{"id":6945,"date":"2020-10-19T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-19T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6945"},"modified":"2020-10-08T09:57:59","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T13:57:59","slug":"the-crypt-in-cadaver-canyon-dcc-dd-adventure-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=6945","title":{"rendered":"The Crypt in Cadaver Canyon (DCC D&D adventure review)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Mark Bishop\nPurple Sorcerer Games\nDCC\nLevel 2<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The Crypt in Cadaver Canyon is a 2nd Level Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure that challenges adventurers to save a hidden desert city (along with its cursed inhabitants) from the wrath of a devious and chaotic god. Its pages are packed with dangerous environments, exotic threats, and a world-shaking finale with thousands of lives on the line!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 87 page linear DCC adventure contains eleven rooms, of which about eight or so will be experienced. Bursts of flavour, and penchant for dreaming up a weird situation, abound in this adventure, in spite of the rather uninspiring writing and formatting. And the design. The simplistic design. The page count isn\u2019t nearly as bad as it sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Weight divide \u201cD&D\u201d in to two categories of play: exploratory and plot. Older style D&D would be firmly in the exploratory camp, with its gold=xp mechanic. Modern D&D, and the wya most D&D has been played from the late 70\u2019s (I\u2019d guess) follows a more simple \u201chere are a few encounters for tonight\u201d sort of methodology, following a simple A to B to C kind of line. I\u2019m not a fan of it, I think you sit around bored, but I recognize that many people seem to enjoy this way to spend the finite number of seconds until they no longer exist. If we accept that, then we must judge these things by \u201cit’s not an exploratory dungeon\u201d standard. And it\u2019s certainly the case that the vast majority of adventures, and especially DCC one\u2019s with their 3.0\/3.5 roots, fall in to that camp. (Which, generally , is why I no longer review them. But, whatever, I\u2019m nothing if not a hypocrite.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s this cliff city. When they execute criminals they then toss their bodies in the river, that quickly runs underground, a symbolic and literal transition to the underworld. Oh, also, they made a pact with a minor god and it\u2019s about to fire & brimstone come true in the destruction of their city unless they can sacrifice someone with a special birthmark before midnight. Also, the last person with that birthmark was executed two months ago and the sent sent down the river, in a clerical mistake. Please, sirs, could you go down the underground river and get the body for us? We\u2019ll then resurrect it and sacrifice it before midnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Greenfield thinking! Outside the box! I love it! That\u2019s a DCC thing if I\u2019ve ever heard it! The designer has these sorts of little flavourful ideas over and over again in the adventure. At one point, if you fail a save, you see an eye on your arm and in a round of insanity try to gnaw it off for 1d6 damage. Noice! These little flavourful bits and setups are scattered throughout the adventure and denote a great talent for specificity and the grounding it can bring to a game. Brief, quick hits of detail, that really bring the noise in terms of something for the DM to run with at the table. It\u2019s great!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mean, it\u2019s great when it happens. Which is not often enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For, in spite of these brief flashes of brilliance, the adventure is saddled with more than its fair share of garbage. And while it looks ok on the surface, I believe it is saddled with bad decisions and design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Looking at the page count we get 87 pages for eleven rooms. Not as bad as it first seems, it\u2019s a digest product. Plus,27 of those pages are handouts, pics for the party to look at, monster standees, etc. And, it does have a decent amount of art. Plus, the background, appendix stuff is well regulated to places that it doesn\u2019t get in the way of running the actual adventure, it true is supplemental. Still, you\u2019re not getting sixty pages of adventure, you\u2019re getting thirty, for eleven rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, you\u2019re not going to run all eleven, probably. The map is essentially linear with a couple of \u201cforks in the road\u201d, both of which tend to lead to the same place. You can have the left encounter or the right encounter, but you\u2019re going to have the encounter after that. A literal DIsney boat ride, in this case. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did I mention the read-aloud? It\u2019s in italics. I know, you\u2019re tired of hearing me bitch about it. And I\u2019m tired of seeing it. Italics is hard to read in long sections, as the page long or half page long read-alouds here are. Put it in a shaded box, or a box, or something else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Related to this is one of the openers, a meeting with the town council, in which 13 of them all give a several sentence long soliloquy. Seriously? Some party is going to sit there and listen to the DM read two pages of text? No one is going to break in? No one is going to pull out a phone? This betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of how a D&D game is run. There\u2019s no \u201cQ&A faq\u201d, it\u2019s just a lot of read-aloud. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This lack of understanding goes further, to the encounters. They are simplistic. To an extreme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Encounter one: make a saving throw or take damage. Seriously, that\u2019s the encounter. Your boat floats down the underground river. There are eyeballs carved in to the top of the walls, all along the river. They cause you to make a save or take damage. (The aforementioned \u201cgnaw part of your arm off for a round\u201d) Another encounter may be just having a fight. There\u2019s little investigation. Little poking or prodding or getting yourself in to trouble BY CHOICE. Those little moments of brilliance, such as the very flavourful rumor table, don\u2019t make up for what is otherwise just a linear adventure of saves and fights. And while an actual puzzle does show up, involving primary colors (great job on it!) it\u2019s an exception, not a rule. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Great specificity, in places, without overstaying the text welcome. Great \u201cvision\u201d of things. But poor execution, both in terms of the evocative writing, the encounter design, choice, and clarity in formatting. Clearly, there\u2019s potential here and I\u2019ve love to see more of it, but it needs some experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, and worthless. It shows you nothing. It should show you one or two encounters, some pretext, a mix of things, so you know what you\u2019re buying. I don\u2019t give a fuck abvout the handouts, art and such. The purpose of the preview should be giving me enough information to determine if I want to buy it. This fails at that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/278808\/The-Crypt-in-Cadaver-Canyon-DCC?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Mark Bishop Purple Sorcerer Games DCC Level 2 The Crypt in Cadaver Canyon is a 2nd Level Dungeon Crawl Classics adventure that challenges adventurers to save a hidden desert city (along with its cursed inhabitants) from the wrath of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6943,"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-6945","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\/10\/cada.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6945","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=6945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6946,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6945\/revisions\/6946"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}