{"id":6012,"date":"2019-05-25T07:14:32","date_gmt":"2019-05-25T11:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6012"},"modified":"2020-02-21T12:48:59","modified_gmt":"2020-02-21T17:48:59","slug":"5e-masque-of-the-worms-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6012","title":{"rendered":"(5e) Masque of the Worms review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
By Kelsey Dionne\nThe Arcane library\n5e\nLevel 1<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Baronness Elenore Rennet has yet to return home from a masque at Moldavia Manor two nights ago. Can the players find her and uncover the hideous secrets brooding inside the grim estate of Count Moldavia?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This sixteen page adventure features a dungeon with six rooms described on four pages. It\u2019s formatted well and evocative. It\u2019s creepy. It\u2019s lacking a bit on the interactive side of the house, but it\u2019s not a museum tour by any definition. I\u2019m going to praise it and then nitpick, but it\u2019s a good adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take a deep breathe and stay with me here. I promise I know what I\u2019m doing. Ready? This adventure was written for streaming play, like Twitch. But it\u2019s good! I know, There have been others, and the cnic in me notes this is a new way to market. In this case the \u201cwritten for streaming play\u201d seems to mean the inclusion of a high-res digital player map. Oh, there\u2019s some mention made of being optimized for play and drama, but, since those are core elements that every adventure should do it\u2019s not really relevant to just twitch play. It\u2019s like saying \u201cwritten down on paper!\u201d or \u201cuses roman numbers!\u201d Well, yeah. Duh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, I get where the designer is coming from. While _I_ expect those things it\u2019s clear that most designers don\u2019t. They write dreck after dreck with shitty ass formatting that fights your attempt to use it in actual play. Even the major publishers, WOTC & Paizo, do this (so it\u2019s no wonder people imitate them.) \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this designer rages against the dying of the usability. Kelsey notes in one small list the changes she\u2019s using. Each encounter on one page. Bulleted lists and bolded keywords. A summary sheet of monster stats. Short room and area description. No paragraphs of droning text. Briefly explained non-encounter rooms. That\u2019s her words! \u201cNo paragraphs of droning text.\u201d I can\u2019t tell you how revitalizing it feels to see a 5e adventure from someone who gets it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it\u2019s all here. There\u2019s a summary sheet for the monsters, stats all in one place for ease of use at the table. The encounters\/rooms don\u2019t span more than a page. Smaller, less interesting rooms get less text. Other features, like a pond out back, are just mentioned in passing. We were told \u201cA dark pond next to the manor ripples in the chilly wind. Low clouds gather overhead.\u201d What more do you need to run this? Nothing. There\u2019s nothing there, why else would the designer devote more space to it? It\u2019s not driving the adventure, it is at best setting mood and creating space for tension, hence its inclusion in the first place. This is exactly what SHOULD happen in ANY adventure written for use that the table. (That, of course, being the dirty secret of the publishers. At. The. Table. Isn\u2019t their market.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The designer actually fucking says \u201cThis adventure is meant to be run at a glance\u201d It\u2019s the first fucking words of the \u201cA word to the GM\u201d section that includes that small list I mentioned earlier. This designer gets it. This is how EVERY adventure should be written. Eight years. Three adventure reviews a week. 90% utter garbage. And then this, a bright jewel buried under the 5e DriveThru cesspool. This adventure delivers on the promise of usability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know what else it does? It has more than throw-away hooks and consequences. The baron hired you. He can pardon you. Or make you a knight. Fuck yeah he can! Consequences? If you brough back the big bad alive then he makes you fucking constables with full on cloak pins and writs! Consequences for different decisions! Rewards that are meaningful and drive future roleplaying! And further hooks with the baron turning evil (and some more boring stuff about returning to manor.) Things that drive the world AROUND the party. The environment they adventure in. Rock. Solid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
NPC\u2019s get little offsets. A little one sentence-ish description, quirk, secret. Just enough to run them, easy to find in the text. One little girl is hiding on the grounds. Her secret is shes\u2019 afraid her mother got taken by The Willowman (a folk story) because she stole some cookie. Word for word, that\u2019s it. It\u2019s fucking great. It appeals to Scared Little Kid imagery. It appeals to folklore. It appeals to Slenderman and everything else in the woods. And it tell you every fucking thing you need know to run it by including \u201c(a folk story.)\u201d Note how specific it is. Not that she was a bad girl, but that she stole cookies. Not a monster, The Willowman. The designer doesn\u2019t include any more words because they don\u2019t need to. The specificity and evocative nature of it give us all we need to know to run it. \u00a0Bad girl is an abstraction. Stole cookies is specific. It didn\u2019t take any more words. It wasn\u2019t two paragraphs. Perfection Personified. At one point a body is holding not a wine bottle but a bottle Amontillado wine. Specificity for the win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bad guy is crazy and mutters to himself. Because the designer is actual good, she includes for us a page of his ravings. On a page, so you can print it out to have it always at hand instead of flipping through the book to find it. Bulleted. Little snippets, just about two-ish sentences each. Just enough to get the DM started out. Perfect. The designer recognized we needed this and they provided it. IE: what a designer is supposed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s cover the misses now. One of our hooks has a section heading of \u201cAppeal to discovery\u201d with a bolded section saying \u201cdark discovery.\u201d This is meaningless. The first hook has a section heading of \u201cAppeal to reward\u201d with knighthood, pardon, and 100gp all bolded. It\u2019s easy to tell what the reward is, it\u2019s bolded. The second section heading is Appeal to Heroism. That\u2019s pretty self-explanatory, the same old do-gooder stuff. The third id the Appeal to Discovery with the \u201cdark discovery\u201d bolded. This tells us nothing. Further, the normal text mentioned \u201cdark rumor and mystery\u201d \u2026 an abstraction that is NOT specific. Bolding some rumor, mystery, or something else would have been better here. Then the DM\u2019s eye would land on it, thanks to the bolding, instead of the generic \u201cdark discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The map is hard for me to read. The player map is 12 meg and done digitally, no doubt for streaming\/online play purposes. The DM map is the same map but with numbers, etc. It\u2019s busy for that purpose, the \u201cartistic\u201d quality makes the number not stand out well, and the detail of the map, meant to inspire, is instead hard to read if running off of paper. I\u2019m a big advocate of overloading the map with additional data, like a checkboard floor, then not needing to mention it in the text, but it can\u2019t be to detriment of the core room\/key usability. Larger numbers, in boxes, off to the side, with arrows pointing in, or something, maybe? It\u2019s busy in a way that\u2019s not useful to DM and even begins to detract. Not disastrous, but not doing what I think it wants to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The cover (which I love, and is the reason I bought it) implies a two-story manor. Some of text also implies that, with climbing up to open windows being mentioned. The map seems one story though and I can\u2019t figure out from the text if there is a second story or what. Either some text was left in or the text isn\u2019t clear. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bulleted format with bolding words well, along with the evocative descriptions, to give the DM what they need to run it a glance. But there are individual misses. The bulleted lists are not always formatted with the most obvious thing listed first. When the players open the door and the DM does their glance and summarizing for them then the most obvious and\/or important things should come first. You don\u2019t put 12 charging orcs at the bottom. In some cases the most obvious things are not first. A kitchen with bodies \u2026 do you mention a kitchen with dead bodies first or a kitchen with pots on the stove first? If the bodies are last then that implies they are hard to notice, I guess? But this was the results of a monster massacre, not a serial killer hiding bodies. Similarly, sometimes important things are left out. A common example of a room description is a library or kitchen. You don\u2019t need to describe what it looks like or its contents, we all know what that it. You only need to describe what important and\/or relevant to the adventure. There\u2019s a grey area though. Let\u2019s say the room is called a library, or study. Somewhere , deep in the text, it says there\u2019s a secret door behind a bookcase. (Because there should ALWAYS be one there. Likewise, waterfalls. Life should be wondrous and magical.) But \u2026 that\u2019s the first mention of a bookcase. As a DM you don\u2019t know to include a bookcase in the players description, it wasn\u2019t in the initial description. A bookcase in a library? Sure, but it relies on a kind of implicit understanding rather than a more explicit statement. If there\u2019s a bedroom, is it fair to put a secret door under a rug on the floor if I never mention there\u2019s a rug on the floor \u2026 until three paragraphs later? I like relying on universal knowledge and troped to add flavor \u2026 but I get nervous when something requires your knowledge. Of course, every medieval bedroom had rugs on the floor \u2026 A bookcase in the library isn\u2019t that egregious, but it still feels wrong to me. It should have been a mention higher up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More seriously, I think the chosen format of the adventure tends to run the text together and create a wall of text effect. The bullets and bolding work well, as to the offset boxes. The sections headings though don\u2019t do a great job separating areas, or maybe I mean getting that message across to the DM. I look at it and my eyes glaze over at the full page instead of focusing in on just the room, one of three on the page. I don\u2019t know if this is a layout\/style template provided by DMsguild or what, but it stinks. Nire indepts, better whitespace, the background image, idk. But I do know it doesn\u2019t work well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ending on an upnote, here\u2019s the first bullet point for a room. Great imagery. Draped. Fresh. And then red smears and handprints to juxtapose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2022 The hall is draped in fine white curtains; the walls are freshly painted white to match. Red smears and handprints dot the walls.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a good adventure. It easily hits the usability and evocative marks. Interactivity could be a little better, but it IS a horror adventure (I left unmentioned all of the Poe inspiration and references.) and that requires some room to build tension. Or I\u2019m making excuses for something I like, won over by the blatant explicit appeal to usability, this blogs core thesis for eight years now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $3 at DriveThru and easily worth that. The preview is fiv pages. The second preview page shows you the bullet\/GM list I mentioned. The third the hooks\/Appeal to Discovery section I mentioned. The third is the outside of the manor, with the little girl I mentioned, the pond throw-away, etc.The fourth some typical rooms. It\u2019s a good preview, showing you what you\u2019re actually getting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/251360\/Masque-of-the-Worms?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Kelsey Dionne The Arcane library 5e Level 1 Baronness Elenore Rennet has yet to return home from a masque at Moldavia Manor two nights ago. Can the players find her and uncover the hideous secrets brooding inside the grim … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,8,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5e","category-level-1","category-reviews","category-the-best"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/masque-of-worms.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012","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=6012"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6013,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6012\/revisions\/6013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}