{"id":8205,"date":"2022-09-24T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-24T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8205"},"modified":"2022-09-12T20:59:40","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T00:59:40","slug":"the-lurkers-of-bridgely-vale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8205","title":{"rendered":"The Lurkers of Bridgely Vale"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Kiera Kaine\nPig Faced Games\nHeroes & Hatchets\nLevel 1-<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
South of the Grey Mountains lies the sleepy coastal plain of Bridgely Vale. Its ancient roadways, forests and settlements are seldom frequented by travellers these days. Only the harbour town of Bridgely sees much activity, as a transportation hub for the silver mined in prosperous Farely to the north. However, the land holds many secrets: forgotten ruins, hidden caves and lurking ne’er-do-wells. For those with a taste for adventure, it may be closer than first appears\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 72 page adventure details a small region and six or so dungeons, using about fifty pages for them. The dungeons are not bad, from an interactivity standpoint, and have some interesting NPC\u2019s in them, but the entire text is so busy it\u2019s hard to focus on the rooms at hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m going to skip over the region and town portion of this. It\u2019s just fairly generic fantasy trope stuff, with too much information on the NPC\u2019s and businesses. There are exceptions to this, including a guy who \u201cproudly sells his Gastronic Neuronic Tonic for 10 silver. It is bright green and glows in the dark. He won\u2019t reveal any ingredients, only that they are \u2018natural\u2019.\u201d That\u2019s a decent little NPC\u2019 tidbit. And, that\u2019s par for the NPC\u2019s found in the dungeons. They are usually interesting in some way or another and facilitate dialog well, with negotiation being possible here and there. I\u2019m down for that. They are usually too wordy, but, then again, the entire thing is too wordy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The product has \u201cadventures\u201d and \u201cdungeons.\u201d The adventures are pretty poor. The first involves killing a dog. That\u2019s exciting, eh? Oh, wait, no, you can\u2019t kill it, or you don\u2019t get the reward. It\u2019s fucking posossed, man! There\u2019s also a little fight on a derelict ship that\u2019s got some bogus rules like \u201cif you fail your dex check by 5 you crash through to a lower deck\/into the ocean. That\u2019s a lot of fail for a routine check! Anyway, there are three or four little adventures that are all pretty poor. At one point you have to search a forest for a druid, and the DM is told they won\u2019t find the druid unless they take pity on them. Hmmm \u2026 I see issues there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the major problem with the first part of the product. It\u2019s uselessly padded out. \u201cIzzi\u2019s real name is Jemma. She is an orphan and despite being regularly teased about her timid and somewhat dreamy nature, she is a hard worker and treated kindly by the patrons. She secretly dreams of better things and is intelligent but entirely uneducated.\u201d Great. Nothing of use in that description.  \u201cSylvia agrees to help in any way she can, although she is tired and upset and won\u2019t fight\u201d \u2026 so, she doesn\u2019t actually help? In a section on captured bandits you are trying to get information from:  \u201cThe constabulary, sheriff or magistrate will not stand for any form of torture\u201d Fire & torture man. Fire & torture. Actuallly, I\u2019m being a little unfair on that last one. The captured bandits are decent, pleading to lesser crimes, or they were just camping out, etc. Maybe they could use a brief personality, each, but otherwise it\u2019s not bad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dungeon are a different matter. The maps are done in some colorful cartography tool and, while they show terrain and light (yeah!) they are pretty busy overall. This makes grokking them a little hard. And, there\u2019s no grid, so get out your tape measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The interactivity in them, though, is far far better than the adventures. Almost as if there were separate authors. There\u2019s shit to talk to (a decent amount, actually) and maybe barter with or negotiate with. There\u2019s statues to fuck with, fungi to eat, and so on. And some terrain features, like ledges and logs to cross over chasms on. It\u2019s a decent amount of variety. The maps are a little small, maybe ten rooms to a level, which limits things more than a little. Somehow strung together though it would be a decent little dungeon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a small read-aloud for each room. They can sometimes get just to the edge of being too long, but never fully go there, which is a good thing. The read-aloud is more than a little boring, using \u201cdirty cage\u201d and \u201csmall bell\u201d for example. Actually, here\u2019s the full read-aloud for that room: \u201cFixed to the wall opposite the door is a large fountain, artfully carved to look like a seashell with the figure of a mermaid spewing clear water into a basin. A jumbled assortment of supplies are stored here. A dirty cage sits in one corner, inside of which hangs a small bell.\u201d That\u2019s not the worlds worst read-aloud. You can see that the designer is trying to do a good job. It doesn\u2019t get purple, and is focused, generally, on the interactive elements the party would want to mess with. Which is what it should do. There\u2019s a miss or two that stand out in the text, like not mentioning skeletons in alcoves in a crypt room, but the overall content is not bad. I can take quite a bit of exception with the evocative nature of the writing though. It just doesn\u2019t grab you. It comes across, I think, as more of a mechanical effort in writing. On the one hand, I don\u2019t want to knock that, You SHOULD work your descriptions alot. And the evocative writing element is, I think, one of the hardest parts of putting an adventure down on paper. The ability to transmit a vision is a hard thing to master. And yet, it\u2019s 2022 and there\u2019s A LOT of adventure competition out there; workmanlike content is only going to get you so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The worst part is the rooms, proper, and specifically the DM text. It\u2019s pretty common for a room to take up a full column of text. Some of this is from a stat block format that lists creature abilities out in a 3e\/4e like format, with full text. That takes a lot of space and I can\u2019t imagine digging through that in the middle of a combat. But, also, the DM text proper is long and \u2026 meandering? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the shorter rooms DM text reads \u201cThe room is home to two devil mice. The kobolds<\/p>\n\n\n\n
have been trying to tame them to be guard animals, with little success so far (their current feast is the last kobold trainer). The tapestry either confirms what the characters already know of the surrounding area or it could contain some clues to further adventures as the GM sees fit, especially since it was made many years ago.\u201d We\u2019ll ignore the \u201cDM fill in the details portion; that\u2019s just bad. But note how the feasting devil mice are referred to. It\u2019s almost an aside, and buried in the text. With some embedded background. Better something like \u201ctwo wire-haired coal black vermin with glowing crimson eyes rip and tear and a bloody body\u201d or some such. (I just did that on the fly, don\u2019t be mean to me.) That gets you what you want, some detail on the monster and what they are doing in a manner that communicates the scene. As written it\u2019s almost clinical; a travelog. And not a very exciting one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This happens in every room in the adventure. Far, far, far too much text and written in this sort of oblique way that makes it hard to reference during play. It needs to be trimmed. It needs to be worked. You want a direct writing style. A trend towards terseness. Only the information that\u2019s relevant to the adventure at hand. None of this \u201cwas once\u201d shit that permeates the text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Work that fucking text until you are fucking sick of it and never want to see it again. And then work it some more! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could suffer through this, I guess, for the content. It\u2019s not altogether bad content, the dungeons proper anyway. But why? There are better choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $6 at DriveThru. The preview is a poor one, only showing you four pages and only general regional fantasy garbage trope stuff. We need to see some rooms, some parts of the adventures, to make an informed buying decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/389531\/The-Lurkers-of-Bridgely-Vale?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Kiera Kaine Pig Faced Games Heroes & Hatchets Level 1- South of the Grey Mountains lies the sleepy coastal plain of Bridgely Vale. Its ancient roadways, forests and settlements are seldom frequented by travellers these days. Only the harbour … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8203,"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-8205","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\/2022\/09\/vale.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8205","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=8205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8206,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8205\/revisions\/8206"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}