{"id":5172,"date":"2015-06-15T06:21:38","date_gmt":"2015-06-15T10:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=2591"},"modified":"2019-02-21T08:35:47","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T13:35:47","slug":"dcc-80-5-glipkerios-gambit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5172","title":{"rendered":"DCC #80.5 – Glipkerio's Gambit"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"805\"<\/a>
\nby Jobe Bittman
\nGoodman Games
\nDCC RPG
\nLevel 2<\/p>\n

Atop the highest spire of Mount Tyche, your patron\u2019s temple is under attack. A demonic miasma rolls down the frost-blasted peaks leaving a vile stench and foul magics in its wake. Winged black creatures roost along the crumbling solitary road to the temple. The bloodthirsty shrieks of snow apes and the moans of the tortured dead echo from the jagged rocks above. Your patron has saved your skin more times than you can count. Now it is your turn!<\/p>\n

This is an assault on a time-travelling wizards lair that he\u2019s just recently taken over. I\u2019m conflicted here. What\u2019s present is, oh, I don\u2019t know. Confusing isn\u2019t the right word. Muddled, maybe? On the one hand there\u2019s some great little things presented in this adventure. Some decent atmosphere, a decent set-piece finish, and a couple of decent encounters. On the other hand \u2026 I\u2019ve gotten the overall impression that this is a \u2026 dull? adventure? Maybe it\u2019s made promises that are not being kept?<\/p>\n

The idea is that you are contacted by The Fates. Their temple has been taken over by a wizard and they need you to free it. (There\u2019s a nice bit in there where they give you a bit of thread from the spinning wheel to tie around your finger. Nice way to work in the myth and give things a more folklorish\/realistic vibe.) From there you climb up a mountain on a road (or, the hard way) with five-is encounters and hit the temple up top with maybe seven encounters.<\/p>\n

There are these great random events on the mountain. \u201cTURN BACK NOW\u201d chiseled into the mountain in giant letters, dead birds raining from the sky, Crimson slush, Art & Crafts messages imploring the party to go back, ala Blair Witch Project stick figures, frozen hands severed at the elbow sticking out of a snowbank with their finger outstretched as if to say \u201cStop.\u201d Those are all REALLY good little things to drop in and exactly the sort of flavor bursts I\u2019m looking for. There\u2019s also a REALLY nice corpse gate encounter, with severed limbs and a mouth for a keyhole. The final encounter could be thought of as one of those video game Boss Fights: there\u2019s some amount of puzzle going on during the combat but not enough to be frustrating and it’s telegraphed enough (with enough DM advice) to make running it almost certainly a major hoot.<\/p>\n

There are two or three things here though that mar the overall attempt. The first is the lack of \u2026 theming? This is the temple of the Fates and yet there\u2019s really only one adventure element, a stairway, that brings out that theming. \u201cNot you explore the underwater volcano lair of Abraxis, Terror from the 10th planet!!!\u201d \u201cUh \u2026 Abraxian 10th planet underwater architecture looks a whole lot like a 10×10 grey dungeon corridors \u2026\u201d I might say that it\u2019s an overall appeal to the mundane rather than to the fantastic. This would extend to several (most?) of the encounters. Snow apes throw rocks at you from above. Devilkin swarm you and pick your pockets. There\u2019s an ice bridge where two dudes attack you. I generally summarize a lot in my reviews, but in this case I\u2019m not doing it as much as I usually do. For these \u201cmundane\u201d encounters there\u2019s really not much more than what I\u2019ve described to you. I\u2019m not asking for each encounter to be a stand-alone set piece. But if you take the time to include something then you should take the time to make it awesome, for whatever definition of awesome is appropriate to the encounter. Never in my life do I ever want to hear \u201cSometimes you just have to fight a couple of kobolds.\u201d No! reject! Reject! REJECT! I never want to see any sign of that, especially in a DCC adventure.<\/p>\n

These .5 adventures from Goodman seem of lower quality than the others. I don\u2019t know why. It almost seems like they made a single writing pass through the adventure and then sent it off to the printers. The \u201cawesome it up\u201d pass doesn\u2019t seem to have been made. Maybe these are intro adventures? If so then this is a critical error. Introductory adventures should be THE MOST awesome of your published material. Those are the ones that will get the most exposure and introduce the most new players\/markets to you, aren\u2019t they?<\/p>\n

Some nice things in this to steal and overall of much better quality than the vast majority of adventures. I\u2019m a harsh critic and some of these \u201calmost\u201d adventures get a raw deal from me.<\/p>\n

This is available on DriveThru.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/134982\/Dungeon-Crawl-Classics-805-Glipkerios-Gambit?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jobe Bittman Goodman Games DCC RPG Level 2 Atop the highest spire of Mount Tyche, your patron\u2019s temple is under attack. A demonic miasma rolls down the frost-blasted peaks leaving a vile stench and foul magics in its wake. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2587,"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-5172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/805.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5172","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=5172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5640,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5172\/revisions\/5640"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}