p>\n

These are nits. The worst problem is, I think, the lack of focus in the room descriptions with the Hard To Run consequences that results in. The descriptions, proper, are not bad. The actual text used to describe things is evocative and interesting. It makes you want to push the big red button. It\u2019s also surrounded by a more conversations style of prose that makes it harder than it should be to pick out the important bits. Asides, with no meaning. The first line of room 3 is \u201cThe [dungeon] greets intruders with this seemingly unremarkable chamber. Six huge black pillars support the ceiling, where the faded and peeling remains of a once beautiful mural can be seen.\u201d That second sentence is good, and could almost be decent read-aloud. The first sentence though, is useless conversational garbage. It\u2019s completely not needed and clogs up attempts to pull out the data that IS important. This happens time and time again in the adventure. You end up needing a highlighter to draw attention to what you need to run the room. The elements are present. The initial description helps focus attention to the ceiling and the pillars, and both get a little break out to describe them more if the players have their characters investigate \u2026 exactly the way Describe & Inquire adventuring is supposed to go. Except \u2026 it\u2019s a mishmash. The rest of the first paragraph, after the part quoted above, described the mural. Then the second paragraph describes the giant gargoyle statue in the room that holds a silver key. And then, later on, in the fourth paragraph, comes a description of the pillars. The basic room concept is a good one, but you end up fighting the text to pull out what you need rather than the text moving logically from one part to the next. The gargoyle is decent. The pillar stuff is excellent (they are actually hollow specimen cases with black swirling vapor inside \u2026 Wraiths!)<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re looking for a classic exploration dungeon then this isn\u2019t for you. If you\u2018re ok with set pieces then it is. If you want to see something deal with a megadungeon in the larger campaign context then this is for you. It\u2019s loads more interesting than Worlds Largest Dungeon, or Temple of Elemental Evil. I\u2019m going to find a copy for myself, it\u2019s interesting enough to warrant that. For 13th Age fans this should be a no brainer. For OSR fans you\u2019ll have to deal with your own feelings about linear set pieces.<\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/148623\/13th-Age-Eyes-of-the-Stone-Thief?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gareth Hanrahan Pelgrane Press 13th Age Levels 4-8 Can you kill the dungeon before it kills you? In 13th Age, living dungeons slither up through the underworld and invade the surface lands. The Stone Thief is the most ancient … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3163,"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-3164","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\/07\/eyesth.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164","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=3164"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5740,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions\/5740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}