{"id":6162,"date":"2019-08-14T07:13:57","date_gmt":"2019-08-14T11:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6162"},"modified":"2019-08-06T09:15:33","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T13:15:33","slug":"temple-of-the-harpies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6162","title":{"rendered":"Temple of the Harpies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Morten Greis\nAegis Studios\nB\/X\nLevels 2-3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A small child has been stolen from their parents, and the adventurers must find their way to the temple not just to gain riches and uncover secrets of the past, but also to save the child. During the exploration of the ruin, the characters may unleash an army of undead, whom they must contend with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This fourteen page adventure describes a ruined midwife temple with twelve rooms in about six pages. Decently organized, evocative writing, interactive \u2026 it manages it all before throwing in a bunch of room history to muddy things up. This needed a hard edit and it didn\u2019t get it. Still, it\u2019s ok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s this concept of unique monsters that is not usually touched upon. You\u2019re not fighting A troll, you\u2019re fighting THE troll. It elevates the monster back to mythic status. This adventure has a bit of that going on \u2026 you\u2019re fighting the first harpy. In the place where was cursed to be one: the temple to a midwife of which she was in charge. And she now steals babies to turn them in to harpies. That\u2019s a fucking story. It makes sense, and when things makes sense you can build on them. It\u2019s not followed through on much; there\u2019s a village nearby that knows there\u2019s a harpy there, so the whole mythic angle kind of falls off \u2026 but still, harpy stealing babies is great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The adventure pays attention to things the DM needs to know. The entry for \u201coutside the temple\u201d has a little section on what the party finds out if they scope out the ruins for awhile. Perfect! That\u2019s something parties do and the adventure gives you some advice on what they see. Two sentences. It also notes obvious ruins entrances. Again, perfect; that\u2019s the question people ask and the adventure helps the DM answer it. This sort of thing continues in the adventure. One room has notes about attracting the attention of creatures in the next room, with notes about how they react. It\u2019s got a cross-reference to point the DM at the relevant section. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not that adventures need a \u201cview from outside the ruins\u201d or notes on what the party sees if they stake the place out, or notes on reactions of nearby creatures. Not per se. What\u2019s notable is that IN THESE SITUATIONS IN THIS ADVENTURE the DM could use some extra guidance\/help and the designer recognized this and provided it. Yeah, these specific examples are going to fit a lot of adventures, but the general rule is the important one, not the specific one. The creatures that you could conceivable talk to, by parlay or torture, have a little sentence or two on what they know. Again, just what the haggard DM ordered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interactivity is good. Exploring, talking to ghosts, interrogating kobolds. And even, potentially, bargaining with the harpy for the most recently kidnapped baby. Secret doors need things to be opened. A room causes you to cry tears of holy water. You can swamp a statue baby for a real one. For only twelve rooms it\u2019s pretty good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the writing it pretty decent also. Leaves blown in to the corners of rooms. A stench of wet dirt. Low mists with gravestones peeking out. \u201cNone of the skeletons have any skulls.\u201d It\u2019s primarily from the read-aloud, which is kept short. It feels a little forced at times but I\u2019m going to attribute that to perhaps some second-language issues. (And to be clear, the english here is excellent, perhaps just missing some of the nuance that a REALLY talented writer could bring.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The read-aloud generally refers to things in the DM\u2019s text. The DM\u2019s text has paragraph breaks with holding to draw the eye to the appropriate section \u201cThe Items on the floor\u201d section has the details on \u2026 the items seen on the floor from the read-aloud. The writing does tend to be a bit long but the combination of the read-aloud referring to the bolded section that follow, with the use of whitespace makes it all pretty easy to find what you need in a hurry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is an O&O adventure, which I THINK is based off of B\/X. If it\u2019s gold=xp then the gold is a quite light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mentioned that the writing can be long. THis is generally because of the rooms history. \u201cOriginally this room was a blah blah blah\u201d says the paragraph that drones on for four sentences. I don\u2019t care why the roof is destroyed, be it time or siege. I don\u2019t care that visitors nevers went to this room, only midwives. This doesn\u2019t matter to the adventure. Or, rather, I only care about those details in as much as they relate to the party exploring. Crumbling roofs are great. How they got that way is useless trivia that gets in the way of quickly scanning the text to find what you need to run the room. Unless, of course, it has some bearing on the adventure. Some DIRECT bearing on the adventure. Not a \u201cmight be nice\u201d detail. Not a \u201cdepth and richness for the DM.\u201d There\u2019s a place for that, but not two cousins removed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Decent adventure which would be made better by the delete key. I don\u2019t see an editor listed, but, that probably wouldn\u2019t have made a difference anyway, so oh well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $2 at DriveThru. The preview is only three pages. The last page shows you the \u201coutside\u201d text and the beginning of the first room. The read-aloud is not the bets in the adventure (it\u2019s one of the poorer examples), but the DM text and attention section are good examples of what\u2019s to be found deeper in. Another page of \u201creal\u201d text would have been appreciated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/280372\/Temple-of-the-Harpies?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Morten Greis Aegis Studios B\/X Levels 2-3 A small child has been stolen from their parents, and the adventurers must find their way to the temple not just to gain riches and uncover secrets of the past, but also … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-no-regerts","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/harpies.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162","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=6162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6163,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6162\/revisions\/6163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}