{"id":5183,"date":"2016-08-29T07:22:51","date_gmt":"2016-08-29T11:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=3190"},"modified":"2019-02-25T11:32:13","modified_gmt":"2019-02-25T16:32:13","slug":"the-mad-gods-jest-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5183","title":{"rendered":"The Mad God’s Jest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mgj\"<\/a>
\nBy Shane Ward
\n3 Toadstools Publishing
\nLabyrinth Lord
\nLevel 6<\/p>\n

Deep inside the mind of Captain Sherborne, he’s cracked. His dreams haunted by a Harlot. However nothing is what it seems. He wanders the world looking for brave souls to help him. Will you?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all a dream! Hahahaha! Just a dream! You can\u2019t die! Hahahaha! Shit like this gives me a headache. It\u2019s a 21-room cave complex full of bizarro encounters. There is a high point of two, but it\u2019s too far disconnected from reality for me to embrace.<\/p>\n

The hook is DM fiat: Captain Whoever has his crew kidnap you. He gives you a map to some caves and hires you to go into them and recover a boot. I\u2019m pretty sure the boot isn\u2019t in the caves. It makes references, obliquely in several places but never explicitly, to the fact the captain accompanies you. \u201cIf he dies\u201d and \u201cwhen he makes it back out\u201d and so on. So it\u2019s also an escort mission. If the captain dies you get to restart the entire thing, Groundhog Day style. How can this be? Because it\u2019s a dream.<\/p>\n

Consequence free adventuring. If you die you just wake up, XP intact. I hate this shit. It turns everything into Lacuna, or some co-op storytelling game. \u201cMonkeys fly out of my butt because I\u2019m an alien from Xrdoz-10.\u201d This is the cheapest and lamest of all pretexts.
\nOh, I get it. All D&D is a pretext. It\u2019s just an excuse to sit around the table and have a good time with your friends. From that perspective, who really cares? The game is as serious as you take it. And yet \u2026 there\u2019s some kind of suspension of disbelief that comes into play. I\u2019m been arguing playstyles recently with designers who insist Different Strokes for Different Folks, so this is in the front of my brain currently. When anything is possible in D&D it turns it into Lacuna, it turns it into a storytelling game. And yet, w\u2019ve chosen D&D for a reason. We\u2019ve selected it because it has constraints and it has a DM. When those constraints are removed in a blatant way, as is done in this adventure, it\u2019s a slap in the face. No, you\u2019re not playing the game you signed up for. You\u2019re playing this new thing. When the characters are kidnapped via DM Fiat it points out the man behind the curtain. When it goes all Groundhog Day it points out the man behind the curtain. When you wake from the dream after dying it points out the man behind the curtain. I don\u2019t think this is positive, most of the time. Beer, pretzels, and the right mindset? Maybe. But that\u2019s essentially justifying the existence of linear tournament modules. Yeah, they MAY have a place in a certain niche \u2026 but couldn’t you just try a bit harder and do something better that doesn\u2019t have those limitations instead of just slapping on some pretext to justify the decisions made?<\/p>\n

The encounters, proper, all have two notable features. First, they are the very definition of Funhouse. Second, they are aggressively exhibit based. The first is pretty easily described. There\u2019s a room with a hot tub. There\u2019s a room inside an ice block with a giant cooking the captains brother over a pit\/spit\/fire. There\u2019s a torture chamber where cultists go to torture themselves. A pool of lava room. A jungle room. A mushroom room. It\u2019s just a series of encounters with nothing to interconnect them except \u201cit\u2019s ostensibly a cave complex.\u201d
\nSecondly the encounters are all aggressively exhibit based. What I mean by this is that they are all things you SEE. There are no hints of reaction. There are no defaults in the encounters. And I saw \u201caggressively\u201d because I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever seen a dungeon. The Pool of Lava room is a good example of this: \u201cThere is a large pool of lava in the centre of this room, the pool is manmade (amazingly enough the lava has not eaten thru the floor! into the tunnel below). The room contains 4 madness cultists that are being fed strange colored soup. A manticore feeds them, and yells when they spit out the food.do this before so thoroughly.\u201d That\u2019s it! You get the manticore stats and a list of treasure. It\u2019s like a little Vine movie playing in front of you. It ignores the fact that the dungeon exists for it to be experienced BY THE CHARACTERS. The complete lack of reactions is more than a little off putting, so I hope you\u2019ve got your reaction roll table on your DM screen.<\/p>\n

This one is weird. And not in a good way. Not in a bad way either, but it\u2019s going to REALLY take the right mindset to make something of it.<\/p>\n

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

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/168802\/The-Mad-Gods-Jest?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Shane Ward 3 Toadstools Publishing Labyrinth Lord Level 6 Deep inside the mind of Captain Sherborne, he’s cracked. His dreams haunted by a Harlot. However nothing is what it seems. He wanders the world looking for brave souls to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3188,"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-5183","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\/mgj.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183","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=5183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5747,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions\/5747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}