{"id":4805,"date":"2019-01-12T19:19:11","date_gmt":"2019-01-12T19:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4805"},"modified":"2019-01-08T14:22:40","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T14:22:40","slug":"5e-crimson-harvest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4805","title":{"rendered":"(5e) Crimson Harvest"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\nBy Andy Tam\nSelf Published\n5e\nLevel 4\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u2026 The agricultural exports that once brought it wealth and decadence has since all but withered to naught. A group of intrepid adventurers has taken on the task the escort a vital cache of grains to the ailing town, but what seem to be a simple run-of-the-mill escort job takes a sinister turn for the worse. Ultimately embroiling all involved into a spiral of decay and madness\u2026
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This 58 page adventure features a cult in a village and about sixty locations in the manor home\/dungeon.There are hints of an adventure in this, but it’s written like a linear plot based thing rather than a normal adventure. The benefit of the doubt would seem to indicate a lack of understanding of how to design a non-linear adventure.
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Digging around on DMGuild, I was struck that everything there is either A) not an adventure, B) Some AL nonsense, C) Connected to the latest book. I went out of my way to find something relatively independent and came to this. The baddie here is a Warlock, in service to her patron. Nice! Reminds me of the days when druids were baddies. There\u2019s also a civil war going on, with the village in question being majorly impacted. Muddy fields, bodies face down in the dirt, spilled blood, starving and desperate people \u2026 that\u2019s pretty cool. I mean, it’s just gonna be used as a throwaway once this adventure is over, but what if it weren\u2019t? Nice campaign regional. 
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This thing also tries. It\u2019s got an encounter on the way to the village with an old woman trader doing some profiteering, a source of information, who also steals from the party at night. And it tries to add atmosphere, mostly by having a section at the start called \u201cAtmosphere\u201d with some bullet point ideas. And the entire concept of a village, starving during a civil war making civil hands unclean, desperate people, bodies down in the mud, a good ol\u2019 hanging tree ala Witcher 3 (who also tried and failed at wartime) \u2026 ah, warms my DM heart. As does a certain brevity in combat encounters; only a few sentences each, on average!
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Oh, and then there\u2019s this bit right up near the top of the adventure, one of the few few words \u2026
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\u201cCrimson Harvest is a dark fantasy story presented in the form of a Dungeons & Dragons adventure \u2026\u201d
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Ok, no, it\u2019s not as bad as those words would imply. But, man, seeing that can cause your heart to shudder.
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The hook has the baddies luring the party to town. Lure adventure suck. They are right up there with Challenge\/Test adventures. Then the guy who hires you will commit suicide rather than be captured, if you attack him. This is not going well. Really? He kills himself? He\u2019s bought in that deep? And still passes for normal, enough to put one over on the party? Just let the fucking party capture him, who cares? Besides, the hooks are all lame anyway. Hired or assigned a mission or Yet Another Missing Loved One. My next PC is going to home from an extended close-knit family of about 600 relatives, just to mock all these lame ass Loved One hooks.
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The read aloud is extensive. Extensive read-aloud should never be included. Can I say that categorically? Are there exceptions? I don\u2019t know. But it\u2019s close enough to the truth to say it categorically. Plus, it waxes poetic and flowery and presumes to tell you your character’s actions and feelings. Find some vials? The read aloud tells you open them and sniff. Uh huh.
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And that atmosphere that I mentioned had bullets? It\u2019s mostly generalized and abstracted, giving you little concrete or inspiring to work with.
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But that\u2019s all minor nits compared to the major failures, on two key points. First, it fails utterly in some pretty basic design issues. Like it wants to split the party. This is a fucking disaster for DM\u2019s, because it ALWAYS leaves a group of your players bored and disengaged. The only way this works is if have the ability to regroup almost immediately, and that don\u2019t happen here. It also REALLY hates maps. Which is to say it loves them too much, in the wrong way. Clearly someone put some effort in to making battlemaps for everything, nice and colorful and detailed. But the main DM map is a zoomed out version, hard to read. And basic information like \u201chow many villagers attack the party in the tavern?\u201d are left unanswered because the information is not in the text OR on the map, as the adventure indicates it should be. So you can\u2019t run it, by design, unless you use the battle maps which tell you the enemy count and location \u2026 and then the information isn\u2019t on the maps? And, if it IS there, and I missed it, then it\u2019s not clear enough. There\u2019s this weird abstraction of detail, like in a tower with a boy. There\u2019s no map, I think, but the locations are numbered like there is one. But they are weird, like #1 is  painting and #2 are the aforementioned glass vials and #3 is a chest, like there\u2019s a map somewhere of a big room with numbers on it. Feel free to stretch your legs and try new things in design, but you should also make sure they work.
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The second major issues is the entire adventure. Or, rather, how it designed. It\u2019s clear that the designer is going for a kind of open ended sort of thing, something akin to a sandbox\/independent location that the party find themselves in. But I don\u2019t think they know how to do it.
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There\u2019s a strong bend to the writing that is linear and plot based. This then this and then this \u2026 not quite that but about as close and you can without having scenes. The militia, as cult members, are stationed outside the manor home to keep the party out. There\u2019s a strong element of capturing the party or directing them to certain hidden entrances. If this adventure is The Wicker Man then everyone in the village is right on the edge of clubbing the party over the head. It doesn\u2019t come off as much as a village with a problem but rather a kind of armed camp ready to assault the party, turning the adventure in to a hack fest almost immediately. The maps have a strong linear dungeon bend to them rather than presenting the place as a \u201cnormal\u201d manor house. Look, I hate simulationist stuff as much as I hate linear stuff, but this is clearly close to the plot side of the spectrum, too much for its own good.
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Getting out of the 5e echo chamber and seeing examples of good adventures would go a long way to helping the designers next effort. Pruning back the prescriptive writing elements and either returning to traditional map\/key or putting more work in to the color battle maps actually helping the DM. 
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This is $3 at DMsguild. There\u2019s no preview. Andy, go create a preview that shows a few encounters so people know what they are buying!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.dmsguild.com\/product\/263425\/Crimson-Harvest<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Andy Tam Self Published 5e Level 4 \u2026 The agricultural exports that once brought it wealth and decadence has since all but withered to naught. A group of intrepid adventurers has taken on the task the escort a vital … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4802,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/crimsonh.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4805","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=4805"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4805\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4806,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4805\/revisions\/4806"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}