{"id":4324,"date":"2018-07-16T07:13:52","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4324"},"modified":"2018-07-10T09:34:30","modified_gmt":"2018-07-10T13:34:30","slug":"tyranny-of-the-black-tower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4324","title":{"rendered":"Tyranny of the Black Tower"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Extildepo
\nVerisimilitude Society Press
\nS&W
\nLevels 3-5<\/p>\n

The village of Sacrabad is a wretched place. Dark rumors abound concerning its steward, \u201cHis Lordship\u201d Nim Sheog, who rules the place through terror and cruelty. Merchants who have passed through Sacrabad tell tale of how chaos thrives while the good folk wallow in misery. Nim\u2019s guard are no more than a well-paid gang of thugs, hired to enforce his relentless and often bizarre laws and what\u2019s worse, they seem to be in league with a nearby band of goblins, The Yellow Fang, who are often left to terrorize the villagers without reprisal. It is rumored that Nim keeps the rightful and lawful lord of Sacrabad locked away in the dungeons of the keep, the ominous Black Tower. An imposing structure that once afforded the village protection, the Black Tower has become a symbol of tyranny. But there is hope on the horizon. Hope in the form of a secret society who conspire to rescue the rightful lord and overthrow Nim and his guard. Can our heroes champion the cause?<\/p>\n

This 24 page adventure describes a small village and the wizard\/manor tower of the evil rules, as well as the dungeons under it. It has some interesting ideas that could have deserved to have been developed more, like a village rebellion. Given a strong cleanup of the text you\u2019d have a fairly standard adventure.<\/p>\n

So, you\u2019re standard repressed village. Corrupt guardsmen, thinly veiled alliance with the local goblins, evil wizard in a black tower on the hill overlooking town. There\u2019s a small group of rebels in town. The party will get thrown in the dungeon under the tower on a trumped up charge, thus disposing of them, or they will push back when the guards push them, probably then making contact with the rebels. Whatever the reason, the party will end up in the dungeons (monsters) and tower (guards\/wizard.) <\/p>\n

I hate the village and I love the village all at the same time. It\u2019s laid out in standard room\/key format, which is a lousy way to describe a social setting like a village. The entries tend to the long side, making information hard to find in each. What\u2019s worse, it\u2019s mostly just the same old usual tropes. These things should be written to cut fast. Get in and out fast; a couple of words of description and focus on what\u2019s relevant to the adventure rather than the trivia and mundanity. But \u2026. It\u2019s also got a great hand-drawn village map. It\u2019s great for one main reason: it complements the rebellion thing that\u2019s going on in the village. There are a couple of resistors to the mages rule and they could make contact with the party. The map perfectly compliments sneaking around at night. Fields, ravines, rises, hedgerows, tree copses \u2026 all it\u2019s missing are some guard notations and maybe a patrol path and you\u2019ve have a perfect map to support some great intrigue play. The text is not great in that regard; the plots could be called out more and so on. But it definitely leads to the DM imagining sneaking around the village, torchlight, and shiving guards on patrol and pulling them behind hedgerows, WW2 style. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s also got a pretty good emphasis on \u2026 zero-levels! The bulk of the guardsmen are zeros, with a 2nd level lieutenant or so here and there. Finally, a village in which all of the guards are not 10th levels fighters! <\/p>\n

The tower, proper, has the upper levels that house the wizard and his troops and the lower levels that house a more typical dungeon, and in which the party might be thrown in to. There\u2019s a wizard to free down there, who could be an ally if nursed back to health, as well as some goblins, sentenced to death, who could be allies also if you can put up with them being goblins \u2026 not outright betrayal but rather some low level stuff like stealing. It\u2019s a decent little \u201cwizards dungeon\u201d, not awfully special but an effort is made with the encounters. <\/p>\n

The writing though, is very weak. A page of background. A page of hooks (which should have been formatted better) and lots of loose text in the descriptions. \u201cIf the referee wishes \u2026\u201d is a good example. Why would that be put there? It\u2019s padding. Be direct in your fucking writing, people! It comes out as conversational and indirect. It obfuscates the text and makes it hard to find the relevant bits. Non-trivial facts expressed with evocative words. <\/p>\n

At one point dwarfs find a walkway of suspicious design \u2026 but nothing more is said of it. Uh. What? Why would you not tell us?<\/p>\n

This needed an editor. And not one of this shitty copy editors. That crap\u2019s mostly useless. (Except, of course, for my reviews, which desperately need one. \ud83d\ude42 Someone to cut the weasel words, flag the common adjectives, and tells the writer to switch to active voice. The bons are good, if you can slog it through.<\/p>\n

This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is six pages, most of which are useless. The last page gets closest to the real writing. Note the \u201chooked\u201d section on the left. The paragraph writing could have been better organized with bullets, or some such, instead of mixing everything in to the text. The first key is not quite typical, but note the mixed location data and lack of getting to the point.https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/245819\/Tyranny-of-the-Black-Tower?affiliate_id=1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Extildepo Verisimilitude Society Press S&W Levels 3-5 The village of Sacrabad is a wretched place. Dark rumors abound concerning its steward, \u201cHis Lordship\u201d Nim Sheog, who rules the place through terror and cruelty. Merchants who have passed through Sacrabad … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4323,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/blacktow.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324","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=4324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4325,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4324\/revisions\/4325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}