{"id":7554,"date":"2021-09-29T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-29T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7554"},"modified":"2021-09-20T12:59:00","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T16:59:00","slug":"nutmeg-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7554","title":{"rendered":"Nutmeg in the Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Edward Deboinare\nEsoterik Games\nKnave\nlevel 1<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Something has happened to the northern mountain pass, those who have survived to  return reported the smell of nutmeg before their party was ambushed in the dark. The town guard is raising a party to go clear the pass. He enters the local tavern to conscript all the patrons \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 46 page adventure uses twenty pages to describe 33 rooms in a single column format. The rest of the page count is new monsters and some new class backgrounds. But, those 33 rooms? A combination of goofy funhouse puzzles and bizarrely minimal writing. To no effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s get this out of the way: the shambling woodpecker boss monster at the end smells like nutmeg. You now know why the title is what it is. No, I am not holding out on you. It makes no sense to me either. I’m a square though so maybe I’m missing something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The map is \u2026 different. The entry room is, like #14 and the exist #23 and there is no number ten on the map. You can\u2019t really make out any doors. There are minimaps next to the individual (single-column) room descriptions, but, you can\u2019t really make out the features on them. And this is blown up on my monitor to about 1.5! Printed out, in digest form, as the adventure suggests \u2026  there\u2019s Norfolk & Way for shipping an elephant overnight from New York to LA. Or to make out the map. Also, weirdly, the formatting doesn\u2019t work at all on my mac, for the text. The built-in PDF viewer gives me garbage, so I have to use the Chrome built-in PDF viewer \u2026 which still will not render certain pages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The writing is \u2026 interesting. Here\u2019s a room entry: \u201cRoll an encounter with [-] guarding the room, its unhappy. The chest contains loot.\u201d No? Not your thing? How about \u201cCeiling is magically the night sky; there is loot[-] here.\u201d Ok, ok, how about this one? \u201cThat is blood on the floor from the giant guillotine blade trap located there; it goes off every time.\u201d That\u2019s the extent of the description. There is nothing else. No mechanics, nothing. These sorts of things make up maybe about a third of all the encounters in the dungeon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Room type two, Hezrou, has a few more things going on in it. Such as \u201cA Grasping Giraffe guards this room; upon entering the giraffe will trigger the switch on the wall, causing the door to slam shut; investigating behind the throne near the switch will reveal a wheel that can be turned to lift the plate shutting the door. There is a set of platemail here.\u201d No, that\u2019s all of the description. No, I don\u2019t know what a Grasping Giraffe is. There\u2019s no pic. There is an entry in the rear in the monster appendix. \u201cTheir eye stalks enable the giraffe precision and protection during their head-whip attacks.\u201d So \u2026. They must have eye stalks. You should be detecting a pattern by now. There is something here, just under the surface. But it\u2019s almost like 50% of the sentences in the adventure were left out \u2026 the 50% that would explain what the fuck is going on and add depth to the thing. A giraffe with eyestalks? Uh, ok. Sure. I\u2019m in. But \u2026 you need to actually put enough words in to make this work. Another room has \u201ca dire shadow bear with a silver dagger stuck in its heart is frozen into a statue, in mid-attack.\u201d Nice! It\u2019s ALMOST there. It\u2019s ALMOST an actual encounter. Maybe it would be in Dungeon of the Bear days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Room Type III is an actual funhouse room. One of the rooms starts with \u201cWhen the party sees the mirror or is in range, have the mirror introduce it self as the Opposite Mirror.\u201d So \u2026 uh, I guess there\u2019s a mirror in the room then?  Anyway, there\u2019s a message on the floor. \u201cAlways coming to take me down.\u201d If you give the password (the opposite, of course!) then the figure in the mirror (ok, so, now I guess there\u2019s a figure in the mirror?) reaches through the mirror and activates two immovable rods that he uses to pull himself out of the mirror.\u201d So \u2026 there\u2019s two immovable rods somewhere? Outside the mirror I guess? And the figure comes out of the mirror? I mean, I\u2019m not leaving anything pertinent out of the description here. The map doesn\u2019t show anything important \u2026 or legible. It\u2019s a funhouse room. And there are other funhouse rooms. And I can almost grok out what is going on. ALMOST. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The boss monster is labeled as BOSS on the map. It\u2019s a  Shambling Woodpecker. It can the flying tree from the cover (Small Evil Flying Needle Tree) are listed as Unique monsters. Which means that the grasping giraffe and putrid peacocks are not, by inference? DId I mention the electric deergull, a seagull with the head and antlers of a deer? It\u2019s weird all right. It also feels PROCEDURALLY weird to me, rather than a creation. Like someone stuck some words in n app and is testing their new AI program. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The loot table, which you dice on for all oot, is full of hings like \u201cMagic Weapons [+] to hit\u201d or Magic Weapon Damage Die Up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Things like a dire shadow bear that can be turned in to a statue by stabbing it in the heart with a silver dagger? Excellent! Idiosyncratic and great! I\u2019m not morally opposed to a funhouse room; they are not my favorite, I prefer cohesive design, but I recognize them as a thing. But, the minimal encounters, lack of effort in a third of the rooms, and incomplete data in the other ?\u2019s, along with map legibility issues? A hand drawn cover is only going to get you so far with me. That charm has to pay off, and it doesn\u2019t. In the same vein, but less coherent, as Unbalanced Dice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $7. The preview is eight pages but doesn\u2019t really show you any encounters. Maybe check out that last page for the flying tree thing to start to get the right ideas about how it is written.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/366931\/Nutmeg-in-the-Dark?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Edward Deboinare Esoterik Games Knave level 1 Something has happened to the northern mountain pass, those who have survived to  return reported the smell of nutmeg before their party was ambushed in the dark. The town guard is raising … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7552,"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-7554","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\/09\/nutmeg.gif","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554","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=7554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7555,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7554\/revisions\/7555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}