{"id":4588,"date":"2018-12-19T07:14:38","date_gmt":"2018-12-19T12:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4588"},"modified":"2018-12-10T09:22:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T14:22:49","slug":"fane-of-the-frog-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4588","title":{"rendered":"Fane of the Frog God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Stephen J Grodzicki
\nPickpocket Press
\nLow Fantasy Gaming
\nLevel 3?<\/p>\n\n\n

This fifteen page adventure has an eighteen room ruined temple inhabited by frogmen. With the bulk of the adventure in six pages, it manages relatively focused room descriptions while making some decent stabs at evocative writing. But good wanderer actions can\u2019t save an also ran in the frog man adventure arena.
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Challenge of the Frog Idol and Tower of the Were-Toads weigh heavy in this review, alas. Unfair to compare! Unfair to compare! Yes, life IS unfair.
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Some dude wants you to go with him so he can collect artifacts at a abandoned elf temple. Not exactly an archeologist, it\u2019s more of a \u201celves are extinct and I\u2019ve got a thing for them\u201d than it is the academic archeology of so many adventures. Any way, the old temple is partially flooded and has some frog men living in it. The history, background, and hook all come in a single page that gets in and out quickly and is fairly forgettable and ignorable for folks just wanting some frog men in an old elven temple.
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There\u2019s a good action-oriented vibe to the various encounters. This ranges from the wilderness encounters, to the wanderers in the temple to the actual rooms. A snake looks for food, frog men play in the water splashing, or giant eagles land in trees engaged in a mating ritual. It\u2019s enough to get the DM going to create something, which is what they should be doing.
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The descriptions are going just a little extra also. A forest is ancient and lush, with trunks as broad as houses and an intricate canopy obscuring direct sunlight. Snakes try to drown their prey, stirge swarms buzz, frogmen playfully leap out of the water, a mirror is stained and spotted with mold while objects gleam in a clearing. Nothing if \u201cbig\u201d or \u201clarge\u201d or \u201cred\u201d or \u201chuge.\u201d Note the use of intricate, or laping, or buzzing, or other more descriptive word choices. There\u2019s an attempt to paint a picture and that\u2019s the kind of value add that I think adventures should provide.
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That said, it\u2019s still not the most evocative writing. There\u2019s a \u2026 layering? Missing. Rooms feeding off of each other to layer up a vibe. Yeah, the frogmen flooded rooms are next to each other, but it doesn\u2019t feel like the whole is more than the sum of the parts, as far as evocative writing goes.
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It\u2019s also the case that the designer cuts a few corners. That gleaming from the wooded clearing (a clearing full of foreboding, good writing in that) isn\u2019t described. And laughing coming from a hollow in the tree is not either. I get it, the designer is allowing room for the DM to expand further and riff of of unexpected things. I\u2019m not sure how I feel about this. I\u2019ve bitched so long and so hard in thousands of reviews about the lack of value add that when I see someone TRYING to do something it still sets me off. Anyway, it probably deserves a pass.
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What doesn\u2019t deserve a pass is room nine, and I want to use this to illustrate a larger point. There\u2019s this HUGE partially flooded cavern. If you drew two lines across it to divide it in to thirds you\u2019d have rooms seven and eight and nine. Seven and eight are the entrance and middle and nine of the back third, up above water. Nine has an frog god idol on it. And a torch illuminates it. But no mention of that is made in roos seven or eight. So you get to nine and suddenly there\u2019s this eerie torch illuminating an idol. LAME. LAME LAME LAME! Think of the effect, in entering room seven, of the DM noting the flickering light in the distance, and then it becoming more distinct, the frog idol, etc. There\u2019s a kind of lack of \u201cbig open area\u201d awareness in this, and this is not the first adventure to ignore it. A bonfire on the roof of an abandoned castle, or eerie lights in one corner of a graveyard \u2026 designers don\u2019t seem to take a look at the map and note sounds, lights, or monsters drawn in from other areas. That\u2019s too bad, seeing something in the distance can be both a good motivator to get the party going and a good way to get them focused on something so they ignore something else. \ud83d\ude42
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There\u2019\u2019s some good magic items, nice and unique, and some poorly thought out org choices, like putting monster stats before room one instead of at the end. I should think that would make it harder to locate the stats during play?
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Anyway, bullywugs, errr, frog men,  riding dragonflies are cool, but things are a little too \u2026 staid for me, where frog men are concerned, especially considering what Challenge and Were-Toads did with them. This is a decent adventure, it\u2019s just not a GREAT adventure. And I can\u2019t tell you what a pain it is to live like me every day, with standards that high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is only two pages long and only really shows you the one page of background\/hook. A page of room descriptions would have been nice, to give people a good idea of what they are getting. Also,how about trying to put a level in the DriveThru description?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/260671\/Adventure-Framework-46-Fane-of-the-Frog-God?affiliate_id=1892600\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen J Grodzicki Pickpocket Press Low Fantasy Gaming Level 3? This fifteen page adventure has an eighteen room ruined temple inhabited by frogmen. With the bulk of the adventure in six pages, it manages relatively focused room descriptions while making … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4587,"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-4588","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\/12\/fanefrog.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588","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=4588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4589,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4588\/revisions\/4589"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}