{"id":8312,"date":"2022-11-28T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8312"},"modified":"2022-11-15T10:44:53","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T15:44:53","slug":"the-wondrous-hoard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8312","title":{"rendered":"The Wondrous Hoard"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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By Jokin Andersson, Johan Nordinge, Olav Nygard\nCyclopean Games\nS&W\nLevel 2? They never say ... ?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
There once lived a Moon Sage in a wondrous palace. Dilimbabbar\u2014for such was his name\u2014was a leader of armies and a scholar of the night sky. In his palace, he collected wondrous things and hoarded riches beyond belief. He summoned servants from the ether and demons from the earth to bring treasures no mortal eyes had ever seen. But that was long ago, before the flood washed over the lands. Now, the Sage is lost to an unknown fate, his powers having faltered. Yet his palace remains, brimming with wealth locked away in the vacant halls. …or so travelers say, telling tales to each other under starlit skies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This sixteen page adventure uses five pages to describe sixteen rooms in an arabian nights\/sumerian type setting. Decent interactivity, but a shit way of presenting it that I\u2019m not gonna dig through in order to run it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seems unfair, right? I mean, you come up with an ok adventure and then it gets ignored because you wrote it in Basque in iambic pentameter. Cause there\u2019s 600 hundred other adventures that are ok, or better, and easier to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s cover some random encounters! I fucking love them in this, and when I saw them I was cautiously optimistic about the adventure to come. \u201cThe warm wind brings the laughing voices of a group of women, bathing in an azure pond of remarkable depth.\u201d Hey, man, that will get some players attention! And, for once, they ain\u2019t Oh Brother sirens! Or, how about \u201cA long line of prisoners of war are being escorted to Sippar by a troop of well-armed soldiers. One of the prisoners is an Akkadian prince, promising a bountiful reward if he were to be freed and brought to his kinfolks in Ashur\u201d. Where \u201ctroop\u201d is define as \u201c74\u201d \u2026 which seems a little large to get up to some fun, but, still \u2026 that\u2019s a great concept! And the random encounters on the way to dungeon are pretty much all like this. A bolded sentence that grabs you and a follow up sentence that only adds to it. Really top notch chance encounters. In contrast to the actual wanderers in the dungeon, which are, like \u201c1d10 centipedes.\u201d Meh. Ok, then how about \u201c1d6 skeletons\u201d? No. Yeah, me neither. A real disappointment after those desert encounters. (Which, I will continue to praise on, are REALLY fucking good for their size. Like, hex crawl good.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, you\u2019re going on The Wonderous Hoard adventure and you\u2019re hired to go to the dungeon and bring back this mask. And told you can only take two things from the dungeon or you\u2019ll be cursed or something. Grrrr \u2026 ok. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m down with that. It absolutely fits the theme of the arabian nights\/folklore thing this adventure has going on. Almost every creature is a person or demon or insect\/animal, so, it\u2019s got the human-centric\/realism thing down pat, which I groove on, and the \u201conly take two each\u201d fits in with that. And if you do take more than two then theres this chance of not escaping the dungeon and being cursed afterwards \u2026 more for each thing beyond two each. So. Ok. It\u2019s a different vibe, I guess, which is ok. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, the actual adventure. It\u2019s ok. The rooms have some decent things in them to interact with. A hallway in tiles of glazed clay in blue and black \u2026 the severed corpse of an adventurer in the middle of it. That\u2019s fun! And the man, dressed as if from Sippar, carries a healing potion  of the sort sometimes sold in the foreigners district – in a small leather pouch. That\u2019s hw you integrate extra fucking information. Not quite the usual evocative writing, but something behind it. Or, how about the Moon Beasts room! \u201cA giant centipede lies coiled in the middle of the lower room, preternatural frost radiating from its body. It is chained by silver shackles to a large meteoric rock that prevents it from climbing the balcony, but not from moving freely\u2014albeit with some effort\u2014across the rest of the room.\u201d I love a truly giant centipede \u2026 especially as a moon beast!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then the magic items are great also. The Bone Crown brings back to life anyone who wears it. Until they take it off and they drop dead again. How fun! The \u201cmundane\u2019 magic items gets a little bit of fun to them and a large percentage are non-standard. A good mix, with everything done well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But man, that fucking text is a fucking mess. \u201cIt was here that the moon sage rested between his campaigns.\u201d So the fuck what? How does that contribute to play at the table? More importantly, lets look at the COMPLETE CHAOS that is the room organization in this. I present room two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Taking up a column (not unusual here, for the text to stretch out that far in this adventure), we get a room with walls covered with shelves stacked with cuneiform tablets. Which contain astrological calculations and formulas. Then we get notes about a secret door in the room. THen the same paragraph tells us about glass vials and amphorea with strange infusions scattered on the floor, some broken. Then what in the vials. Then that there\u2019s a robe in the corner of the room. Then a paragraph break to tell us about the robe. Then another paragraph to tell us about a big round rock sitting in one of the wall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s almost a stream of consciousness writing style, for organizing the text. SOmething gets mentioned, then some details about that. Then something else gets mentioned in the same paragraph. With details about that. Thus, any overview of the room requires a full on grokking of the room. You can\u2019t scan the text, at least not easily. And then shit just shows up elsewhere in the room descriptions, in other paragraphs, There seems to be no  overarching format at all other than \u201cI guess I\u2019ll put this here now.\u201d And that\u2019s not cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Either giove an overview of everything in the room, up front, that the players will notice, or separate them out in to separate paragraphs, Or put them in bullets. Or something. But I, as the DM, need to be able, when the party enters the room, relate to obvious contents in split second. A second, maybe two, that’s how long I have to glance at the text Before I start relating shit. And the format chosen needs to support that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this don\u2019t do that. You have to dig. You have to read the entire thing, slowing down the game. You have to hunt for information. I missed the secret door location TWICE in room two, while scanning the room description. That\u2019s not cool. The descriptions are long. They pad out with useless information, and they are arranged in a manner not conducive to running it at the table. Uncool man. Uncool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But man, those random desert encounters \u2026 In the middle of the desert, a city of tents has sprung up. Here, a drunken revelry is held to the deafening sounds of countless cicadas. The ecstatic festivities culminates in an ancient ritual\u2014led by Tuol Aham, a copper skinned priest from Borsippa\u2014where two teenage boys are sacrificed to summon the vile cockroach demon Bahaga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, when you call your adventure The Wonderous Hoard, then, maybe, you should have a wonderous hoard in it?  “There are plenty of precious things in here for example …” (gives three examples …) Hmmm, so, not so much wonderous?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $3 at DriveThru.The preview is five pages. You get to see a good portion of those desert encounters, ad well as the intro. Meh. Show us a fucking room man! Or three! So we can make a real purchasing decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/205392\/The-Wondrous-Hoard-SW-compatible?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jokin Andersson, Johan Nordinge, Olav Nygard Cyclopean Games S&W Level 2? They never say … ? There once lived a Moon Sage in a wondrous palace. Dilimbabbar\u2014for such was his name\u2014was a leader of armies and a scholar of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8306,"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-8312","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\/11\/hoard.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8312","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=8312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8313,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8312\/revisions\/8313"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}