{"id":3327,"date":"2016-11-23T07:16:48","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T12:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3327"},"modified":"2019-02-26T08:34:44","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T13:34:44","slug":"the-golden-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3327","title":{"rendered":"The Golden Four"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"goldenfour\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Steve Willett
\nPolyhedron Games
\nAD&D 1e
\nLevels 5-7<\/p>\n

A lost compound for four enterprising adventurers has been recently uncovered and the party must travel to it and plunder its wealth whilst looking for papers and articles of historical interest.<\/p>\n

This fifteen page adventure is a bit different than the other Willet adventures. It\u2019s a brief overland journey followed up a two-level minimally keyed castle with a dragon in it. The minimal keying keeps the stream of consciousness\/wall of text to a minimum. While minimal keying can work, it goes too far here.<\/p>\n

The entire intro and overland, as well as a general castle overview, fits on one page with the 43 room keys fitting on a second page. Three pages of maps round things out with the rest of the pages being devoted the dragon’s treasure (one page) and the rest being an appendix with monster stats. So, without maps, about two pages of content.<\/p>\n

The intro, overland, and general castle description are in the style that Willet generally uses. These are large free form paragraphs full of a kind of abstracted outline for the adventure. \u201cSet encounters before reaching their goal include brigands, a pair of owl bears, a band of bugbears, a dryad and a mother bear.\u201d Those encounters are then followed up on in the next paragraph with a couple of sentences about each. It\u2019s very stream of consciousness and conversational and not all all in a format conducive to running at a table, live.<\/p>\n

The keying takes \u201cminimal keying\u201d to the logical extreme. The two level castle is essentially a ring road corridor with rooms off of either side of it. Typical room descriptions are \u201cOfficers Quarters\u201d, \u201cWater closet\u201d, \u201cStables\u201d, and \u201cBath.\u201d Props for including the room name AS the description. That\u2019s something I wish more adventures did. After all, I think we all know what a Stable looks like and don\u2019t need the adventure to provide us wither read-aloud or a DM description of a stable. The descriptions, the content added, should focus on what’s unusual about this stable, and by unusual, I mean actual contribute to the player’s experience. Steve \u2018Bloodymage\u2019 Willett\u2019s descriptions take this too far though.. When ALL of the room descriptions are simply a room name, maybe with a treasure description ot \u201c(behir located here)\u201d then we need to ask: what’s the added value? Randomly printing room names and randomly assigning monsters is something that can be done with a dozen online generators, as well as the 1E DMG.<\/p>\n

I expect an adventure to be more than that.<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ve now reviewed all of Willett\u2019s adventures. This is by far the most coherent of them. Folks interested in BloodyMage\u2019s work could read the \u201cmain\u201d page of this and get an idea of what his other adventures are like and, if so inclined, have a minimally keyed dungeon.<\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/103120\/The-Golden-Four?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Steve Willett Polyhedron Games AD&D 1e Levels 5-7 A lost compound for four enterprising adventurers has been recently uncovered and the party must travel to it and plunder its wealth whilst looking for papers and articles of historical interest. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3323,"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-3327","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\/11\/goldenfour.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327","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=3327"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5770,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3327\/revisions\/5770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}