{"id":5182,"date":"2016-08-22T07:14:30","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T11:14:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3186"},"modified":"2019-02-25T11:27:34","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:27:34","slug":"escape-from-gronchos-lair-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5182","title":{"rendered":"Escape from Groncho’s Lair"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"groncho\"<\/a>
\nBy Stuart P. Keating<\/span>
\nDioxin Dump LLC<\/span>
\nOSR<\/span>
\n<\/span>Levels 1-2<\/span><\/p>\n

Most adventures involve getting to the absolute bottom of a dungeon, blithely swinging hammers and swords through warriors and civilians, pillaging and looting along the way.<\/span>This adventure inverts the traditional model: The adventurers easily run through a surprisingly unpopulated goblin warren and then get struck with amnesia at the very bottom. They know their identities, skills and class abilities but have no idea what\u2019s happened over the past several days.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a 16 page, thirty room reverse dungeon crawl in goblin caves. You start at the bottom and make your way out, having suffered from limited short-term amnesia. IE: you can remember who you are, you just can\u2019t remember your dungeon crawl to this point. It\u2019s got a good mix of encounter types and a decent variety of topical dungeoncrawl humor that everyone should get a kick out of. It can be hit or miss at time with the descriptions, and the font selections make readability suffer A LOT. I like it, but I dread actually trying to use it, because of the readability issues, if you get what I mean.<\/p>\n

The party starts out in one of the last rooms. In a room with a chest, a dead person, fried & still smoking, laying in front of a chest. Everyone knows who they are, but the memory of the last couple of hours no longer exists in their minds, evidently the results of the trapped chest. It\u2019s a nice little in medias res start to the adventure that glosses over all of the rumors, rewards, backstory, why we adventure together, and everything else. You\u2019re in the dungeon. Go!<\/p>\n

The encounters here are a decent variety. There are a few straight up combats and more than a few more with cowering goblins or even goblins who are willing to talk and\/or goblins who are willing to join up with you. The variety here is much more than in the usual dungeoncrawl and gives it that factions feel and adds that element of negotiation and diplomacy that most non-faction dungeons lack. To compliment this faction play is a decent variety of weirdness, things to screw around with, traps, and even some little set-piece like encounters \u2026 usually something to do with terrified goblins trying to protect and respond to the \u201cReavers\u201d that have invaded. All the while the party is confronted with the results of of the typical dungeoncrawl: bodies, death, destruction, well-looted rooms, cowering women & children. It adds a nice touch of lightheartedness without going for over the top humor. A statue to fuck with, a dead dwarf body that could be a boon or bane. Nice little touches. There\u2019s enough variety that things don\u2019t get monotonous in one direction (combat) or the other (another empty room.) It\u2019s really a positive example of design from that standpoint. (And cheap, so easy to check out.)<\/p>\n

The primary negative is that the thing is impossible to read. I don\u2019t bitch much about this sort of thing, but this is a bad bad example. It\u2019s some combination of the font size, margins, font weight, mixture of italics and standards text \u2026 \u00a0the whole thing just combines to wash all together in a head dizzying spin. I know this is petty, but if it gives me a headache to read and it\u2019s hard to find things in the text then it\u2019s hard to use at the table. It can also be \u2026 mechanically? lengthy at times. The descriptions, proper, don\u2019t seem to run on too much and are at times quite short. This contrasts to the DM notes which can be long because of the mechanics presented. Mechanics? DM notes? I\u2019m not sure what to call it. Some rooms can be a column long because of this. Further, some details are buried in this DM text, forcing you to be familiar or pick out the text at a glance \u2026 which is hard to do because it\u2019s buried further down and\/or the font\/italics\/text issues.
\nThere\u2019s also this tendency to abstract. Here the entry for room 21, the Pantry: \u201cSuprmeley foul food closet. No real treasure to speak of, unless you’re into rotting carcasses and garbage. Roll on the encounter table.\u201d That\u2019s not terrible and you get the idea, but it\u2019s also abstracted. It tells you it is grody (a conclusion) instead of describing it and letting you make the determination. (Although \u00a0\u201cif you\u2019re into rotting carcasses and garbage\u201d is pretty close, it\u2019s still an abstraction.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also got some mechanical issues with descriptions. This is something that I\u2019ve only ever seen one or two other adventures do. There are critical details missing in places. The last encounter has the party leaving the cave complex and being confronted by the boss outside, with his giant boar, \u00a02 mercenaries, and a line of crossbowmen. How many crossbowmen? We\u2019re never told. Further, the encounter implies, later down in the description, that there may be captives outside in the mix also \u2026 but it\u2019s not very clear. Oh, and the treasure descriptions suck ass, just boring old mundane stuff.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s got a good design it just suffers from the ability to communicate that creativity to the DM in the most effective manner. This is something I\u2019d love to run and think everyone would have a great time \u2026 it would just be a pain to run from the existing text.<\/span><\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/117668\/Escape-from-Gronchos-Lair?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Stuart P. Keating Dioxin Dump LLC OSR Levels 1-2 Most adventures involve getting to the absolute bottom of a dungeon, blithely swinging hammers and swords through warriors and civilians, pillaging and looting along the way.This adventure inverts the traditional … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3185,"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-5182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/groncho.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182","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=5182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5745,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5182\/revisions\/5745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}