{"id":6196,"date":"2019-09-04T07:18:11","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T11:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6196"},"modified":"2019-08-27T09:29:10","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T13:29:10","slug":"darkland-moors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6196","title":{"rendered":"Darkland Moors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Jeff Dee\nUNIgames\n1e\nLevels 3-5<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A huge, monstrous presence rampages through the farms and villages of Darkland Moors, throwing the locals\u2019 formerly peaceful lives into turmoil. What manner of giant is responsible, where is it taking its captives, and what is their fate? To restore peace, our heroes must scour the misty Moors and track the beast to its lair!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This ten page adventure fits 21 encounters in to four pages. A hexcrawl in search of a marauding giant, it does a decent job with hex rules. The encounters are more of a setup for the DM to fill in with a writing style that is not always consistent in how it conveys information, especially where enemies are involved. I respect the hex crawl stuff and think the format for the hex crawl has possabilities, but the details need work to make it worth something to check out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a hex crawl, searching for a marauding giant in some fog-covered moors. Dee does a good job of summarizing some basic hexcrawl rules.  Movement is covered: 2 per day on foot or 4 by horse. Likewise he covers getting lost in a very simple manner, as well as basic \u201cwhat you can see in the next hex\u201d landmark details. Concise hexcrawl guidelines have always been lacking, IMO, but this is one of the best summaries of basic hex crawl rules I\u2019ve seen. It\u2019s not worth it just for this but it does show that Dee has pretty good understanding of how things are supposed to work, and the need to transfer that to the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The encounters are presented as general situations which the DM is then left to expand upon. Recall the 21 encounters in four pages? That includes several ruins and village\/towns. The ONLY way to do that is to present the general situation to the DM and let the DM fill in the details. There\u2019s nothing wrong with that, in fact it\u2019s the general manner of all hex crawls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The encounters, though, feel flat. The detail is, again, abstracted to a degree that it removes the life from the encounter. I think I can understand the why of this; you can\u2019t fill in the details of these largish locations and still have a decently-sized product. Some of the hexes would easily be their own adventures if expanded upon in this way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I would suggest, though, that there is another path. Rather than writing a very generalized and generic abstracted description the encounter\/situation could instead be imbued with brief bursts of color. \u201cA local farmer blinded the giant before being eaten.\u201d is one of the sentences. Better, I think, would be some local color for this farmer, his family, or something else. Picking out one thing per encounter, maybe the most significant part of the place, and adding\/changing the wording for some better adjectives and adverbs or more color. I\u2019m not arguing for a significant increase in word count but rather a better use of those words, targeting some aspect of the encounter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As always I\u2019m looking for something that inspires the DM while they are running the encounter. Something that the DM\u2019s own imagination can build upon and be leveraged by the designer to add more the encounter than what\u2019s written. In this adventure, in particular, the page count could be about the same with some trimming. The map and hex crawl rules note what can be seen from each hex \u2026 and then each encounter ALSO notes what can be seen from this hex. Doubling down on the information is quite necessary and the word count could have been used to add some color, some building blocks, to the actual encounters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writing also, at times, feels tacked on, especially where enemies are concerned. You\u2019ll get a paragraph description of a place and and then another paragraph description of enemies which can totally change the vibe and what\u2019s going on in the first paragraph. This happens multiple times but the first encounter is a good example. A ruined farmhouse, as if a mighty blow had been dealt to an upper corner. All valuables looted. Just some broken simple furniture inside. And then the next paragraph tells us how 11 large spiders live inside, it\u2019s got a web-festooned interior, and there\u2019s treasure. All of which kind of contradicts a bunch of info in that first paragraph. Or, at a minimum, the first paragraph totally leads you down one path when the second one yanks you back a different direction. It\u2019s almost as if they were written by different people who only knew \u201cruined farmhouse\u201d and one write an empty farmhouse and one wrote a monster farmhouse and an editor just slapped them together. There\u2019s no cohesiveness at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hex crawl summary is great. The terseness\/length of the situations is about right, I think. The descriptions though are too generic and too disjointed. It needs work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also note that this is listed as being for \u201cAdvanced rpg games.\u201d Man, T$R really did a number on the old employees. From the Eldritch ENterprises use of generic stats to the dancing around \u201c1e\u201d stuff. These people have WOUNDS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $2.50 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. Good news, it shows the hexcrawl summary rules! Bad news, it doesn\u2019t show you any of the encounters. A preview really needs to show you a few of the encounters so a potential purchaser can see what they are getting \u2026 or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/126811\/JD2-Darkland-Moors?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jeff Dee UNIgames 1e Levels 3-5 A huge, monstrous presence rampages through the farms and villages of Darkland Moors, throwing the locals\u2019 formerly peaceful lives into turmoil. What manner of giant is responsible, where is it taking its captives, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6195,"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-6196","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\/08\/darkland.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196","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=6196"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6197,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6196\/revisions\/6197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}