{"id":4259,"date":"2018-06-20T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T11:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4259"},"modified":"2018-06-12T09:48:07","modified_gmt":"2018-06-12T13:48:07","slug":"the-caverns-of-ugard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4259","title":{"rendered":"The Caverns of Ugard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Shane Ward
\n3 Toadstools
\nLabyrinth Lord
\nLevels 1-3 maybe?<\/p>\n

The name Ugard is notorious with pain and fear! Thru-out the surrounding lands Ugard and his minions threaten, bully and extort money and lives. The vile Minotaur is holed up in some caves on the outskirts of town.<\/p>\n

This ten page adventure describes a twelve room cave with goblins and a minotaur, as well as a completely separate adventure in a thief guild in the city sewers. The primary cave adventure takes up four pages with the map. It tends to the drab & dry side of the D&D adventure spectrum, but doesn\u2019t drone on.<\/p>\n

With twelve rooms, there\u2019s not much room for things to go on. Some goblin guards, a wolf pen, spiders, some friendly dwarves, and the minotaur. The guard play dice, a prisoner is being held ransom, dwarves mine and want a pickaxe back. There\u2019s a big underground lake to get past, full of piranha. (Shouldn\u2019t ALL lakes be full of piranha in D&D? Hmmm, they will be in my next D&D campaign.) <\/p>\n

The room text tends to be short, two or three longish sentences and its done. That makes it easy to scan. The text tends to be on the dry side, I think, but clearly an effort has been made to be evocative. Crumbling stone bridges, a strange idol on a pillar emanating a dark green light. A crude jail with sticks wedged in to holes in the ground. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s there. How effective it is is a subject of my nitpicking. Can a room be both utterly dark AND have an emanating green light in it? \u201cAt one time there was a stone bridge across the lake, but it has since crumbled.\u201d Well, ok, but is there a better way to say that? \u201cTo the SE there is an exit. There is nothing in the room.\u201d Well, yes, obviously, if there\u2019s nothing in the text then there is nothing in the room.<\/p>\n

The crumbling bridge is, I think, a good example. Yes, it does tell us that the remains of a bridge wareere in the room. But I think it uses a rather passive voice to get us there, with perhaps some inference required. There\u2019s room for this in places in an adventure, but I think of it more of an aside, after the main description. \u201cCrumbling remains of an majestic bridge litter the lakes surface.\u201d That\u2019s more direct, it tells us what is there now and hints at what was. I\u2019m not the best at this, and second guessing word and sentence structure is not the point of the blog, but the avoidance of a passive voice and engaging in active voice descriptions are a much more effective way to communicate features, IMO.<\/p>\n

I could quibble with other aspect also. Some rooms have obvious sounds, or smells, that should emanate from them. Chanting, laughter, animal sounds and latrine smells. It would have been nice to have an odor comment, for example, in adjoining rooms. Treasure also seems quite light. With just +1 weapons augmenting a few coppers and silver. There\u2019s no level listed, so I guessed at 1-3. Most enemies are goblins, with the 6HD minotaur being the big bad. The goblins and minotaur don\u2019t really have a response to their buddies being hacked to death.<\/p>\n

What you\u2019re seeing in this review is, I think, a response to an adequate dungeon that still doesn\u2019t meet my (very) high standards. It\u2019s basic, and there\u2019s not much wrong with it. But there\u2019s also not much in it that makes you excited to run it. Noth the romo text, or encounters, or anything else that would seem to fire your imagination. And thus it comes off as a bit dry & bland.<\/p>\n

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a current suggested price of $0. The preview doesn\u2019t work. Me can has sad.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/128306\/The-Caverns-Of-Ugard?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Shane Ward 3 Toadstools Labyrinth Lord Levels 1-3 maybe? The name Ugard is notorious with pain and fear! Thru-out the surrounding lands Ugard and his minions threaten, bully and extort money and lives. The vile Minotaur is holed up … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4258,"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-4259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/ugard.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259","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=4259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4260,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259\/revisions\/4260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}