{"id":3816,"date":"2017-09-13T07:15:48","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T11:15:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2017-09-13T10:10:05","modified_gmt":"2017-09-13T14:10:05","slug":"the-blood-pharoah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3816","title":{"rendered":"The Blood Pharaoh"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Jayson Gardner
\nSilver Bulettes
\nSwords & Wizardry
\nLevels 5-7<\/p>\n

The party is hired by a caravan to guard a mysterious cargo. What can be so important to require a full group of 4th-6th level adventurers? <\/p>\n

This is a 22 page \u201clinear event\u201d type adventure which has you escorting a caravan. Linear events. Nonsensical maps. Lots & lots of combat. At least there\u2019s a lot of read-aloud? Oh \u2026 wait \u2026<\/p>\n

This adventure has some SERIOUS issues with making sense.<\/p>\n

Ok, so Pharoah Bob goes to some kingdom and dies. His body gets shoved in a crate and a caravan hired to take him back home. This, then, is the very first thing in this adventure that doesn\u2019t make sense. He appears to have no retainers and sending him home is done by \u2026 the king of the place he was visiting? Isn\u2019t he supposed to be a living god, with lots of loyal followers? I can buy in to the dead foreign dignitary bit, but the rest of the thing makes no sense to me. <\/p>\n

Parts of the initial timeline make no sense. You\u2019re hired, and meet the caravan \u2026 at night .. a few hours before sunrise. You set off immediately, travel a couple of hours, and then make camp. Later, you break camp, travel a couple of hours, come across an inn, and then stop for the night at mid-morning. It just makes no sense at all!<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a hex crawl portion. But there\u2019s no hex crawl map even though it’s referred to repeatedly. Other wilderness maps have no scale on them \u2026 and I think it’s clear the scale varies widely on them. You\u2019re supposed to roll twice per hex for encounters on a small wandering table \u2026 which has a 50% chance of having an encounter. And then at night you roll at least three times, meaning encounters are assured. This seems pretty excessive, especially for an early edition game with healing issues. And the wandering table, just listing a few monsters, can\u2019t really support this quantity of wandering play. It\u2019s like someone through it in as an afterthought.<\/p>\n

The encounters are linear. \u201cNight of day one\u201d you get to have an encounter with a wild boar running through camp. Night three a demon shows up. Day three there\u2019s some goblins up ahead. And so it goes. The read-aloud, of which there is at times PAGES worth (night three, I\u2019m looking at you!) assumes you kill things. No talking to the goblins, the readaloud says \u201cI\u2019ve never seen such combat prowess!\u201d and then goes on for a lot more …<\/p>\n

This is just someone writing down some combat encounters and then expanding them with a fuck ton of read-aloud. Not even the addition of NPC\u2019s named Magic Master and Stealthy Steve can save it from itself.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s PWYW from DriveThru, hanging out at $1. The preview is one of those \u201cpage flippers\u201d and it WAY too small to read at all, only giving a basic overview of the layout style.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/220884\/The-Blood-Pharaoh?manufacturers_id=11366?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jayson Gardner Silver Bulettes Swords & Wizardry Levels 5-7 The party is hired by a caravan to guard a mysterious cargo. What can be so important to require a full group of 4th-6th level adventurers? This is a 22 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3815,"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-3816","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\/09\/bloodp.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","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=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}