{"id":5425,"date":"2019-02-06T07:17:51","date_gmt":"2019-02-06T12:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5425"},"modified":"2019-02-03T13:20:03","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T18:20:03","slug":"the-judgement-of-rad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5425","title":{"rendered":"The Judgement of Rad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Emanuele Betti\nSelf-Published\nBasic D&D\nLevels 3-5<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Things not always go the way they are supposed to. It’s not uncommon that an adventure, especially in a long campaign, can be greatly derailed due to a player who has got no experience, does not think an action enough or just screws things up for the fun of it. Whenever this kind of things happen, the Master must find a way to fix the situation and give the characters a way out of their trouble, and a second chance to succeed.
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This eighteen page adventure details a twenty room dungeon and is to be used at some point in the game when your characters are jailed. Decent interactivity in the dungeon is marred by bad read-aloud and writing style issues. Good concept poorly executed.
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This is an english as a second language adventure, from the Italian I believe. There are some grammar and wording issues in it, but all of my commentary disregards this. The issues are not with the translation, I think.
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I have a soft spot for \u201cspecial use\u201d adventure. Use this adventure when someone dies, or use this one when someone is in jail, like this adventure. Yeah, there are some level variability issues, but I think the concepts they present are an interesting genre of adventure that is not well explored. You pull this one out when the party is in jail for a serious offense.
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The conceit is that there\u2019s a legal loophole: the party can submit themselves to the Judgement of Rad. The relatives of the victims get to set a quest and the party, given one light source and one normal weapon each, must complete the quest. If they succeed then Rad has clearly indicated that the parties motives were pure. If they fail, well, they were just gonna be killed anyway so no great loss. In this instance the relatives send the party down to a dungeon\/well that has a great jewel, to be obtained for the relatives, that will likely kill the party anyway, so a win-win for the kinfolk. 
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The dungeon proper has a cursed monster, with the (cursed) jewel in its chest that moves around in a preset course, it changing rooms when the party does, as a kind of monster hunt gimmick. It\u2019s a decent idea, and, maybe could have been supported a bit better by noting its path on the map instead of in text in the adventure. You know how I love to leverage a map to overload information for the DM. 
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The undead in the dungeon, previously killed by the monster\/jewel, try to rip the hearts out of characters and eat it when they down a party member, since they had their own hearts done so. That\u2019s a good detail. Breaking up the \u201ci hit you\/you hit me\u201d stuff in D&D is almost always a good thing and I wish more adventures would give their monsters a little more character.
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The rooms, proper, have some decent interactivity. There\u2019s a crude shrine that will summon a ghost if you pray at it. Some toads hide under a bridge, and there\u2019s a dead body under the water you can dive for \u2026 with hidden loot! I don\u2019t talk about it much, but this sort of interactivity is, I think, what makes a good D&D adventure good. The play athe table stuff and the evocative environments are key components that, for me, must each not suck too much. If they are ok, or good, then the D&D adventure can go forward. But the interactivity of the adventure is what\u2019s going to turn a middling adventure in to a great one, providing elements for the party to interact with.
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This adventure pays little attention to those first two points. There are multiple points in the adventure with page long read-alouds. That\u2019s hard to handle. Room that say things like \u201cThe room seems empty\u201d in the read aloud \u2026 and then the DM notes tells us it\u2019s empty. Things should never SEEM or APPEAR TO BE, they just are. Those weasel words just pad out an adventure. In places the read-aloud jumps the gun. It tells you almost everything you need to know about the room. The body is dried out, its missing its heart, etc, etc. The read aloud, if used, should be the initial impression. When the players go examine the thing THEN the DM can follow up with \u201cthe body is dried out\u201d or \u201cthe heart is missing.\u201d This back and forth between the party and the DM is a critical part of the D&D experience and when you put everything in the read-aloud you negate that core experience. Let the players DO something. Again, interactivity, back and forth between the players and the DM. 
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The entire preamble is about the prison and justice system. This is mostly specific to Galantri and is the usual \u201cheld in lead lined cells\u201d sort of thing. Just removing it all would have been better. It also adds two other prisoners to the party \u2026 for seemingly no reason. I thought they would betray the party, but, no, in a refreshing change of pace they are just NPC\u2019s. I have NO idea why they are there \u2026 although I do admit a couple of desperate prisoners trying to glomp on to the parties potential release is a nice effect. They just need a little more personality. 
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The entire writing style could use more whitespace formatting, bullets, etc, to make wading through the DM text easier. As is, it\u2019s just not worth it to me to wade through the text to get the adventure out of it.
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This is free on Pandius. And thanks to Dreams\/Mythic Fantasy for turning me on to the Pandius site!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
http:\/\/pandius.com\/AX01_The_Judgement_of_Rad.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Emanuele Betti Self-Published Basic D&D Levels 3-5 Things not always go the way they are supposed to. It’s not uncommon that an adventure, especially in a long campaign, can be greatly derailed due to a player who has got no … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5424,"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-5425","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\/02\/rad.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5425","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=5425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5426,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5425\/revisions\/5426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}