{"id":6923,"date":"2020-10-10T07:19:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-10T11:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6923"},"modified":"2020-09-28T10:21:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-28T14:21:00","slug":"the-brazen-bull-dd-adventure-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6923","title":{"rendered":"The Brazen Bull, D&D adventure review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Jeffrey P. Talanian\nNorth Wind Adventures\nAS&SH\nLevels 1-2<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Whilst traversing one of the seedier neighbourhoods of Khromarium, your party are solicited by a greasy-haired Pict. He offers to sell you a sheaf of magical lotus that allows one to see the future or to brew potions that empower the imbiber with sorcery. He beckons you to follow him into a dilapidated building….<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is an anthology of three adventures, onlyone of which I\u2019m reviewing because it was specifically requested: The Brazen Bull. It\u2019s full of flavour, which is somewhat unusual for North Wind, but it continues to use tortured language to describe encounters, which is a hindrance to running it. But, seriously, major bonus points for writing something with some interesting situations. Anyway, it\u2019s about thirteen pages long with about 24 rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know that old hook of the dude with the treasure map in a tavern, who is selling the map?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A little generic, and abstracted. Dull around the edges and without flavour. But \u2026 what if he was an obvious meth addict, for obvious reasons? Selling his parents laptop. Who\u2019s an accountant. Or manages Fort Knox, or something like that. Suddenly, things take on a much different flavour. It springs to life. That\u2019s what this thing does, spring to life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It could be the same hook; some lotus addict approaches the party, telling them them they escaped from a cult with a lot of gold and jewels laying around, and they\u2019ll let them know where, for some cash \u2026 and\/or lotus \u2026 are you carrying? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This transitions in to the first encounter, a run down crack house with four skeezy dudes in it sitting in a loose circle. One, in a loincloth is kind of waving a knife over his head slowly, saying \u201ci told you so\u201d over and over again, mumbling. Another one is face down in his own vomit, another one is obviously stoned out of his mind, and another, it turns out, is dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the fuck has happened to Jeff Talalnian? This shit is actually good! And it does this over and over again, delivering interesting little situations. A bunch of bodies, some still alive, hung on meat hooks, being drained. Multiple \u201czones\u201d in the dungeon, which doubles as a druggie flop house and cult temple and an old crypt and some vermind tunnels also \u2026 don\u2019t get lost trying to score your fix! Really some top notch situations being presented. Which is unusual. Finally, a shrieker that makes sense! Decent elevations show on the map and a map that makes the dungeon more interesting than normal! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
North Wind Adventures pretty much have universally suffered from two major problems. First, they use this tortured writing style (more on that later) and second they are boring. A perfect example is this adventure anthology. The first adventure is one I\u2019ve reviewed before \u201cRats in the Walls.\u201d IE: one of the most boring adventures ever published. Some dude has rats in his basement and you spend the adventure going in to boring old basement rooms and killing giant rats. That\u2019s LITERALLY a meme of bad D&D, and it was at least fifteen years ago. But \u2026 this ain\u2019t boring. Not at all! The vermind encounters FEEL like good vermin encounters that would be in a place like this. The cultists feel like cultists. The druggies FEEL like druggies. You know, implicitly, how to run these encounters. Once you read them they spring to life in your mind and you can call on all of your years of experiences to add to and expand them. That\u2019s what a good encounter should do; it should leverage the DM to expand and add to the encounter. It should inspire them to greatness. And this does that. Good encounter concepts and decent specificity to bring them life in a way that inspires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I say decent because this is, after all, still a North Wind adventure. It suffers from what all North WInd adventures suffer from: a writing style straight out of HP Lovecraft. The words are oblique and the sentence structure tortured. Where Gygax might thrown in a word or two here r there of High Gygaxian language use, Talanian lets his freak flag fly and stuffs the adventure full of  it. And then fucks with subject\/verb and drops in a shit ton of asides just to make things more oblique. This is bad writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What?! Say it isn\u2019t so! But it is. This isn\u2019t a novel to be read for enjoyment. This is Ulysses or The Fall of America. Stream of Consciousness as a writing style has no place in an adventure. You have to fight it to run it. This isn\u2019t Stream of Consciousness, I just say that for effect. Hyperbolically, we should be able to recognize that a D&D adventure written in iambic pentameter might suffer from some usability issues. What if, though, we wrote an adventure that emulated the writing style of Arthur Machen or Lovecraft? Tortured word choice and sentence structure? No, the adventure would suffer just as much. But that\u2019s what this adventure does and that\u2019s what all North Wind adventures do. It\u2019s the house style. It seems counter-intuitive to me to have a house style that obfuscates instead of enlightens, but, there it is. That\u2019s what the North Wind house style is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s FUCKING TERRIBLE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the goal is to emulate Lovecraft, then, congratulations, you did it! You have mechanically emulated the style of a writer. But, wait \u2026 is that the goal of an adventure? Isn\u2019t an adventure supposed to be run at the table? Isn\u2019t that its purpose? To help the DM run it? So selecting a house style that purposefully makes that hader would then be \u2026 THE. WRONG. FUCKING. DECISION.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I get it. Someone, somewhere, thinks it\u2019s not that bad. They think that it doesn\u2019t interfere. Some fucking moron somewhere on the internet is even now arguing that they like it and that it helps them and that it\u2019s the best way to write it .. because it\u2019s the internet and that always happens on the internet. But it\u2019s not. It\u2019s a terrible way to format things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, for $10 you get one of the most boring adventures ever written, some unknown adventure, and this little adventure which has some interesting situations and is quite visceral, the way that North Wind adventures typically TRY to be but generally fail at. But, if suffers, as always, by the tortured house style. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $10 at DriveThru. There\u2019s no preview because FUCK YOU, that\u2019s why. PPut in a preview so we know what our $10 is getting us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/265542\/Rats-in-the-Walls-and-Other-Perils?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jeffrey P. Talanian North Wind Adventures AS&SH Levels 1-2 Whilst traversing one of the seedier neighbourhoods of Khromarium, your party are solicited by a greasy-haired Pict. He offers to sell you a sheaf of magical lotus that allows one … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6922,"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-6923","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\/09\/brazen.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6923","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=6923"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6923\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6924,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6923\/revisions\/6924"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}