{"id":7342,"date":"2021-05-26T07:08:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T11:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7342"},"modified":"2021-05-17T07:10:53","modified_gmt":"2021-05-17T11:10:53","slug":"dead-flood-of-dwfn-eir-gron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7342","title":{"rendered":"Dead Flood of Dwfn Eir-Gron"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Stephen Yeardley, Thilo Graf\nAAW Games\n5e\nLevels 7-8<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
When a sacred dweorg festival is raided by the drow, with hundreds slain and even more enslaved, abducted, and turned into undead servitors, a deity weeps. When the divine tear becomes a flood that puts to rest the undead, the party has the chance to follow the legion of living dead on sturdy dwarven kayaks through the caverns, riding the Dead Flood of Dwfn Eir-Gr\u00f8n. The undead and their drow masters are stranded, briefly, but can the party prevail against a sheer endless legion of the living dead, punish the drow and rescue the few hardy survivors that remain?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This two page adventure is actually one battle. I know, I know. So let\u2019s talk about it. That, not this, I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remain interested in shorter adventures. I think there is a lot of potential in them. They are not overstaying their welcome and the shorter format should enforce a kind of discipline on the designer. Let us not forget that G1 was only a few pages long! Further, modern adventures flow a different way than classic OSR ones. Gone are the exploratory elements, and, therefore I assert, the longer page count that even G1 has. You should be able to, I think, create a modern \u201cplot\u201d adventure, with just a few encounters, in just a small handful of pages. Imagine that, a hook, investigation, and your 5 page lair dungeon all in just a few pages. Form + Function, recognizing that 5e\/3e\/Pathfinder are different than a OSR exploratory thing. I\u2019m interested in such things and thus I torment myself looking in to them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thus, looking at a 2-page 5e adventure, you can see how my rosey worldview worked. Decent production values, a couple of pages, sure, I can imagine a possible world in which this is a good adventure! (Wasn\u2019t there a system of D&D where you could worship an idea rather than a god? A possible worlds paladin – In some possible world, this action is good! *smite*) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not good. It is a \u201c4e adventure.\u201d Meaning it is not an adventure at all. It\u2019s a fucking Warhammer game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I fucking HATE warhammer games. If you want to play mini\u2019s combat then go fucking play warhammer, or blah blah blah one of the fucking clones. Or make the fucking advernture for 4e, the officially recognized \u201ci don\u2019t want to play D&D I want to play minis combat\u201d version of D&D. It sucks the fucking soul out of D&D. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019ve got this map. It\u2019s, maybe, 20 squares by 30 squares. Underground, I guess, in caves, with a bunch of water scattered around in it, representing a river. There are five encounters. SE, SW, NE, NW, and center. Original design, isn\u2019t it? Like, no effort at all?  You enter on kayaks on the western side, driven by dwarf commoners. Otherwise someone might have to drive the kayak and not get their AOO, or their 5\u2019 step or whatever. At each encounter is one bad guy. They don\u2019t help each other or interact in any way, in spite of being, I don\u2019t know, less than 80\u2019 from each other? You know the deal before I even write it. \u201cI\u2019m a 8th level drawven gravesmiter assassin with beads of force and a penchant for my description revolving entirely around my battle tactics.\u201d There is NOTHING to this adventure EXCEPT the battlefield notes and the opponents. NOTHING. Pure fucking fantasy battle mastabutory wankfest. Mini-dungeon my ass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The backstory is lame; I know, fluff is subjective, but, when did the drow become masters of the undead? I guess theming doesn\u2019t mean anything anymore. You\u2019re just looking for a villain of CR9, or whatever, and Drow came up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This adventure does ONE thing interesting. Every square on the map, except the water ones, every single square, has a zombie in it. Ostensibly you are trying to save them by pushing them in to the river, which is actually a flood caused by a gods tear, which acts as a gentle repose spell, which lays the (dwarf) zombie to rest, which is the goal of mission, to \u201csave\u201d as many dwarves as possible. I mean, it\u2019s Warhammer, but it is an interesting battlefield thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took two people to write this thing. Instead of a long backstory, instead of a quarter page of artwork, but not write an actual adventure? Why advertise it as an adventure when you could advertise it as \u201cfour hours of nonstop hacking zombie action in the style of your least favorite 4e adventures!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and that river, the one that acts as a gentle response spell? That, my friends, is a classic example of \u201cexplaining why.\u201d It\u2019s a gods tear, you don\u2019t need to have a book fucking explanation for why. It kills the magic. It kills the mystery of it all. Wonder is no more. Another example has the drow using three different book poisons on the dwarves, so as to, I assumer per game rules, give them all three levels of exhaustion. I fucking hate this book shit. Infinite possibilities and and we get a 4e battle with book explanation for wondrous things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $1 at DriveThru.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/356560\/5E-MiniDungeon-197-Dead-Flood-of-Dwfn-EirGron?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking of DriveThru, let\u2019s look at how much life sucks by examining the Rule Systems=OSR, Product Type= NonCore, Adventures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Adventure of the Week – Just a plot hook, it looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dead Girls in Sarkash Forest – Emmy Allen thing. Looks like a digest procedural thing, and, being for Mork Borg, has the required \u201cI used an \u201cinteresting\u201d giant font. I may end up reviewing this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Geppetto\u2019s Folly – A filbar thing, so, you know, not going to be good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Casa Matildo – In spanish. Good for them. But not fodder for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some one page dungeon, but in Russian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MAPS YOUR PARTY WILL DIE FOR 2 – I assume not actually an adventure<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dungeon Crawl Solo – Ug. Solo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another Voxelhouse in Spanish. I might have to learn spanish. HOLA. BUEON GIORNO<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAdventure of the week\u201d, one in French and one in ENglish, both just plot ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some kind of zine, collected from someones blog<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zero level players guide from Starry Knight. Bun me 293 times, shame on you<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A one page Mork Borg adventure<\/p>\n\n\n\n
14 Zweihander \u201cadventures.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, maybe, one thing to look at, the Emmy Allen thing. And this is a good week. 90% of \u201cadventures\u201d are not actually adventures and 90% of the ones that are are total crap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Stephen Yeardley, Thilo Graf AAW Games 5e Levels 7-8 When a sacred dweorg festival is raided by the drow, with hundreds slain and even more enslaved, abducted, and turned into undead servitors, a deity weeps. When the divine tear … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7329,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-5e","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/flood.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7342","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=7342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7343,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7342\/revisions\/7343"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}