{"id":6264,"date":"2019-10-16T07:15:33","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T11:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6264"},"modified":"2019-10-06T10:16:39","modified_gmt":"2019-10-06T14:16:39","slug":"qf3-malady-of-kings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6264","title":{"rendered":"QF3 – Malady of Kings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Sean Smith\nSelf Published\nQuarrel & Fable<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A harried messenger collapses in the town square with news that the king at Firefen has succumbed to a demonic parasite.  And where the king is ill, the land is ill.  Will YOU rid the kingdom of this evil before the disease spreads?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This nine digest page adventure details a road journey from a town to the home of the king, through a demon-infested land. Nice little ideas are abstracted to a degree that they are no longer useful. It\u2019s too short for what it\u2019s trying to pack in, falling somewhere in between the abstracted nature of a hexcrawl encounter and the details of a regular encounter. It doesn\u2019t do either any justice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I accidentally bought this. All I saw was \u201cOSR\u201d and not \u201cother OSR systems\u201d on DriveThru. In my own defense, I tend to think of the OSR label as \u201ccompatible with B\/X\u201d \u2026 and many light systems are essentially NOT. They bear more resemblance to indie RPG\u2019s then to B\/X. System aside, the adventure bears the marks of being essentially a linear set of encounters, something we should all be familiar with from more modern versions of D&D play styles where they eschew the game element and concentrate on the experience. So I\u2019m reviewing it anyway. Such as it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s Meh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s organized in a kind of time-based manner. First you encounter this and then you encounter this. It\u2019s not really laid out in a keyed format. There are some headings for different regions\/areas, but then it just runs through the \u201cfirst this and then this\u201d thing. It\u2019s still relatively easy to follow though, with paragraphs being clearly laid out and information contained within, even without area headings, blding, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The general format might be \u201cfirst this little things happens and then you\u2019re in this big situation.\u201d First you meet a bandit on the road, jumping out of a copse of trees. \u201cYour lupins or your life\u201d he shouts. That\u2019s your encounter. That\u2019s followed up with about four sentences, in the next paragraph, describing a small starving village, the abbey in it that has closed its doors, they sell salt, and the villagers wants to eat an albino cock and black chicks running around. So, a LARGE situation. Farmers jump out to attack \u2026 and then run away. Small encounter. You happen to a friendly well-fed village of kind people \u2026 who are cannibals. Big Encounter. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of these are, essentially, underdescribed. The bandit and farmers are just people that jump out. There\u2019s nothing to them, no soul. They need more than once sentence, maybe two, to bring the encounter to life. To give it some character and flavour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bigger town\/village encounters are essentially the same. It attempts to describe these huge situations but it doesn\u2019t give enough detail. It turns in to an abstracted idea of an encounter, like one of those \u201cfifty ideas for fucked up villages\u201d garbage supplements on DriveThru. Here\u2019s your three sentences to describe your new campaign world. Run it! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not arguing for things to be infinitely explained, or rigid beyond use. But a fun extra details, an NPC or two, a roving gang, some farmer details, SOMETHING to bring the place to life and help spark the DM. It\u2019s as if it were \u201can exciting new campaign supplement!\u201d and it only contained the words \u201cthe dark lord or Mordor is trying to take over the world.\u201d Well, ok, sure, but there\u2019s lots of possible shit in that. Maybe you could give me just a little bit more to work with? Otherwise this is just a roll on some random tables that\u2019s put down on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The wanderers are a great example of this. A short wandering monster table. Farm bandits. Slug fiends. Demon friar. That\u2019s it, just a list. But each one can only be used once, it tells us. Well then why the fuck didn\u2019t you include just a little more information about a vignette? The friar forcefully converting a flock through demonic executions, or the farmers, idk, doing a wicker man or something? It\u2019s all so abstracted that it might as well be Wilderlands. Although, come to think of it, Wilderlands had MORE detail and was organized better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It does, at times, engage in a decent word or two. Fleeing across a river hiding in the \u201clong reeds.\u201d Long reeds in a river, fleeing, hiding in them, that\u2019s great imagery and gives me something. I want more of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, while I\u2019m not an expert in this system, I think combat is unusually deadly and the idea is to come at things sideways? But then why all of the forced combats in this with many encounters being a \u201cthey jump out an attack!\u201d type? Maybe I don\u2019t understand the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Weirdly abstracted. There are two roads between your start and finish, and you\u2019re only ever gonna encounter stuff on one ,meaning half the book is wasted. Quantum Ogre don\u2019t matter here, it\u2019s bad design in a non-exploratory railroad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $6 at DriveThru. Of course, there\u2019s no fucking preview. $6 for nine pages is pushing things. Quality deserves payment. But the reality of the situation means you\u2019re just getting fucked over for these high price\/low page count things \u2026 that don\u2019t have a fuck preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/284980\/QF3–Malady-of-the-Moor-King?1892600 <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Sean Smith Self Published Quarrel & Fable A harried messenger collapses in the town square with news that the king at Firefen has succumbed to a demonic parasite.  And where the king is ill, the land is ill. Will … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6263,"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-6264","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\/10\/moorking.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6264","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=6264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6265,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6264\/revisions\/6265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}