{"id":6609,"date":"2020-04-06T07:06:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-06T11:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6609"},"modified":"2020-03-30T09:07:32","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T13:07:32","slug":"the-stolen-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6609","title":{"rendered":"The Stolen Child"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Dave Tackett\nQuasarDragon Games\nOSR\nLevels 7-9<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The pleasant town of Sligo has its tranquility shattered when a young boy vanishes in the middle of the night. Investigating the disappearance, the characters discover lost ruins and an ancient plot for revenge and a long forgotten enemy of humanity. Will the characters be able to rescue the stolen child or will a cruel, wronged race be able to wreak vengeance on all humanity?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 39 page adventure details a two level guardhouse with forty rooms on a demiplane full of evil elves. It\u2019s trying to build a fairy\/fey theme, since it\u2019s based on a yeats poem. RA is in the characters perspective and the ancient evil elves have no order of battle. Treasure is quite light and rooms have backstory. This seems like an adventure out of the early days of the OSR when the excitement of rediscovery of D&D trumped meaningful design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So Mr. Levels 7 through 9, you\u2019ve stopped in a small village and a child goes missing. Your do-gooder heart goes off to find it. You wander through a forest, find an island, and teleport to a demi-plane of evil elves. Because, I guess, it was in the poem. There you fight a bunch of elves who never leave their assigned rooms, until you find the kid, or don\u2019t, and come back. End.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s an opportunity lost here, I think, to orient this towards domain play, where the village BELONGS to the party. The bosses can torment the village to get their taxes, solve the problem themselves, or assign troops, etc. That would have been an interesting idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A middling effort in every way, it starts out with describing three buildings in town. Fine, you don\u2019t need to do an entire town, just the important bits. But the blacksmith and general store still has to go in to t detail on item availability and markups, with nothing else interesting, and the inn takes a column of text to tell us it was once called the Dagon\u2019s End, with a pic of a dragon mooning someone. This is not the tight, terse, evocative writing style that I think makes an adventure both easy and interesting to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re supposed to go in to the nearby forest and look around for the missing child. There\u2019s no scale on the hex map though, so who knows how long it takes. The town lays out in four hexes long by 2 hexes wide, and the forest is about 8-12 hexes away, so, I guess it\u2019s a minute walk? And the lake with the important island is inside of two hexes of trees, so I guess you can see it from the edge of the wood? Or maybe not? The wilderness text implies this is supposed to be a long search. I don\u2019t know.  In fact, I\u2019m not sure why the players even go to the forest, other than \u201cit\u2019s there.\u201d  There\u2019s not really any information that leads the party to it. Oh, a couple of rumors on the inn table mention it, but, ultimately, it\u2019s the DM leading the party by the nose with no support from the adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A focus on going through the motions of adventure design format, instead of concentrating on what\u2019s important for the adventure, is revealed by this. \u201cPretending to be grown up\u201d is what I call this at work. People using big words and doing things because that\u2019s what they think grown up business people do. A kabuki. But there\u2019s no understanding of WHY something is done, ot when, and thus it\u2019s generally just a time waster that doesn\u2019t lead to anything worthwhile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read-aloud is atrocious. It\u2019s full of character perspective. \u201cAs you walk by\u201d and \u201cAt first you are uncertain \u201c and \u201cSomeone walks up behind you\u201d and \u201cAs you walk along \u2026\u201d This is quite a weak writing style, putting things in this voice. It\u2019s far far better to describe just a scene, the environment, then it is to try and insert the party in to it. There\u2019s little to no benefit to inserting the routinely, except perhaps  in special circumstances, It comes off as amateurish, pedantic, and removes the agency that a 7-9 party might have. And no, \u201cthe DM can just summarize it\u201d is not an appropriate response. If that were the case then why put it in like this as all? Why not put it in a format that\u2019s easy for the DM to scan and summarize? \u201cWhy, because that\u2019s a spurious argument bryce.\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So you make it to the island in a pond\/lake in the woods and on it find some evil elves guarding it. That\u2019s all you get, so work with that. In the middle of the island is a fairy circle of mushrooms. You stand in the middle and say \u201cShiek\u201d and go to the fairy demi-place. How do you learn the code-word? Or even that there is a command word? Fuck if I know. Why is there even a demi-plane? Probably as a callback to the Yeats poem, which I refuse to read out of ennui. The lockdown impacts us all in different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, you teleport through and see a fairy castle in the distance. And then a bunch of elf knights ride out and attack you straight away. I guess they say you teleport in? From the distance that\u2019s implied is far away? Whatever. It\u2019s a guardhouse, the text tels us. But the elves riding out will be the last interactive things the elves do. They all just wait in their rooms to die, no order of battle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rooms inside are just boring old things stuffed full of, usually, elves. Lots of backstory. Lots of history. An unfocused writing style. Treasure is quite light for levels 7-9. GOLD=XP! GOLD=XP! GOLD=XP! Jesus, I wish people would learn that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The kitchen tells us \u201cThere is little here to interest the characters\u201d Indeed. No truer words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. The whole thing could be a preview since it\u2019s PWYW, but the real preview is nineteen pages long. That\u2019s a good preview and gives you a good idea of the writing style for the adventure, both the town, wilderness, and guardroom\/dungeon rooms. It shows you exactly what you\u2019re getting, so, very good preview, and also happy to see PWYW.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/134488\/PO1-The-Stolen-Child?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Dave Tackett QuasarDragon Games OSR Levels 7-9 The pleasant town of Sligo has its tranquility shattered when a young boy vanishes in the middle of the night. Investigating the disappearance, the characters discover lost ruins and an ancient plot … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeons-dragons-adventure-review","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/stolen.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609","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=6609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6610,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions\/6610"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}