{"id":8483,"date":"2023-03-18T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-18T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8483"},"modified":"2023-03-06T12:10:53","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T17:10:53","slug":"curse-of-the-blood-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8483","title":{"rendered":"Curse of the Blood Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By John Cavalcante\nSelf Published\nOSE\nLevel 1<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
In the borderlands of a dying empire, in the Duchy of Gauvadan, the village of Braildorn now cowers in fear. This is the birthplace of the Blood Treatment: a miraculous Panacea created by the arcane scholars of Liardnia University with otherworldly influence. However, the days of prosperity and miracles would end soon. With the mysterious fall of the University, came a curse: The surrounding forest, once blessed by the fey, was transfigured into a cursed and dangerous swamp. People now are disappearing in the dead of night, and the noble house is the prime suspect to be behind everything, arousing anti-empire separatist sentiment. In these dangerous times, only one question remains: What will you do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 48 page adventure (riffing on Bloodborne) uses around eleven pages to describe about fifty rooms in a three level mansion in a \u201cgothic with some firearms\u201d setting. The writing is terse and well formatted. It does not make me hate my life. It also brings me no joy, lacking interactivity and evocative descriptions and scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, I feel like maybe I need a new category: \u201cObviously, you tried.\u201d Because dude tried. There is a certain \u201cspirit of the OSR\u201d present in this adventure, a kind of kit-bashing that was prevalent in the early OSR days. Dude has grabbed some house rules from other OSR products, and, perhaps, even some room ideas. The map is easy to read and there are AT LEAST four ways from the first floor to the second in the mansion. The keys start with a bolded room name \u201cLiving Room\u201d and are followed by a short description and then some bullets for things going on in the room. The mansion tropes are here. Body in the chimney. Dude tried. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are a couple of things that are pulling this adventure down. Well, more than a couple, but two major ones. There need to be more cross-references in the text to make locations data, especially named NPCs, easier. The rumors are pretty generic, like \u201cThe house is now haunted because a wizard did it.\u201d and so on. And the layout, the size of the map, is relatively small, at twenty rooms for each of the main levels. It\u2019s just hard to get a really good environment going with that without some really good situations. The major issues, however, are interactivity and descriptions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The descriptions here are terse \u2026 and minimal. Nothing wrong with terse, that\u2019s what they should be. But, also, they are minimal. We don\u2019t really get the flavour of the room. The pantry says that it has naked walls with shelves full of rotten ingredients, and also kitchen and dining tools. Sure. That\u2019s a pantry in a haunted house. We\u2019re starting off pretty well with \u201cnaked walls\u201d, but then it drags to just a standard description of a pantry. Peeling wallpaper. A jumble of collapsed shelves. The smell of old cinnamon. . A jumble of beaten up pots? We\u2019re really looking to bring this room alive, and it\u2019s just not going there. The kitchen next doors has \u201cA central cooking table with a mutilated corpse in it, and 5 Ghouls in chef\u2019s garb using rusty tools to prepare the meat and hurl it into a boiling suspicious soup.\u201d So, the same kitchen in just about every haunted house adventure. A boiling soup can be great, but suspicious is a conclusion rather than a description. Mutilated is a little abstract for the horror that the kitchen scene is supposed to be conveying, and our ghoul friends are rather perfunctory with no description to speak of at all. The place abounds in \u201creligious frescoes\u201d with little more to go on. And by \u201clittle\u201d I mean \u201cnothing\u201d. The rest of the adventure is more of the same. A degree of writing that is is trying, but the words choice, or the ability to convey the imagined room via the written room, in order to convey it to the DM, just isn\u2019t getting there at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interactivity is about the same. We\u2019ve seen the ghouls in the kitchen. The rest of the rooms pretty much fall in to this same category. You can stab things, of course. And there are, to it\u2019s credit, a decent number of things to talk to, especially among the servants. The interactivity, though, is fairly lacking. You get a body in a carpet of smoothing, the kitchen ghouls, a poltergeist playing a piano to summon specters (at level one!) and so on. Thus, our interactivity is somewhat related to combat, and generally to how combat starts. That\u2019s not bad, in and of itself, but it\u2019s lack of interactivity beyond this that drags the place down. We want things to investigate, leverage, figure out, discover, and so on. A challenge beyond merely what\u2019s on the character sheet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is, at its heart, a pretty standard haunted mansion adventure. We\u2019ve got the undead running around, a couple of barely functioning servants, a ghost butler, dead-ish family members, and so on. Shadowbrook and Xyntillian remain the gold standard in this genre, towering above everything else. This is an also ran, but a good first effort for the designer!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is 24 pages \u2026 more than enough to get a sense of the product and the the rooms. So, good <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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By John Cavalcante Self Published OSE Level 1 In the borderlands of a dying empire, in the Duchy of Gauvadan, the village of Braildorn now cowers in fear. This is the birthplace of the Blood Treatment: a miraculous Panacea created … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8482,"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-8483","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\/2023\/03\/blood.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8483","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=8483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8484,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8483\/revisions\/8484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}