{"id":3737,"date":"2017-07-26T07:14:39","date_gmt":"2017-07-26T11:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3737"},"modified":"2017-07-19T09:35:58","modified_gmt":"2017-07-19T13:35:58","slug":"giants-perch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3737","title":{"rendered":"Giant’s Perch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy John Fredericks
\nSharp Mountain Games
\nLabyrinth Lord
\nLevels 3-6<\/p>\n

The elven alchemist Corlue needs brave adventurers to help him locate a rare plant in the northern woods. This plant can help him locate an ancient undead king who seeks to return to life and conquer the world. Who will aid him in his quest?<\/p>\n

This is a 28 page adventure, with about fourteen pages of actual adventure, primarily inside a small twelve room temple ruin. I seem to recall not being completely offended by the last thing from Sharp Mountain I reviewed (a witch adventure?) This one has a high point or two but is generally not interesting, with the usual long text and lack of detail that plagues most adventures. When its SPECIFIC it can be good, but that\u2019s all too rare and invariably is hidden inside a long text block.<\/p>\n

The party is hired to escort an alchemist the last three miles in to town and, sure enough, he\u2019s being attacked when you reach him. In town you learn he\u2019s looking for a rare flower to stop The Evil One\u2019s return. Poking about turns up an ent in the forest who knows where everything is. Looking for the ent has you finding a young ent set on fire by bandits. This leads to the evil temple ruin where he\u2019s held captive. <\/p>\n

The adventure has octobats! They aren\u2019t used enough, just in the final encounter room, which is a shame. Putting them in more often\/earlier would have the party freaked out the entire time looking for them. The thing is chucked full of advice. When the advice is specific, which usually appears in the \u201cHow to roleplay this encounter\u201d section, it can be a decent add on. The bullywugs, for example, end each sentence with a *croak*. That\u2019s good advice. A little silly, maybe, but it really anchors the encounter and provides for something fun & memorable. Likewise, they were paid off in juicy rare beetles and are truly amazed\/astonished if the party is not impressed them as a rare delicacy. That\u2019s good shit right there. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this kind of solid specific advice is both rare AND buried in text blocks full of meaningless trivia. We\u2019re told that the local inn has solid furniture and hunting trophies on the walls. Great, just like every other fantasy fucking inn that has ever appeared. Instead of concentrating the text on being evocative and focusing the interesting, what\u2019s special about THIS inn, instead we get tedious descriptions (and reaction descriptions, and scene descriptions, and \u2026) that focus of the trivia and the mundane. \u201cLeave me be!\u201d shouts the alchemist, as he is under attack in the first scene. Wow. Great. Perfect. How was this creative masterpiece ever arrived at? The point, of course, being that it does nothing to inspire or add to the encounter. It\u2019s like telling us, in a room description, that a bedroom has a bed in it. Of course it fucking does, it\u2019s the bedroom. It\u2019s only notable if it DOESN\u2019T have a bed in it, or the bed is pristine clean in a dusty room, or the design has the answer to a puzzle, or the indent in it show the princess is a fairy. It has to ADD something. The text in this adventure adds very little.
\nI could have some minor quibbles with providing skeletons as enemies to level 3-6 parties (don\u2019t they auto-turn at that level?) but it\u2019s really the DM advice I take exception to.<\/p>\n

The advice to the DM punishes the party for good play. If the party sneak around then the DM is encouraged to move combat encounters they would have missed to instead be in front of them \u2026 so they encounter them. Not. Cool. This punishes players for smart play and is almost the textbook definition of Courtneys Quantum Ogre. Instead, one could show the players the patrolling skeletons at the entrance that their smart play so cleverly bypassed, in essence rewarding them and saying \u201cyou people were smrt.\u201d <\/p>\n

The adventure IS full of other helpful advice to the DM also. \u201cDM\u2019s, if you are using your own base town instead of this one then change the names, etc to the ones in your town.\u201d Dear god. Or, how about \u201cFeel free to change the name and gender of the young ent to suite your needs.\u201d <\/p>\n

Recently I tried to get in to a building at work that I seldom access. They had just remodeled the building and they had just switched over to a new card access system. My card didn\u2019t work. I called support. After relating these facts they told me to hold my card vertical up against the card reader. In spite of the fucking fact that I use my card a dozen times a day at card readers. They then explained to me what \u2018vertical\u2019 means. That\u2019s what this adventure is doing with its advice. \u201cRemember to breathe after speaking so you don\u2019t suffocate.\u201d Again, clogging up the adventure with useless advice. And don\u2019t feed me any fucking line about n00bs. I\u2019m reminded of the \u201cIf Quake was done today\u201d youtube video. \u201cTip: you can shoot enemies to kill them!\u201d \u201cHint: This is the wrong way!\u201d What the hell happened, indeed.<\/p>\n

This needs a BIG edit, removing almost all of the text, and beefing up the descriptions to be more evocative. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s $2.50 on DriveThru. The preview is five pages. The last page of the preview shows the first page of the first encounter, with the alchemist outside of town. You get to see the *croak* as well as the \u201cI have no quarrel with thee!\u201d trivia. The second page of this encounter is still more monster stats, taking up the entire second page.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/151798\/Giants-Perch–An-Adventure-for-OldSchool-Games-and-Labyrinth-LordTM?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By John Fredericks Sharp Mountain Games Labyrinth Lord Levels 3-6 The elven alchemist Corlue needs brave adventurers to help him locate a rare plant in the northern woods. This plant can help him locate an ancient undead king who seeks … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3736,"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-3737","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\/07\/giantperch.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737","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=3737"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3738,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3737\/revisions\/3738"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}