{"id":3909,"date":"2017-11-18T07:17:44","date_gmt":"2017-11-18T12:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3909"},"modified":"2019-01-22T13:16:48","modified_gmt":"2019-01-22T18:16:48","slug":"5e-madness-of-the-rat-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3909","title":{"rendered":"(5e) Madness of the Rat King"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Tomer Abramovici
\nManiac Brews
\n5e
\nLow Levels<\/p>\n

This is a 28 page adventure (plus a dozen battle maps) in a fourteen room cave complex with a rat theme \u2026 with about half the 28 pages being appendices for new monsters and magic items. It can be wordy in places, and has a kind of 4e \u201center room\/face challenge\u201d vibe going on in places. It\u2019s also got a format that helps mitigate the wordiness and steers closer to interactivity than most products. There\u2019s are things to explore and do! A decent effort that makes me interested in seeing another product from the publisher.<\/p>\n

The monster descriptions, proper, are not that good. The first couple of sentences need to be what the DM immediately needs, the looks and demeanor, and not their creation history or some such. There\u2019s a good example of this in one entry: Nipples the rat. The description starts with \u201cAlbino with a large cranium.\u201d Perfect! When the DM flips to the monster appendix it needs to be easy to find the most important info, which is almost always the description & demeanor. (Well, besides the stat block, obviously.)<\/p>\n

But it makes up the gaps with some creativity. Explody rats. Laser-Rats. Rat-Bear-Pig. It gets in to the spirit of real D&D by providing a new mix of monsters to pump up the old. New monsters keep players on their toes. They don\u2019t know what to expect, it\u2019s full of mystery. Further, they are a resource, in some cases, to exploit. In this case the dungeon has a couple of potions of rat control. Wonderful! It turns a great feature of the dungeon, the new rat monsters, explicitly in to a tool for the party to exploit to overcome other challenges! This is the sort of creative play opportunities that I\u2019m looking for. It was a miss, however, to not put \u201cwielding\u201d rules in to the description of the Laser Rats; that\u2019s the first thing I would do if I saw one.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of battle maps, about one per room, I think. I don\u2019t think they add much. They, along with the writing style and vocabulary used, tend to give this a 4e type of vibe. That whole \u201center room and have a fight\u201d type of thing. A focus on \u201cDifficult Terrain\u201d and other vocab that is clearly a callback to rules. It\u2019s a weird feeling and more than a little misplaced. The first encounters reinforce this, with a rat ambush straight out of a \u201cthis is encounter\u201d 4e textbook. But it\u2019s \u2026 not right? Or maybe it\u2019s a toned down 4e that is them mixed with a lot of older-style interactivity?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that interactivity that won me over and elevates this adventure. Skeletons holding notes. A satchel hidden in the ceiling. Statues holding out their hands. Telepathy encouraging you to \u201cMix the blood!\u201d Black Lotus floating the water pools. Not just a hack fest, but things to DO and explore.<\/p>\n

The writing gets loose in places. Here\u2019s the first paragraph for one of the rooms, which occurs in front of the read-aloud: \u201cThe Rat King works tirelessly on his various experiments here, hell-bent on his delusional plans of world domination. He is constantly coming up with (and often discarding) new alchemical brews or rat mutations to build an unstoppable army. There is no end to his tinkering and half-baked schemes.\u201d That doesn\u2019t add anything to the room. It\u2019s trivia, useless during play. There\u2019s too much text like this and gets in the way of the interesting text about interactivity, in spite of the bolding and paragraph breaks.<\/p>\n

I have to draw some comparisons to the other wererat I just reviewed, Under Tenkar\u2019s Tavern. This feels more exploratory than that, although the map is simpler. The text is formatted better to allow the DM to find things easier. It\u2019s not going to win any awards in that category, it\u2019s still not great, but there was clearly an effort made to help the DM locate things.<\/p>\n

The adventure also has a half page to a page of suggestions for follow ups. Things that the DM could riff on regarding prisoners released, treasure gained, and so on. I like it when these small adventures do that; it adds an element of depth and continuity to them that others don\u2019t have. Yeah, it\u2019s a DM thing, but I\u2019m all about the designer throwing the DM a bone to work with.<\/p>\n

This is PWYW at DriveThrough, with a suggest price of \u2026 $0. It\u2019s free! The preview shows you five pages, which allows you to see the first five rooms. It does a good job of showing the color highlighting, bolding, and use of paragraphs to help organize and orient the DM.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/183874\/Madness-of-the-Rat-King?affiliate_id=1892600<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Tomer Abramovici Maniac Brews 5e Low Levels This is a 28 page adventure (plus a dozen battle maps) in a fourteen room cave complex with a rat theme \u2026 with about half the 28 pages being appendices for new … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3908,"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-3909","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\/11\/madrat.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909","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=3909"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5229,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions\/5229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}