{"id":3577,"date":"2017-04-24T07:07:04","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T11:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3577"},"modified":"2017-04-17T12:07:56","modified_gmt":"2017-04-17T16:07:56","slug":"the-crocodiles-tear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3577","title":{"rendered":"The Crocodile’s Tear"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Geoff Gander
\nExpeditious Retreat Press
\nOSRIC
\nLevels 3-6<\/p>\n

A wealthy patron is outfitting an expedition to sail to the mysterious southern continent. The goal of the expedition is none other than the legendary Crocodile\u2019s Tear: a massive magical emerald! Many tales are told about the southern continent, most of which paint it as a disease-ridden jungle filled with hostile natives, reachable only by crossing a pirate- and monster-infested sea. As the port winds fade into the winds of the open sea, the sails of The Mermaid billow firmly. Will the player characters survive the voyage, and will they find more than they bargained for? Oh, and was it mentioned that that two other trips set out before this one only to be swallowed up by the dense jungle\u2026<\/p>\n

This thirteen page adventure has a 25 day sea voyage, a forty mile jungle trek, and then a nineteen room abandoned temple, all to recover a giant emerald. It\u2019s sparse on content, with only a few encounters in each area and is pretty free with the generalizations, rather than the specifics that bring an adventure to life, where the inter-village politics are concerned. Considering the jungle is one third of the adventure…and there\u2019s no wanderers for the jungle, AND the ocean voyage is parse, AND the first ten rooms of the nineteen room temple are devoid of t-birds for daddy to take away \u2026 it seems likely that the adventure was built around a single encounter, the last one. <\/p>\n

The adventure essentially starts with the a sea journey of 25-ish days to the fetid \u201csouthern continent.\u201d You have 5 encounters to pick from for wanderers: a pirate ship, a skeleton ship, a squid, a sea hydra and some flotsam \u2026 \u201cThe GM should decide whether there is anything of interest.\u201d The reviewer already has. No. No there is not. This gets back to the old issue of value being provided. Is it enough for an adventure you buy to just list a monster encounter, in ultra-minimal keyed format? That is what this adventure is doing with the wandering monster table for a 25 day sea voyage. What value does this content add over the tables freely available, or included in the book? \u201cGiant squid attacks\u201d is not value. <\/p>\n

Likewise the 40-mile steaming hike through the fetid jungle with hostile natives. Only in this case there\u2019s no wandering monster table at all. Or much of an adventure, really. Just the description of a couple of tribes, one paragraph each, and a couple of village descriptions, only two of which are likely to be relevant to the adventure. They can be summed up as \u201cfriendly\u201d and \u201chostile\u201d, with no other interesting roleplay opportunities in them. There\u2019s a little bit going on with a couple of other villages, but not much more than \u201cthey tolerate outsider better\u201d or \u201cthey have pearls to trade\u201d, and, they are unlikely to come up in play since you\u2019ll have a guide to take you directly where you want to go.<\/p>\n

The temple is partially submerged in a lake, which has some interesting aspects as you attempt to build a raft and get to it while avoiding the hostile natives in the nearby village that also fish in the lake. After that it\u2019s in to the ziggurat. The first ten rooms are, essentially, empty. They might contain a minor treasure or two, but the only thing mildly interesting is a secret door to a hidden sub-level. Under that is five or encounters in a linear map. It is most likely here that the first monster will be encountered\u201d 6 fungus men and a crocodile. Finding the emerald there\u2019s a brief time travel scene where you fight an evil king and his warriors, with the fate of the emerald (full power magic item or just a \u2018minor\u2019 1d6 healing a turn) being decided. <\/p>\n

So, book wandering monsters in the sea. No wanderers, or encounters, in the jungle. Three in the temple (probably.) What, you might ask, is in the adventure.<\/p>\n

The usual nonsense, I sez me. \u201cThe king used to use this room for \u2026\u201d and boring descriptions of boring filler rooms. Over and over. This room once contained a chapel. The old king spent much of his time here. The wall paintings have been defaced \u2026 but there\u2019s no \u2018adventure\u2019 or clue related to that, so it\u2019s just window dressing. This room once housed. It\u2019s frustrated just how little content there is and how what little there is fails to drive action. Detail, without being related to driving the adventure, is worthless. Further, it tends to distract and get in the way. Are there exceptions? Sure. But that\u2019s why they call them exceptions. For almost everyone writing an adventure that detail will be worthless, just filler words to pad the thing out so you can get your pay-per-word fulfilled.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s $14 for a 13 page PDF on DriveThru. The preview will show you the ocean voyage and the \u201cbackground\u201d to the jungle, and map illustrating why most of that background is useless.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/189645\/Advanced-Adventures-34-The-Crocodiles-Tear?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Geoff Gander Expeditious Retreat Press OSRIC Levels 3-6 A wealthy patron is outfitting an expedition to sail to the mysterious southern continent. The goal of the expedition is none other than the legendary Crocodile\u2019s Tear: a massive magical emerald! … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3576,"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-3577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/croct.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577","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=3577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3578,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3577\/revisions\/3578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}