{"id":6654,"date":"2020-04-29T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-29T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6654"},"modified":"2020-04-22T09:55:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T13:55:11","slug":"the-place-of-the-skull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6654","title":{"rendered":"The Place of the Skull"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Mark Hess\nSelf published\nLotFP<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A Sci-Fantasy adventure for old school gaming. A princess has been kidnapped, the players must save her by infiltrating a strange fortress of unknown origin. Weird tech, mutants, and evil swords abound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This eighteen page adventure uses five digest pages to describe thirteen rooms. A little sci-fi, borrows from Conan and He-Man (and probably others) and uses a minimal format \u2026 although a decent one that concentrates on the right things. Still, a little light on the encounters for  my tastes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, kings daughter has been kidnapped by Skull face. King brings out platter of rubies and throws them at party, saying that riches mean nothing next to the love of your daughter. Oh, and she\u2019s a warrior princess virgin, so in addition to Conan and He-Man we\u2019ve got some She-Ra stuff going on also. And probably more. There\u2019s the Fun Guy, who has fungo growing from his head. It\u2019s got some sci-fi elements to it, broken computers, a couple of plasma rifles and so forth. And also magical elements, like the Doomsword, which turns you chaotic and melts your face off so you can be the next Skill Face. It\u2019s over the silly line for me. A little too on the nose with cultural references. Instead of allusion it\u2019s direct reference after direct reference. Maybe as a silly con one shot but, as always, comedy and references are tough in adventures. Placed in directly, there\u2019s no buy in and the game suffers. Referenced tangentially, they allow the DM and players to refer to those memories and the expanded meaning that they refer to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There;s not much to this, just eighteen pages overall and just thirteen rooms over about five digest sized pages. That keeps the descriptions terse, all right! \u201cThe cave entrance branches to the right and left, only to meet on the other side. A hewn hallway leads to a set of stone double doors. The doors may be pushed open.\u201d The hewn part is good, nice imagery of a hewn tunnel, I think, even if the right\/left just repeats the map data and doors opening are doors opening. The throne room has \u201cA large chamber with a wicked looking throne of shaped stone. The throne and the raised dias it sits on are surrounded by an anti-magic field.\u201d That\u2019s it. Large is a boring word. Wicked is a conclusion, but would be used ok if  the throne stones were described as jagged or something like that. But, basically, this is all there is to the rooms. A kind of abstracted description with a little bit of iconic imagery referenced and not much beyond that. There\u2019s just not much here to work with. MAYBE one thing per room, a little abstracted at that. You can see where the designer wants to take it but it never reaches any potential.  There\u2019s just not much here. It\u2019s almost like an outline rather than an adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $2 at DriveThru. There\u2019s no level range given, but the preview is six pages and shows you the first four rooms, and the lead in information. So, decent preview, EVEN IF THE LEVEL RANGE IS NO WHERE PRESENT ANYWHERE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/310386\/The-Place-of-the-Skull?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Mark Hess Self published LotFP A Sci-Fantasy adventure for old school gaming. A princess has been kidnapped, the players must save her by infiltrating a strange fortress of unknown origin. Weird tech, mutants, and evil swords abound. This eighteen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6654","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\/04\/skull.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6654","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=6654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6655,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6654\/revisions\/6655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}