{"id":7098,"date":"2021-01-18T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-18T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7098"},"modified":"2021-01-05T10:47:08","modified_gmt":"2021-01-05T15:47:08","slug":"the-singing-ice-dd-adventure-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7098","title":{"rendered":"The Singing Ice, D&D adventure review"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By D\u00e9sir\u00e9e Nordlund\nSelf Published\nGeneric\nLevel ?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The party enters a castle that at first seems to be abandoned. But something is not right. It is empty and cold but clean and cared for. The princess has been turned into a beast. The spell will not be broken until a special crystal is placed in the highest tower. If that is done, it is proof that the princess learned to ask for help.  The crystal is found on the other side of a portal, guarded by a dragon that should not be awoken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This eighteen page adventure attempts to present a strongly evocative fairy tale vibe. Rather, it comes out as an outline of an adventure, abstracted, rather than an adventure, leaning on the excuse of \u201cit\u2019s a system agnostic adventure.\u201d Weak writing and a dearth of encounters lead to a snoozefest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reading just the publishers blurb you can see the hows and whys of me selecting this adventure for review. It\u2019s got a fairy tale like thing going on, at least from that description. The classic elements of an abandoned castle, princess, highest tower, crystals, and dragons. What\u2019s not to love! I am a fan of the classics, well done! But this ain\u2019t it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a lot going on wrong here in this adventure. There\u2019s a kind of genre mismatch in places, with the adventure never really committing to the fairy-tale\/mythic vibe and waffling back to a traditional D&D like vibe at times. While attempting evocative writing, or at least stating it is trying to do that, it instead comes across as somewhat boring writing, lacking evocative descriptions (for the most part) and a writing style that makes me think the designer might be some kind of fiction writer, confused to the current genre they are working in. And then there\u2019s the adventure proper, the encounters and the like. This being a \u201cgeneric\u201d adventure for \u201call systems\u201d there are no stats, which is almost always a mistake. Not much meaningful interactivity is present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The interactivity here is either missing or wrong. We get, maybe, one combat, maybe two, and little else beyond that. A crawl through some flytrap like plants, a talk with The Beast from Beauty fame, and a talk, maybe, with a farmer. Perhaps a trek up in the snow. (More on that later.) \u201cThis place is dark and you need to find your way through it\u201d or \u201cIt looks scary but s harmless\u201d is not interactivity. It COULD be interactivity, but, as presented, it\u2019s just an OUTLINE of an adventure. A generic framework. There is not enough specificity to ground it down to an actual adventure. Further, There are a couple of times where interactivity is actual missing that should be there. The Beast who can only be killed by stabbing her in the heart. How do we know that? Were there clues to discover in an empty castle? No. It\u2019s just a note for the DM. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s an appeal of genericism here that is unwarranted. It\u2019s almost always unwarranted. You are rewarded with things \u201clike pearls and diamonds as a thank you.\u201d No. No we are not. We\u2019re awarded with something SPECIFIC. Something that does the work for the DM, inspires them to run a great game. And generic text like \u201clike pearls and diamonds\u201d does not do that. Nor does things like \u201cits really cold out\u201d or \u201cyou could get exhausted\u201d as the extent of the mechanics. This is done in order to keep the adventure generic\/system neutral, but to what end? Just stat it for 5e, or OSR, or write the fucking thing for Polaris, a system that this adventure is SCREAMING for. Bad DM\u2019s won\u2019t use this adventure and good ones will restart it\/run it on the fly. But, what you WILL get is the specificity to tie things down to the ground. To be concrete.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou walk along \u2026\u201d or \u201cYou walk up to the gate \u2026\u201d or \u201cYou see \u2026\u201d betray a writing style that is focused on some kind of novel experience. Adventure writing is not novel writing and, I think, few of the skills translate well. Adventure writing is TECHNICAL writing. You must have a text that is completely optimized for running it at the table. And, a part of the optimization is to have a terse and evocative descriptive style. Chaos, that is perfectly organized, as I like to say. But that\u2019s not the writing here. It\u2019s clearly meant to be a kind of scripted plot, with moments outlined, and it\u2019s written as such. But the correct framework, even for a story based adventure (as opposed to a traditional 5e plot one or OSR exploratory one) is not that. You need to present situations, interactive ones, things that the players canmake interesting decisions about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the embedded URL\u2019s don\u2019t work, just three days after publishing this on DriveThru. And the directions in the text for room layout are inconsistent, with gates SE and NE being interchanged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One quick note about ESL. I get the sense this is a Scandanavian-native speaker. I\u2019m pretty generous with ignoring language issues as long as meaning comes across, and it does. And their English is better than my Scandanavian (hmmm, is that insulting, to lump each country in to the generic \u201cScando\u201d group?) The language issues are probably not an issue in this adventure, at least where meaning is concerned. A quick english language check by an english editor could have been in order, though. More importantly, are the evocative language issues related to the ESL thing? If so, it would be the VERY first time I have seen that \u2026 so I\u2019m inclined to say no. But, it really just isn\u2019t that evocative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages, that show the main adventure text, the start of the adventure. So, it\u2019s a good preview. Note the main hall description, for both good (fairytale!) and ill (evocative writing.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/341524\/The-singing-ice?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By D\u00e9sir\u00e9e Nordlund Self Published Generic Level ? The party enters a castle that at first seems to be abandoned. But something is not right. It is empty and cold but clean and cared for. The princess has been turned … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7096,"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-7098","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\/2021\/01\/singing.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7098","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=7098"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7099,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7098\/revisions\/7099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}