{"id":7717,"date":"2022-01-05T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-01-05T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7717"},"modified":"2021-12-25T13:00:22","modified_gmt":"2021-12-25T18:00:22","slug":"vault-of-the-warlord-no-artpunk-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=7717","title":{"rendered":"Vault of the Warlord (No Artpunk #7?)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Number seven(?) in an eight-part series. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince\u2019s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle in, I\u2019m reviewing one adventure at a time. Also, I admit that an orgy of women, wine, bread, circuses, and self-absorbed loathing kept me from reading Prince\u2019s commentary earlier. So I\u2019m going in to this blind. Let\u2019s see what \u201cwinning\u201d entries look like, shall we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vault of the Warlord\nBy Justin Todd\n1e\nLevels 1-3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This twenty page adventure features a dungeon with thirty rooms as well as a nearby town and wilderness area. It\u2019s got a Deathtrap vibe, but not an unfair one. A good example of pushing your luck, over and over again. Smart play yields rewards. It\u2019s also a little light on the evocative text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What a strange little adventure. Strange in a good way. It feels like one of those dungeons of old. Multiple entrances ,lots of whit to fuck with. Almost verging on a funhouse vibe, but never crossing the line in that territory. I can see analogies to Tomb of Horrors, without as much Deathtrap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We get a small town nearby. A temple the party can take over and get worshippers, a wise woman and her witch sister. A thief to fence shit \u2026 that may screw the party over. And the local lord who \u201cwill house & feed a man, provided he submits to bathing.\u201d Specificity. That\u2019s what he town has. Little details like that the DM can riff off of. Just enough description to run it and riff. Which is the way I like things in town. The town provides rumors to a cursed dungeon, and off to th wilderness the party goes. To find a number of interesting encounters, from a bandit gang, to Karl the Ogre \u2026 who is a troll cursed to not harm men except in self defense. A tribe of giant beavers has build a great dam \u2026 and underneath is the dungeon. If you get them to drain the lake, or do it against their will, you will get a new dungeon enctrance. One of several scattered throughout the region, from traditional entrances to others like the beaver lake or one guarded by Karl. It all kind of works together. There\u2019s a kind of mellow vibe to the writing, but the encounters make sense and have just enough detail to generally bring them to life, with a few exceptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dungeon proper is basically a giant room with several doors off of it, and several side corridors with rooms off of them. It\u2019s an interesting design, and reminds me a bit of Mordenkainen’s Fantastic Adventure. There are flooded areas and partially flooded areas \u2026 or maybe not depending on your beaver damn experiences \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
 Formatting is good and easy to use and scan. The encounters are interactive. Some sodium bricks for your flooded water journey. Or finding a coffin with a staked vampire in it \u2026 and some magical swords at his side. What to do what to do? The pushing your luck thing. You know what\u2019s gonna happen. Nother vampire has stakes through her eyes and is weakened \u2026 a continual threat. A ceiling held up by an immovable rod. You want the rob, don\u2019t you? Treasure can be generous \u2026 but it\u2019s always got something going on, like the vampire, or the ceiling, or swords that are catatonic until something else happens. You\u2019re gonna have to work for shit. It\u2019s the Hidden Depth that is sometimes talked about \u2026 but not the depth that is esoterically twelve layers deep. It\u2019s accessible and approachable by the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is the writing that I\u2019d like to comment most on. It\u2019s terse. Maybe too much so. The situations are interesting, and they work together to give you a good sense of the place, but the individual encounters can lack quite a bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere is an enormous set of Drums of Panic stored here.\u201d Well, ok. Not much really interesting or evocative about that description is there? Either for the room or for the drums? Or, maybe something like \u201cThis area contain the ruined bodies of several cultists, with only tatterred robes and skeletal or desiccated remains.\u201d That\u2019s in a room with the title \u201cProfane Temple.\u2019 You need to run with that. Or \u201chundreds of corpses are piled & stacked here \u2026\u201d These are not bad words in and of themself (though I could take exception to the \u201cthis area contains \u2026\u201d padding) but there is just nothing more beyond that. I could use just a sentence more, on the context the object is in, and maybe a descriptive word or two more for the object itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, and some rooms have something that could be considered either read-aloud or a DM overview. It\u2019s cringe. \u201cThe air is stale & fetid. Too-cold water laps the knees. Death visited this place.\u201d Uh huh. That\u2019s a little fantasy novelist try-hard. There ARE zombies under that water, which is a classic encounter, and one of them has a jewel in its gut. Yeah for gutting monsters like I am 13YO again! So, great encounters, but the writing needs to be bumped up a notch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru, with a suggested price of $10. Proceeds are going to the Autism Research Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/379533\/No-ArtPunk-Vol-1?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Number seven(?) in an eight-part series.  This is a compilation of the best eight entries from Prince\u2019s recent No ArtPunk contest. Basically, you had to use published monsters, magic items, etc, with one unique allowance allowed in each category. Settle … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7698,"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":[29,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeons-dragons-adventure-review","category-no-regerts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/noart.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7717","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=7717"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7745,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7717\/revisions\/7745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}