{"id":7355,"date":"2021-06-02T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7355"},"modified":"2021-05-26T08:32:39","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T12:32:39","slug":"a-giant-shield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7355","title":{"rendered":"A Giant Shield"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Andy Beard & Tracy Rann\nSleeping Griffon Productions\nBattleaxes & Beasties\nLevels 1-2<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
You’ve been hired to escort and guard a wealthy merchant into the Black Yew forest to obtain some of the wood that the forest is famous for.  Should be a simple job. . . right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This ten page adventure is a conversational list of \u201cfirst this happens and then this happens\u201d, abstracted, of an escort mission for a merchant. It has one nice thing: a shark with legs. It makes me feel like Papers & Paychecks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You escort a merchant down a river to get some wood from a forest. You then escort him back to make a delivery. Along the way you fight river monsters, deal with some fey, and get ambushed a few times by thieves. The excitement I convey is not found in the adventure. The highlight is something called a Lake Finn, a shark with two stumpy legs up front. I assume they can come out of the water? Its not stated as such. The monster description focuses just on attacks, with no description or anything, but the art that comes with it is pretty nice in a \u201ctree octopus\u201d kind of way. Don\u2019t worry, while a shark with legs sounds gonzo, the rest of the adventure is depressingly mundane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We get stock NPC\u2019s, from the slightly greedy slightly rotund merchant to the haughty elves to the mischievous faeries. Worse, we get a generic adventure, abstracted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is written as a long two-column text file. The formatting present is, at best a carriage return to represent a paragraph break. It is, in this, this long long section of text blocks, that the adventures to be found. You follow it by reading, not referencing. One encounter after another follows in the text, with no formatting, other than a carriage return, to separate things. First this thing happens and then this thing happens. In about as many words you are told that there will be a lake encounter and two roll twice for random encounters on the river. This represents the journey from the town you\u2019re hired in to the forest where you gather the wood you are escorting the merchant for. That\u2019s it. That\u2019s the basis of the adventure. \u201cRoll for an encounter.\u201d This is fucking dumb. This is not how you use random tables. If you\u2019re going to write ap plot adventure then put in encounters. Randomness in encounters is (primarily) used as a timer in D&D. No timer? WRITE A GOOD FUCKING ENCOUNTER!!!! The entire adventure is like this, just rolls random encounters, or, a throw away sentence about an ambush or something. Everything is abstracted. How long does the travel take? Not mentioned. How much does the merchant pay the elves in the forest who demand gold? Not mentioned. You need to rout a group of rous in the forest, the elves say. How many? Not mentioned. ANYTHING at all, any detail at all about the rous? No. Just \u201cYou need to rout a group of rous.\u201d It\u2019s all abstracted, conversation style of text, with a linear plot. It\u2019s just a lit of ideas, nothing more than that. Nothing is alive, nothing breathes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What if I wrote an adventure that only said \u201croll four times on the random encounter chart\u201d, but took five pages to say that? That\u2019s this adventure. Any potential impact of the plot lines, the devious NPC\u2019s or entanglements, that the adventure wants to do with all of the ambushes, is hidden from the players while being overly described to the DM.\u00a0 This is really just a stream of consciousness set of ideas, as if this review were an adventure.\u00a0 And, and … the giant shield does not make an appearance in this adventure. It’s what you are gathering thee wood for, for delivery to someone else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $5 at DriveThru and there is no preview, of course. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/357892\/A-Giant-Shield?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Episode 1 of \u201cBryce reviews everything on his DriveThru Wishlist, in order.\u201d You were warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Andy Beard & Tracy Rann Sleeping Griffon Productions Battleaxes & Beasties Levels 1-2 You’ve been hired to escort and guard a wealthy merchant into the Black Yew forest to obtain some of the wood that the forest is famous … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7354,"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-7355","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\/05\/giant.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7355","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=7355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7356,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7355\/revisions\/7356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}