{"id":6450,"date":"2020-01-11T07:17:00","date_gmt":"2020-01-11T12:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6450"},"modified":"2020-01-08T09:40:33","modified_gmt":"2020-01-08T14:40:33","slug":"5e-ddal-eb-01-the-night-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6450","title":{"rendered":"(5e) DDAL-EB-01 The Night Land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
By Shawn Merwin\nSelf-published\n5e\nLevel 1<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The brokers of Salvation pay good coin for artifacts scavenged from the haunted battlefields of the Mournland. In this nest of cutthroats, daring explorers gather to carve their destinies from the ruins of Cyre. They\u2019ll need all the help they can get: it\u2019s no secret that most scavengers don\u2019t survive their first expedition in the Gray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 29 page adventure is a collection of three short \u201cone encounter\u201d adventures in sixteen pages. Set in a kind of post-apocalyptic \u201cBartertown\u201d\/salvage-town bordertown, it has you making trips in to a Forbidden Zone to do short missions. Nice concepts with the whole thing, but the actual implementation is boring. There\u2019s little continuity and the \u201ccreative\u201d part of evocative writing is missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, evidently I\u2019m an asshole. All this time I\u2019ve thought of Eberron as a techno- fantasy setting, kind of RenFaire stuff, which has absolutely no appeal to me at all.  Magic railroads and Sphere of Annihilation toilets and the like. But this adventure seems to imply NOT. This is a kind of post-apocalyptic people living in Bartertown kind of vibe going on, or tries to anyway. A less gonzo Rifts or a Gamma World with some magic tossed in? Fuck yeah I\u2019m in! Maybe it\u2019s just this setting and I\u2019ll gouge my eyes out later when magic Zeppelin races appear. Anyway, there\u2019s this underlying vibe of a barely there town and people salvaging things from The Forbidden Zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A cloud bank straight out Fury Road, a little ways off from town. Screaming faces and buildings collapsing sometimes appear in the fog. Fuck Yeah! That\u2019s what I want to see! Talk about a transition to the mythic underworld! The description for the threshold is pretty good and gives this great sense of impending danger and YOU ARE ELSEWHERE NOW. The whole town vibe is enhanced by a little newspaper handout with some decently Orwellian writing that again adds to the mood. \u201cRemember: Sheriff is watching. So keep your troubles outside the outpost.\u201d Orwellian inside but a free for all outside! I\u2019m in! And the newspaper announcing 70% of people who go in don\u2019t come back out? Uh huh uh huh. I\u2019m in LUUUUUUV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Substantial information is conveyed through bullets, with what you can learn from NPC\u2019s being the primary usage of them. Bolding and section headings, indents and a summary table are all present. And, there\u2019s job board handouts in addition to the newspaper. Very nice. And there\u2019s this little NPC, the leader of a fellow salvage gang, with a great little table of how they know you\/how you\u2019re connected to you. \u201cSaved from kneecapping\u201d and the like; the table is full of flavour!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the entire fucking thing is actually implemented lame as all fuck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That NPC reference table? Full of the wrong things. Instead of it being a table that helps you run the NPC\u2019s it\u2019s more a writers reference. \u201cChaotic Good Human Female Artificer.\u201d Great. How about quirks? Goals? A train? Something to help me actually run the NPC? No. For that you need to reference the text and hope that the designer put in a little offset box for that NPC. The table is ineffectual for its intended purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The three \u201cmissions\u201d come from the job board in a tavern. There\u2019s really nothing tying the three together at all \u2026 which may be ok, I think, if it\u2019s serving as an introduction to the town and the salvage lifestyle. But then THAT becomes the theming and tie to hold them together, and it\u2019s just not there. It feels like three changes of scenery rather than \u201cmy life as a salvage worker on the edge.\u201d And that salvage board \u2026 a centerpiece of the adventure and the entire town built around salvage? A boring ass bulletin board in a tavern. No mementoes or shrines to the fallen salvagers, no rituals, nothing. This was a SUBSTANTIAL miss in adding to the \u201cSalvage Life 4EVAR\u201d thing that should be going on in this adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the writing it boring. A ghost train comes across as boring. The writing is just not evocative at all. Now, we should all know by now that I\u2019m NOT looking for a lot of text, but I expect the text that IS present it be interesting and describe the scene\/thing in a way that makes it comes alive. \u201cThe air around you suddenly fills with cracking, ringing noises. Some of the larger black glass shards twitch and fragment, reforming into lizard- like beasts with maws of razor-sharp glass teeth.\u201d B O R I N G. Nice idea, ozone, crackling, maws of obsidian glass \u2026 but a \u201clizard like creature\u201d is boring, as is anything with the fucking word \u201cSuddenly.\u201d This is poor writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
More than that though .. The Mournland, inside the fog cloud, is boring. The fog is a barrier. No dust storms. No 70% death rate. No littered landscape. Just more featureless plains. And no wanderers. No hint of danger. I was excited for this shit! \u201cIn the morning of the second day of travel \u2026\u201d It\u2019s not even the slow burn of Stalker or Annihilation. Just nothing. No text to speak of and what there is \u201cdecrepit wood buildings.\u201d  The whole place comes off as dumb and boring. Just Another Shitty Lame Ass Boring Generic D&D Setting. Go somewhere, have an encounter, mission over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It tries. With that Mournland text. With a sculpture made out of corpses. But it fails. It feels thrown together and as if not much work in to it beyond a draft. Repetition of text, and not in a Salome way but in a Didn\u2019t Think About It way. Some read-aloud gets long. There\u2019s a section in the beginning, in which bar patrons gets hushed when an old salvager gets on top of a table to speak \u2026 a load of nonsense. I\u2019d guess it has to do with the overall plot that will eventually show up in these, but it telegraphed HORRIBLY. Everyone should recognize \u201cyeah, this is the evil cult thing we\u2019ll eventually have to stop,\u201d and, at the same time, it would have been MUCH more effective if introduced as a part of one of the other missions (NO! NOT A FUCKIGN DIARY!) or somehow his exposition had an impact. The hushed voices of the rowdy scavvers? Great! Just anti-climactic as fuck. \u201cOh, it\u2019s a fucking monologue. Great.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Missed opportunities include a little construct Dog, which should have been called Timmy, or had a Timmy\/well codeword\/connotation\/theming. And a goblin turned to stone with a ghost train hurtling down on her NEEDS to be her caught in the train tracks. No, I don\u2019t know how it works \u2026 that\u2019s the designers job. But fuck me if rescuing people from train tracks isn\u2019t iconic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then again that scene shows the problems. The train arrives in five rounds to crush the little girl. How far away are you? Who the fuck knows, we\u2019re never told. And this sort of Missing Information thing, critical information for a scene, is not  uncommon. The overall impact is that the 70% of people who die in the Mournlands do so of boredom. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s so full of promise, you can see it in the edge. But the actual implementation, the writing, the \u201cnow the D&D encounter starts\u201d format \u2026 it\u2019s kills the thing. It should be enhancing that half-glimped themes and vibes. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d tout my MFA in Creative Writing if I turned this out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at DmsGuild. The preview is four pages. The last page actually has something for you to look at. You can see a long\/useless read-aloud for the tavern and then the little gnomes speech \u2026 that has no impact on the adventure. Bad preview.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.dmsguild.com\/product\/296403\/EB01-The-Night-Land?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Shawn Merwin Self-published 5e Level 1 The brokers of Salvation pay good coin for artifacts scavenged from the haunted battlefields of the Mournland. In this nest of cutthroats, daring explorers gather to carve their destinies from the ruins of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,29,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5e","category-dungeons-dragons-adventure-review","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/oracle-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6450","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=6450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6451,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6450\/revisions\/6451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}