{"id":3168,"date":"2016-08-10T07:22:37","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T11:22:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3168"},"modified":"2019-02-25T11:24:18","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:24:18","slug":"streets-of-zobeck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3168","title":{"rendered":"Streets of Zobeck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"zob\"<\/a>
\nI own this because either I saw online it was a good adventure or I saw online that someone thought it was a good town supplement. Lies! Fucking Lies! The number of decent things in this book can be counted on one hand. Worth Stealing: Dragged Woman, \u201cAdventure Ideas when you own a brothel\u201d and the couple of things I mention below. Otherwise it\u2019s generic, overly described mundanity. I\u2019m pretty sure every single adventure has the hook \u201cThe PC\u201ds have gained a reputation as \u2026\u201d From now on I BORROW this kind of shit from people when I want to review it.<\/p>\n

Everyone Lies L1-3 – Ben McFarland
\nGarbage. Oh, it wants to be good, but some fuckwit thought a railroad was a good idea. The pretext is good: Someone steals the Maltese Falcon …errr, I mean a book. About five different factions are involved. Thieves, secret police, ghoul info brokers, corrupt guards \u2026 and one fuckwit thief and his in over her head girfriend. This is a DELICIOUS set up. That is then ruined by the ABSOLUTE RAILROAD that follows. I mean, we\u2019re talking Eliminster Heel boy\u201d railroad. You go from place to place encountering toughs who threaten you, tell you information to get you to the next location, and fight you if you don\u2019t take their shit. And after they fight you they give you, anyway, the information they were going to give you. And you get healed. By them. By a third party, doesn\u2019t matter. Heal. Look, I try to stay neutral in things. I know different people like different things. But FUCK PATHFINDER if this this is the way they write their shit? Also, \u201cMasters of Small Matters\u201d is a great name for a messenger company. Props for that little bit of specificity, of which there is too little in this adventure.<\/p>\n

Rust L4-5 – Richard Pett
\nWell \u2026 it\u2019s not a railroad. It\u2019s also pretty straightforward. When it gets specific it\u2019s good but that\u2019s
\nfar too infrequent. Mister Corpulent and Master Doldrum, two loathsome petty merchants, both independently contact the party, looking for them to untangle some murders \u2026 which are tied to a treasure they both want. The investigation is short & mostly abstract: either watch & follow a killer to its lair or look at a scene, find a sign, and go to a temple to figure out who once used it. I\u2019m summarizing, but not by much \u2026 there may be about two more sentences about the temple\/crime scene investigation. Most of the text concentrates on a slaughterhouse and a few things in it. The Corpulent\/Doldrum setup thing is good, but that\u2019s about it. The adventure lacks specifics. It deals with horrific crime scenes in the abstract. Doldrum refers to Corpulence misdeeds in the abstract, instead of the specific. It\u2019s these lack of specifics, in the meeting, I the crime scenes, in the investigation, and in the workhouse, that leaves the adventure lacking. Understand, I\u2019m not looking for mountains of read aloud. I\u2019m not looking for railroad, or mountains of DM text. But SPECIFICITY is the soul of storytelling. Without it there is nothing to hang your hat on and you might as well have written \u201cClockwork machines in a slaughterhouse.\u201d and claimed it was an adventure. And remember: Describing the mundane does nothing. There\u2019s also the customary betrayal at the end of the adventure by whichever Merchant the party threw in with, with the other one showing up also. This is lame. Betrayals, a time honored trope, are completely misused in D&D and lead to the party never trusting anyone, ever.<\/p>\n

The Fish and The Rose, L5 – Christina Stiles
\nThis is nothing but a linear dungeon. The monsters do not break morale. They have no treasure. The only redeeming quality is a prisoner you pick up who you, presumably, have to drag with you the entire way. I seriously can\u2019t think of a reason for this adventure to exist.<\/p>\n

The First Lab, L7 – Mike Franke
\nNothing but a little linear lair with almost nothing interesting going on. Find stolen diary, beat thieves to hidden lair. You catch up by meeting the dragged woman: lighting the bloody end of a rope and giving up a precious memory. That\u2019s nice .. but then again she\u2019s one the best things about the entire booklet, so, no duh. Otherwise it\u2019s all \u201center room. Fight. Enter Next room. Fight.\u201d I try to avoid falling into Old Man-itis, but, Fuck, if this is mainstream adventure design then I Weep For The Future. Oh, and there\u2019s a Rolle To Continue in the beginning. Joy.<\/p>\n

Rebuilding a Good Man, L98, Matthew Stinson
\nLinear AND a mess?! This is it! Fight some thieves, steal a clockwork body, find the parts to transfer a soul into it. The son of a poor ferryman is CR10 because, of course, he has to be in order to make this POS adventure have a bad guy attack at the end.<\/p>\n

Ripper, L10 – Mike Franke
\nA mob hanging a foreigner and the party stumbling in on it! What a great start! Of course, you can\u2019t actually do anything. I mean, you can TRY, and roll some dice, but no matter how good you roll or what you do the guy still hangs. This is what passes for Player Agency, I guess. The guard shows up. A R4 and six F3\u2019s. They threaten and bully your level 10 party in to looking into some killings, or things will go badly for you with the lynchings. How is this even a thing? You really couldn\u2019t find ANY better approach for the corrupt captain than bullying a party two to three times his level? Generic investigation follows, and if you don\u2019t make your DC 20 Gather Information check then it\u2019s going to be an AWFULLY short adventure for you. Then a body drops out of the sky in front of you so you can have your required forced combat, followed by you arriving at the location that connects all the murders JUST in time to see it under attack. It\u2019s got one thing going for it: it\u2019s not those last three shitty ass adventures.<\/p>\n

Flesh Fails L9-11, Christina Stiles
\nEasily one of the better adventures in this booklet, and deserving of analysis than the ranting the other earned. A noble disappears and you\u2019re hired to find him. Along the way you get to impersonate him at a party, explore a BDSM club, visit the hallowed halls of of the magic college, and finally hit up a necromancer’s private workshop. The BDSM club is about as tasteful as you can want and still have a BDSM club, so no worries for the prudes in the audience. The party where the group impersonates the noble is more abstract than it should be. It\u2019s really just a short paragraph and a timeline of (mundane) events. This really needed just a bit more to kick it up and provide an delightful evening of role-playing. There\u2019s a section earlier in the book, in the generic town overview, which offers a page of ideas\/seeds if the party run their own brothel. The party\/impersonation section needs something like that. Just a half dozen or so bullet points for things to happen. Shit for the impersonator to roleplay through or for the rest of the party to deal with. Yeah, I can make it up. I can also not pay for this book and make up my own entire adventure. Its this kind of DM support that adventures need to provide, not explicit detail but nudges to the DMs imagination. The bookstore above the BDSM party is nice, and complete with store clerks who eavesdrop because they are bored; real life always provides the best motivations in an RPG. There\u2019s another skill check to continue the adventure, DC 10 in this case, to find the entrance to the party. I\u2019m sure there\u2019s no problem for Level 10 party, which begs the question, why make it a skill check? The roll to continue the adventure checks are super lame and need to handled through a different mechanism. Something like just giving them the location and the skill check provides a boon or bane, rather than making the rest of the adventure contingent on making the check .. no matter how trivial. The magic college is abstracted and the DM told to make up traps and senties \u2026 again, that\u2019s why I\u2019m paying Paizo. SOmehow you\u2019re supposed to figure out that the office at the college is not really being used and there\u2019s another one, at the docks. The \u201cnot being used\u201d is tenuous and \u201cthe docks\u201d is not really discoverable that I can tell. Maybe I missed it, but I did read several times. The dockside necromancy workshop is quite nice, complete with pens of zombies and some crates full of preserved zombie parts, a head on a pedestal that talks to you and a nice new magic items \u201ca bag of arms.\u201d A tad more specificity with some of the idea seeds and this one could have been good.<\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/91298\/Streets-of-Zobeck-PFRPG?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I own this because either I saw online it was a good adventure or I saw online that someone thought it was a good town supplement. Lies! Fucking Lies! The number of decent things in this book can be counted … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3166,"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-3168","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\/08\/zob.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3168","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=3168"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5741,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3168\/revisions\/5741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}