{"id":6503,"date":"2020-02-10T07:25:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-10T12:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6503"},"modified":"2020-02-03T09:27:06","modified_gmt":"2020-02-03T14:27:06","slug":"where-theres-a-will-osr-adventure-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6503","title":{"rendered":"Where There’s a Will, OSR Adventure Review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Jacob W. Michaels\nRaging Swan Press\nOSR\nLevel ... ?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Standing on a dingy side street in Low City the Scythe has a reputation as a place for hard drinking and its entertainers. Nights at the Scythe are rarely boring\u2014particularly when the legendary halfling bard, Dricolen Nimblefinger, is playing<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ever get the feeling you\u2019ve been cheated?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why yes, El Senor Lydon, Johnny Feelgood, Liz and I do THE THE FUCKING TIME. (Hmmm, looking this up, the lyric is \u201cJohnny Light on.\u201d I think it\u2019s better as \u201cJohnny Lydon.\u201d Kind of a Peaches \u201cMy Chrissy behind is fine all of the tie\u201d Chrissy Hynde kind of thing. That fucking earworm has been out of my head for a week now and I just put it back in. Great.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This thirteen page adventure details \u2026 I don\u2019t know \u2026 some vignettes in a town? It\u2019s supposed to be a roleplaying adventure, uh, I mean \u201ceventure\u201d, but in reality it\u2019s just some one of those hooks from a \u201c101  hooks for your party!\u201d products that\u2019s been expanded in to thirteen pages. Just the hook. JUST. THE. HOOK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Town adventures are one of my favorite things and this product line seems to be trying to do two things. First, no combat, andsecpnd  shit that happens in town during downtime, returning,etc. Not bad, especially the second. Shit going on in town helps cement the characters and who they are, with the players flexing themselves a bit and all them zany human relations. Plus, players seems to have more restraint that usual, not ALWAYS picking the \u201cstabby stabby\u201d solution. SO, good ideas! Town! Yeah!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And very VERY poorly executed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This isn\u2019t an adventure. It\u2019s not even an adventure outline. It is, I don\u2019t know, a hook? Imagine one of those \u201c100 hooks\u201d products and one line in it is \u201cIn town, get part of a map to a pirates treasure during a dead pirate captains wake.\u201d That\u2019s this adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re in town, somewhere. You hear bells ringing. A notorious pirate captain is dead. You go see his body strung up at a town gate and met some other pirate captains. You go to a bar and the reading of the will, along with other pirates, and a bunch of map pieces get tossed out. That\u2019s your adventure!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it\u2019s not even properly supported. There are a bunch of tables at the beginning to add local color to the town: rumors, street scenes, gossip and the like. They tend to be well done, although the street scene tables could be more oriented toward the pirate captain being dead instead of the usual \u201cbeggar with his bowl\u201d shit. But, that\u2019s the good part. It\u2019s full of things like \u201cthe pirate tell tall tales\u201d \u2026 without anything to get the DM started. It\u2019s critically important in these situations to give the DM something to work with. Not a novel, a few words, maybe one sentence. Just enough to get going. But this don\u2019t do that. And this happens repeatedly. There are these little two or three sentence paragraph that describe these HUGE scenes, like the stringing up and viewing of the body at the the gates. I finally figured out that these little things ARE the \u201cadventure.\u201d These two or three little sentences in their little scenes scattered around the test are what is supposed to occupy the players and their characters. But it\u2019s unsupported. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It THINKS it\u2019s supporting them though. We get full write ups on six pirates including their history, and other details that mean little to the adventure. MAYBE, in an ongoing campaign, this kind of extra detail is worthwhile, and this IS meant to be a town thing, so, recurring. And there IS a decadent dive bar full of twisty passages, etc, that is more a \u201ccity bar location fluff\u201d than \u201cadventure location.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what you\u2019ve got here is a fluff product that says it\u2019s an adventure and is TRYING to be an adventure but succeeds in only being fluff. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I like fluff. Inspiration is good. But it\u2019s not an adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is just an outline. And an outline of a hook, at that, that lasts thirteen pages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
*bleech*<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $3.50 at DriveThru. To its credit, the preview shows you the entire product. CHeck out page seven of the preview\/five of the book. This is the \u201cTraitors Gate\u201d hanging scene. That column of text is all you get (!) to run it. A column should be more than enough \u2026 but this column tells you nothing pertinent to running this as a scene\/encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/300608\/Where-Theres-a-Will-OSR?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jacob W. Michaels Raging Swan Press OSR Level … ? Standing on a dingy side street in Low City the Scythe has a reputation as a place for hard drinking and its entertainers. Nights at the Scythe are rarely … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","category-the-worst-evar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/will.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6503","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=6503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6505,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6503\/revisions\/6505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}