{"id":6899,"date":"2020-09-26T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-26T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6899"},"modified":"2020-09-15T09:57:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-15T13:57:46","slug":"5e-the-crypts-of-caverndel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6899","title":{"rendered":"(5e) The Crypts of Caverndel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Daniel Anderson & Cameron Foster\nThe Bugbear Brothers\n5e\nLevel 4<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The Crypts of Caverndel have been ransacked! A giant deer-skulled demon, beset by plague and pestilence, has torn the dwarven watch limb from limb before squeezing through the Hagmaw and disappearing into the crypts. The Crown has offered entry into an upcoming knighthood competition to any who might prove their bravery by entering the crypts and slaying the beast. In turn, whoever wins this prestigious competition would be granted rule of one of the Crown\u2019s vacant demesnes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 24 page adventure describes a six room dungeon with more than a hint of Guillermo del Toro. Freaky deaky shit has some good base ideas, but it suffers from a poor communication style and inconsistent descriptions. It\u2019s also essentially just combat with room modifiers. IE: 4e. The designers are, though, on the right track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobility has a crypt. It\u2019s been invaded by a demon, the guards killed. You\u2019re sent in to kill it. Along the way you learn, maybe, that there\u2019s some extra plot behind it all. It\u2019s a six room dungeon with a few town locales attached. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both the town and the dungeon locations show a certain knowledge of making things memorable for the players. IE: having a kind of strong concept for the DM to hang their hat on when running a room, or NPC. The town doctor is dressed up all plague doctor like, never taking off his outfit and has a high ethereal voice \u2026 and wants things. A patient has a weird undead leg, pegleg style. There\u2019s an eyeball\/palm monster straight out of (What\u2019s that fascist Spain del Toro movie that\u2019s all just an allegory? Arg! Memory fails!) There\u2019s strong strong imagery in this, including the deer-skulled demon thing, and more than a few of the rooms. It DOES tend to the freaky deaky side of the house, which makes things a little easier for a designer to work with, but the underlying concepts, freaky or mundane, are the same, and they pull it off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our room descriptions, six of them, along with the business descriptions in town, use a muddled format. The Panopticon room tells us that it\u2019s circular with a high domed ceiling, the surface riddles with hundreds of golden twitching eyes, following your movement in the room. Nice! Note the \u201ctwitching\u201d element, and golden. That\u2019s really good use of language to add specificity and detail, and evocative writing. Then it goes in to detail on the mechanics of the eyes. Then, in paragraph two, it tells us that over time the chamber has turned in to a lake, having been flooded by groundwater, and in the center sits a small island. Floating on the lake are countless bloated bodies of dead soldiers that have been hacked to smithereens. A couple of problems here. First, good job with those floating bodies! I might suggest that smithereens is not the best word, but the rest of the description is pretty good. But, then it\u2019s all fucked up with the backstory. DONT. FUCKING. CARE. about the over time bullshit. It\u2019s a fucking lake with bodies in it. The rest is just filler fluff explaining why, and that\u2019s almost never called for in an adventure. Further, the description of something THIS important and obvious is in paragraph two. And then there\u2019s the third paragraph also, describing he creatures in the room. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Better would have been a short paragraph describing the room, circular, high dome, golden twitching eyes, that sentence. Then follow it with a lake in the center, with island, with countless bodies floating, that sentence, then the creature in the middle. Perfect! Then you can have three extra small paras, each starting with a bolded word, like \u201ceyeballs\u201d (bolded) and the mechanics for it. Then Body search  9bolded) and the mechanics for it. And all of the bullshit backstory of the room dropped. That would be a VERY effective format, delivering information concisely and maintaining reference ability. Hmmm, maybe i\u2019ll do a (bad) rewrite of that room at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Treasure can be abstracted in this. \u201cYou find wealth worth 1000gp\u201d Well, fuck that\u2019s exciting, I guess. Don\u2019t abstract treasure, be specific. It\u2019s what a decent number of players are after, even in a non Gold=XP game. But then it goes and sticks in a warhammer, magic, made from the molar of a front giant (mjjolner, anyone?) That\u2019s great specificity. Inconsistent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The adventure could also use more cross-references. When it mentions \u201cthe panopticon\u201d, in reference to a room, it should be \u201cthe panopticon (r5)\u201d or something like that. Likewise when it mentions people or places. Just give us a hand on where to look. Other weird things like putting the description of a hallway, outside a room, in the description of the room 30\u2019 away. Clearly that should have been another locale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there\u2019s the interactivity. This is mostly combat. Rooms can have a combat modifier, like difficult terrain from hands and arms reaching out to grab you, or the eyeballs confusing you. That\u2019s very 4e, a focus on combat and terrain\/combat modifiers. More interactivity. Exploration is a pillar also! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, decent attempt but they need some serious work on the layout\/organization of their room entries and to be more consistent with their descriptions\/abstractions. And something besides combat. Town is not for RP and Dungeon for Combat. You can mix it up. And put in some other shit in the dungeon also, besides combat. And I don\u2019t mean just traps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages, but it just shows you the town locations. You can get a look at some of the NPC\u2019s and some of the muddled descriptions that are indicative of the issues with the rooms. It would have been better if it showed one or two rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/316220\/The-Crypts-of-Caverndel?manufacturers_id=15533?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Daniel Anderson & Cameron Foster The Bugbear Brothers 5e Level 4 The Crypts of Caverndel have been ransacked! A giant deer-skulled demon, beset by plague and pestilence, has torn the dwarven watch limb from limb before squeezing through the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6898,"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-6899","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\/09\/crypt.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6899","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=6899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6900,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6899\/revisions\/6900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}