{"id":6501,"date":"2020-02-08T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6501"},"modified":"2020-01-31T09:53:34","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T14:53:34","slug":"5e-the-song-of-the-sun-queens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6501","title":{"rendered":"(5e) The Song of the Sun Queens"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Shane Ivey\nArc Dream Publishing\n5e\nLevel 2<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The adventurers have journeyed uncounted miles to the vast plains of the Sunlands. A merchant in a faraway city told them that a great treasure rests in an ancient, cursed ruin called Juakufa. Where can the ruin be found? What is the nature of the supposed curse? What dangers lurk along the way? What are the Hyena Giants? And what were the mysterious Not Heres? The adventurers may learn all that from the people who abandoned Juakufa long ago. But first, they must survive being guests of the Sun Queens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An average rating of 4.5 on DriveThru?!? You just KNOW this one is going to be good!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This forty page adventure uses about twenty pages to describe, I don\u2019t know, six encounters? Maybe? The rest is appendix and pregens. It\u2019s got an Africa theme. It\u2019s a fucking mess of a mess, almost incoherent in how the adventure is laid out.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, Africa theme. They ride around zebras. No joke. They hunt ostriches. They all get together to sing and dance for your entertainment. Yes. That\u2019s right. No joke. Also, the friendly queen in the adventure wants to have sex with you since you\u2019re an exotic foreigner. And she claws your back \u201cduring an intimate moment.\u201d So, creepy African stereotypes and creepy sex shit. A perfect combo for your lighthearted D&D game. [For what it\u2019s worth the African guy here at work says that the African version of \u201cEveryone in Africa rides zebras\u201d is that the streets are made of gold in the US. Immediately upon residence you become rich.] Ok, weirdo shit out of the way, there\u2019s more than enough disgust with this adventure outside of these elements in order to call it bad, so, non-issue. [Oooo, what if it WAS a really well written adventure\/good adventure, but was FULL of creeper stuff? What then? \u201cThe Supreme Court does not deal with hypotheticals, Sir!\u201d]]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s some \u201cyou heard about a ruined city full of treasure\u201d thing, but the adventure starts with the party on the plains of Africa and in the court of these two queens. Kind of. It\u2019s hard to say. It\u2019s ala a mess. There\u2019s some description of the queens and their court and how they hate each other, and then an ostrich hunt. There\u2019s no real \u201cArrival\u201d or anything. It\u2019s just got background on the \u201cthe Sunlands\u201d and then launches in to \u201cThe Ostrich hunt\u201d where your on the plains with the queens and a bunch of africans hunting ostriches. It\u2019s jarring. There\u2019s no pretext at all. Just: hey! Here\u2019s scene one of the adventure and it\u2019s not an introduction!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another example of this sort of \u201cthings not said\u201d issue follows immediately. The hunt is attacked. Now, the party is out riding zebras catching ostriches or out int the field kind of \u201cbeating\u201d to drive them. The hunt is then attacked, the ostriches anyway, but some, I don\u2019t know, bird monster things. But the SCENE is an advisor running up to the queen saying that the hunt has been attacked by some Ghjkdfgdfhgdef. Whatever, some foreign word that the adventure keeps dropping the fuck in because it thinks that I, the DM, wants to keep track of this shit in my head. That shit is for the players, not the DM. Anyway, the dude is yelling that a Ghdkfghdk is attacking the hunt. The hunt that is RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.  That YOU ARE A PART OF. Do you now see it? The queen responds: \u201cis it a HKDJHDDD?\u201d No, bitch, it\u2019s right there, look! Does it look like a Hhdjfhjdkfd?\u201d Ok, so, not fair to the queen, it\u2019s not her fault, it\u2019s the designer and editors fault. It\u2019s their weird kind of disconnect where it almost seems like two different people worked on this and a third blindly put it together without marrying the two writers content. And the fucking adventure does this REPEATIDLY. It\u2019s a basic continuity issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Good news though, you do get XP is you are good-aligned and save someone in the hunt. Yeah for enforced morality by the DM! I guess if you want to play D&D then you\u2019ll play the fucking game the way this designer wants you to and FUCK YOU PLAYER if you deviate? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s more singing and dancing by the happy africans and then the queen sleeps with the exotic foreigners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You go visit a few villages. The locals sing and dance for you and tell you that you should leave all your gear with them since you are going to die anyway when you get to the ruined city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The adventure is linear, with  a brief walk up a mesa, getting attacked by gnolls. Err, giant hyena people. The maps all fucked up and doesn\u2019t show the encounters in the right place, one of them being off to the side. I guess no one cared to fix that mistake? Up top there\u2019s a fortress. I GUESS that\u2019s the ruined city you were looking for? It\u2019s never mentioned that it is? Or that it\u2019s your destination? I thought it was just a side trek, but no, it\u2019s the object of your quest. Inside is a ruined keep with about, I don\u2019t know, 25 rooms? Al are unnumbered, undescribed except for four. Three of those are just some dream sequence stuff where you hear a voice in your head and maybe a will o wisp does a hit and run. The last room has a devil in it for you to kill. Yeah! You freed the land from the curse and laid some ancestors to rest so they can be reincarnated as elephants! You get 120gp in coins and two objects worth a total of 65gp! I guess it was worth that ten day journey to get here. Plus that trip to Africa. How long was that boat journey here, and how much did it cost?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anticlimactic bullshit, that\u2019s what this is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This thing has a couple of decent ideas. A ruined land\/forbidden zone under a curse is a classic trope. WIll o\u2019the wisps representing the souls of dead people is nice, as is their nature of just being on the outskirts of the scene\/vision in the ruined fortress. All but one leave you alone, and he\u2019s a bad guy\/traitor, or, was, in real life.  A devil on a throne in the middle of te ruined fortress, sending you dream visions in your head, taunting you, while these dead people wisps float on the periphery, in a ruined and blasted Forbidden Zone? That\u2019s great! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s just terrible as implemented. It\u2019s linear, essentially an empty adventure, ham handed in its culture use, and an INCOHERENT MESS when it comes to scene transitions. And I haven\u2019t even mentioned it\u2019s reliance on the \u201clong text paragraph\u201d to relate information; perhaps the most common sin in all 5e adventures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at DriveThru. The preview is four pages long, but only shows about two pages of text. You do get to see the intro. Literally \u201cyou journeyed here and are at the court.\u201d And you get to see the transition to the ostrich hunt. So, VERY representative of the writing you\u2019ll get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/283114\/The-Song-of-the-Sun-Queens-5e?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Shane Ivey Arc Dream Publishing 5e Level 2 The adventurers have journeyed uncounted miles to the vast plains of the Sunlands. A merchant in a faraway city told them that a great treasure rests in an ancient, cursed ruin … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6500,"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-6501","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\/sunq.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6501","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=6501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6502,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6501\/revisions\/6502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}