{"id":7478,"date":"2021-08-14T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-14T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7478"},"modified":"2021-08-03T11:51:20","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T15:51:20","slug":"the-feast-on-titanhead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7478","title":{"rendered":"The Feast on Titanhead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
By Brayden Doomscribe Turenne\nGames Omnivorous\nLotFP? CoC? Meh, It's horror, and horror tends to translate well when well done\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDoomscribe delivers a heavy-metal, grind-core interpretation of the Manifestus Omnivorous, coated in weird-horror. One that speaks both to Lovecraft fans and those of movies like Saw. There is a big bad MONSTER that players will most likely not defeat. The LOCATION is the head of that very monster. And everything seems to be there to DEVOUR something. Includes psychotic outbreaks, naked people popping their eyes out, grotesque masses of fungi and engines of growth\/rebirth that reshape humans into abnormal masses of skin and soft-tissue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 28 page adventure describe twelve rooms in a colossal titan skull. Body Horror\/The Thing\/Stranger Things beasties abound in an adventure that brings the horror, but not necessarily the \u201cskull\u201d, and, as always, begs the question \u201cWhy bother going there?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, mountain, with a giant partially exposed skull on it. And I mean GIANT partially exposed skull. For some fucked up reason you\u2019re going in there. The adventure suggests you\u2019re hired to go in. Or you\u2019re going in to find a friend that disappeared inside. Or, you\u2019re just walking down the road and see it, and, of course, go take a looky loo. I know, I know, people say hooks don\u2019t matter. I generally agree. Except when they ARE included. If you\u2019re going to put a hook in then make it a decent hook. Or a supported hook. Or a relatable hook. And not just a couple of throwaway lines of text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This mentions it\u2019s set in \u201cEurope\u201d, but that doesn\u2019t really impact the adventure in any way. There\u2019s mention of leather armor, and one mention of explosives being used previously on the mountain to expose more of the skull, but both of those points are trivial to setting this wherever, in whatever game, although Europe+Leather generally means the default LotFP setting, but, as most horror adventures are, this could be used almost in any genre at any time. I only mention this in the context of Why? As in \u201cWhy the fuck are exploring this shithole of a place?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The age old question. A giant skull halfway up the side of the mountain? FUCK Yeah I\u2019m in! Let\u2019s go? Same skull, but filled with weird pulsating fungus and hybrid creatures with giant toothy gaping maws stretching too wide? I\u2019m getting the fuck out of Dodge! So, why explore? There\u2019s no real promise of treasure, and a lot of promises delivered on of weird body horror shit.  There\u2019s some kind of CoC do-gooder gotta stop the evil impulse, I guess. But, even then, dumping the place full of gas or explosive laced animals seems to be a better idea than slogging through each room. If you aint gotta, then nuking the site from orbit is always the correct PC answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, yeah, body horror. Naked people inside who have torn out their own eyeballs. Or, in the words of the designer \u201cThey\u2019re each covered in blood, with many wounds along their bodies. As they move closer, you can see that their own eyes have been gouged out. They walk blindly, yet sniff the rank air like dogs, jerking their heads abruptly at their surroundings.They moan and weep pathetically as they scratch and bite themselves bloody like animals. The walls are scrawled with scribblings in blood and shit. One of them, a woman, is in the process of digging out their own eyes from their sockets. A large mound of brain matter resides on the opposite wall. A single man lies half sunken into it, writhing as though in ecstasy.\u201d So \u2026 yeah. I said body horror, right? This is good writing. It certainly paints  very visceral picture and, also, does a good job SHOWING up a monster instead of just TELLING us its a monster. The writing is, overall, pretty strongly evocative. It dances over the line to pretentious read-aloud sometimes, but the DM text is pretty strong overall. \u201cHis head is half caved in, exposing part of his brain. His eyes are blood red and wide with shock. A PC may notice that the visible portion of Elijah\u2019s brain looks wrong and that his skin is discolored in a sickly green.\u201d Yeah, that dude is pretty fucked up. Probably no reason to waste a cure light on that guy. A lot of adventures TELL you that someone is too far gone to use cure light on, but this one does a good job SHOWING you. The rooms have a little interactivity, mostly shit like the pineal gland psychic blasting you, or a magnetic trap room, etc. Just a light amount for what is, at the end, just a small dungeon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is doing a few \u201cinteresting\u201d things with mechanics. Every 20 minutes of real time everyone gets to make a save. If you have you have a vision and get a little crazier. After missing five save you attack another party member three times without them getting a defence \u2026 you\u2019re just too fast! One more fail and you\u2019re an insane NPC. So, about two hours, I\u2019d say, before the whole party is a TPK because of the adventure mechanics. I get the need for a timer Mr \u201cjust fill the entire place with gasoline\u201d, but I\u2019m not sure this is the right way to do it. Also, every time you fail you have a vision which are mostly just variations on \u201cempty blackness\u201d and have NOTHING to do with advancing the adventure. That\u2019s too bad, abd a very big missed opportunity. \u201cYou open your eyes to find yourself submerged in a sea of unknown substance, of a color that you cannot describe. You breathe the liquid as though it were air.\u201d Sure, whatever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s also a place or two with things \u2026 muddled? The first room, the entrance socket, has a horse monster, complete with gaping maw, coming out of it. It\u2019s written in such a way that it\u2019s clearly meant to be the parties first encounter with the weird monsters. But, then, they also show up on the \u201cjourney up the mountainside\u201d wandering hazard table \u2026 which will blunt this initial encounter with them. Weird things like that, like a little more thought needed to go in to things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and the dude at the end, because there\u2019s also a boss at the end, has \u201ca ridiculous amount of HP\u201d and if killed turns in to a baby monster with only 1HP but you need a nat 20 to hit. So \u2026 playing with mechanics a lot. That\u2019s not bad, in general, but perhaps implements a little ham-fisted in this one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, you don\u2019t get bonus points for using a fucking font that I have to literally copy\/paste in a notepad app in order to tell what the fuck the writing was supposed to be. If you make \u201cSepulchral\u201d illegible that\u2019s on you. You have to be able to actually sit on it if it\u2019s a chair and you have to actually be able to read the words if it\u2019s meant to be read. I just don\u2019t fucking get why that\u2019s hard to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, lots and lots of body horror. Not so badly done and one of the better examples of it. Suffers from the \u201cWhy the fuck bother at all?\u201d problem common to so many LotFP adventures. A little one note, and  all of the horror essentially starts in room one and doesn\u2019t let up or change., which doesn\u2019t help much. Death Frost Doom had old Zeke and his warning and then the cabin to warm the party up, and this needed something like that to ramp things up. One of the better body horror adventures, in terms of evocative writing, though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $7 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages and none of those nine really give you a good impression of the actual adventures writing. It\u2019s better than the intro\/background garbage that appears in the preview. So, bad preview that should have shown us a room or two anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/303810\/The-feast-on-titanhead?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Brayden Doomscribe Turenne Games Omnivorous LotFP? CoC? Meh, It’s horror, and horror tends to translate well when well done \u201cDoomscribe delivers a heavy-metal, grind-core interpretation of the Manifestus Omnivorous, coated in weird-horror. One that speaks both to Lovecraft fans … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7477,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7478","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\/08\/titan.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7478","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=7478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7479,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7478\/revisions\/7479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}