{"id":5941,"date":"2019-04-15T07:14:42","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T11:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5941"},"modified":"2019-04-13T08:52:52","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T12:52:52","slug":"5941","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=5941","title":{"rendered":"The Crypt of Baron Vraszek"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Kai Putz
Self-Published
LotFP
Levels 2-4<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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Once again, a quick reminder of the Patreon:\nhttps:\/\/www.patreon.com\/tenfootpole<\/a>\n\nAnd the Forum:\nhttp:\/\/www.tenfootpole.org\/forum\/index.php<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a place were a bitter vampire has holed up. He prepared for these crypts to be his lair and had the help of an accomplished warlock to secure the place. Many undead minions do his biding, and he is himself a force to be reckoned with.
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This seventeen page adventure describes a fourteen room tomb\/vampire lair in five pages, with the rest being supporting information. . More creepy than the Strahd adventures, it gets close to some decent historically accurate imagery. And it does this through an unfocused writing style. Classic highlighter fodder.
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Yeah, I know, no one cares about the fucking hooks. But _I_ care about the hooks. AT least to the extent that they give the DM a springboard. Most of the hooks, which take up a full page in total, are pretty standard \u201cGet hired by someone\u201d hooks with little to recommend them. One, though, the first, is different. You\u2019re hired to deliver a merchant’s daughter, riding in a wagon, to a cloister, where she is to spend the rest of her life. You hit \u201cthe weird village where people hang out garlic and fortify themselves at night\u201d and, sure enough, she goes missing. You need a letter from the Mother Prior, telling the merchant that the girl arrived, in order to get paid. This had got a good Carpathian\/middle-ages thing going on, from the escort\/girl\/cloister thing (and some implication of roleplay with her\/plight) to the letter thing. Leveraging all of those villages in Vampire & Werewolf movies helps orient the DM as well. It\u2019s a good example of getting just a LITTLE specific, in certain areas, to then allow the DM to riff and go from there.  
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The map tries to be helpful. It notes a collapsed area, as well as an area where the parties light will attract attention from a nearby monster room. It\u2019s going for a creepier theme than most tombs\/undead adventures, and it leverages the art to decent effect. \u201cThe Hungry Dead\u201d are more zombie like and there\u2019s some decent art of rotting corpses, animated, that helps cement that vibe. Likewise there\u2019s some skeleton guards that the art depicts in heavy cloaks, arrows sticking out. Not exactly Harryhousen skeletons, but a more formidable vibe comes from these dudes, and the art reflects that.  A really good job in tying the art to generate genre vibe, something unusual. 
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There\u2019s some interesting magic items as well, like a heathen charm to \u201cprotect the soul using the journey to the afterlife\u201d. It makes you the LAST person they choose to attack, which is a interesting little effect. AT the expense of 10% more XP to level. Ouch! But can also destroy undead in a funerary rite\/place in mouth fashion. It suffers a bit from the description: \u201can intricate silver amulet on a tiny chain.\u201d  The appeal to the real-world funerary rites, mouth amulets, and heathen fetishes is quite evocative. The description could use a word or two on design. Abstract wire? Intricate implies there\u2019s something going on, but all we know is \u201camulet.\u201d This sort of thing is not an isolated occurrence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can flog this out in to the general text as well. There\u2019s a great vibe going on. The tomb of an old rural Carpathian? Absolutely! Battle murals with a knight in armor, christian imagery, it all comes together to paint an excellent picture of an old world vampire\/knight surround by a christian mythos. 
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But man it makes you fight to get at it. Long sections of small italics have TERRIBLE readability. The room text is rich \u2026 and padded the fuck out. \u201cThe sourthern wall contains a secret door (to room 5)\u201d [Yes, we know this form the map.] \u201cthat will automatically be found by those that inspect it (due to the wide gaps around it)\u201d Nice \u201cwide gaps\u201d, but there\u2019s a better way to get at this than the cumbersome first clause. \u201cWhen enough force is applied, it will swing in to the corridor behind it.\u201d Which doesn\u2019t really matter in a meaningful way to the adventure at hand. It opens. 
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Another example: \u201cA Magic-User may salvage some of the present stuff for his or her own laboratory. For this purpose (and only this one), items with a total value of 3d6 x50sp may be looted. Every 5+ rolled equals one additional item slot that will be occupied by this loot. If not the whole of \u201cthe useful stuff\u201d is taken along, it will not be useful to the Magic- User at all.\u201d  It\u2019s long and cumbersome text, languidly taking it\u2019s time to get where it\u2019s going.
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The mural room I liked so much takes three paragraphs to describe. \u201cThe western wall of this angular room shows a mural of a battle scene. It is much more recent than any of the other murals, more simple and less impressive.\u201d That\u2019s all padding. But then it follows: \u201cThe scene depicts a knight surrounded by twelve enemy soldiers who are either dead, mortally wounded or desperate in their fight against the seemingly supreme lone knight. The sky is filled with dark clouds, and seven strange and cheerful cherubim with black wings fly above the scene. The knight is the only combatant depicted in full armor, his great helmet features goat horns and a long beard protrudes from under it.\u201d GREAT! And, is you WIS throw, the 12 soldiers are depictions of the apostles [called \u2018saints\u2019 by the author. They are a non-native english speaker, but do a great job. At least I think it should be apostles \u2026] while the cherubs are depictions of the seven deadly sins. Nice! While I\u2019m usually off put when adventures engages in non-gameable descriptions, creeping the fuck out of the players is an allowed activity, especially when you\u2019re foreshadowing the villain. 
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It\u2019s also got a problem with \u201cexplaining.\u201d Dude teams up with an evil necromancer warlock, which is used to explain manoy of the tomb effects\/objects\/reasons. A magic mouth triggers a zombie hoard. That sort of \u201ccause and effect using the rules\u201d stuff that turns D&D in to a magical rube goldberg creation. Bleech! Disembodied voice cackling? Great! Magic mouth initiated? Meh \u2026 WHich then triggers something else? Bleech! 
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Our vampire, proper, is really \u201cstats as a level 5 elf with these spells \u2026\u201d and the ability to teleport. I THOUGHT when looking at the level limit that the 2-3 range, with a vampire, was fucking nuts. But \u201cstats as L5 elf\u201d with a few doilies like \u201ccan drink blood\u201d and \u201ctakes damage from sunlight\u201d, etc, actually works out ok. I might quibble it\u2019s \u201cless fantastic\u201d, but it solves the stat problem well enough.
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So, a kind of quite, historical tomb raid in the historical medieval Capathains, is a good way to vibe on this one. Decent imagery, for a fake \u201chistorically accurate\u201d vibe without it slipping in to simulationist territory. It keeps the LotFP genre\/vibe well, without engaging in the torture porn that it can sometimes slip in to. I\u2019m not sure I would run it without a highlighter \u2026 but your mileage may vary.
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This is on DriveThru for $4. The preview is five pages. Page four, at the end, gets you the Convent hook, otherwise there\u2019s nothing much of note in the preview and isn\u2019t do a good job at all of showing you the room encounters\/the adventure you are actually purchasing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/265243\/Gregorius21778-The-Crypt-of-Baron-Vraszek?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Kai PutzSelf-PublishedLotFPLevels 2-4 Once again, a quick reminder of the Patreon: https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/tenfootpole And the Forum: http:\/\/www.tenfootpole.org\/forum\/index.php This is a place were a bitter vampire has holed up. He prepared for these crypts to be his lair and had the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5940,"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-5941","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\/04\/cryptbaron.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941","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=5941"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5944,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5941\/revisions\/5944"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}