{"id":8582,"date":"2023-05-22T07:07:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T11:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8582"},"modified":"2023-05-09T09:09:10","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T13:09:10","slug":"hard-ticket-to-lud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8582","title":{"rendered":"Hard Ticket to Lud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Noora Rose\nMonkey's Paw Games\nOSR\nLevel 1<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
In the Long-Ago, this was not a marsh but a rugged mountain, ruled by a fierce people of stone with singular, burning eyes. The remains of their Empire lie scattered about the marsh, in places called taboo by the Luds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 42 page adventure is a hex crawl with about eighteen hexes detailed. The hexes are decent enough situations. There is a distinct lack of adventure motivation, though, and a descriptive style that meanders a little too much for my tastes. It\u2019s a decent idea for an adventure that is not executed as well as it could be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, You\u2019re staying a little village town one night and it gets attacked by four titans. This is a level one adventure, so, they are more environmental than creature. Anyway, they destroy the place. Ok. So. Now what? *twiddles thumbs* Oh, they attacked another place in the swamp also and destroyed it. Ok. And \u2026.? I guess the party looks in to things on their own or some such? There\u2019s really no motivation for the party to do anything in this adventure, and there\u2019s no advice to the DM to get things moving or the party involved. What\u2019s actually happening is that an escalade slave was in town with an artifact and the titans are showing up to get it back. The dude wanders the hex map and the titans show up wherever he is to destroy it. There\u2019s supposed to be, I think, this great refugee clogged area, in a swamp, and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each location has a little blurb about it. They are generally decent with some situation going on interesting enough for the party to interact or poke around in, for the most part. There are a few too many \u201cruined city\u201d locales with rado destroyed building searches, but, whatever. Those are always a pain to handle well and never are anyway, in any adventure. Wanna get rich in the OSR? Figure that out and make $5. Anyway, each location finishes up with two little sections: one details what is going on if the escaped slave is there and the other details what happened\/location changes if the titans have been through. Nice enough. The dude wanders around randomly but the text tells us that \u201cthere\u2019s always some clue as to which way he went.\u201d Which is hanging statement if I\u2019ve ever read one. There is no advice to the DM to keep these clues  fresh and interesting. So, good luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rumor table is ok, as if the wanderers table, who are doing things. Good things? Meh. \u201cA swirling, buzzing cloud of mosquitoes. Perched over a corpse.\u201d Ok, sure.. Not really a situation. The NPCs present are fairly well described. Some sentences that give their appearance and motivations\/quicks  pretty well. Something short to hang your hat on when running them. Three asshole soldiers from a nearby Baddy Empire will  \u201cAt the first sign of trouble all three will don conical bronze helms with chain veils and flee, stabbing anyone who steps in their way\u201d Yeah, I can run that. And, all of the descriptions in the adventure are fairly well done. They do have enough specificity to start brining the area to life without really going on too long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But there\u2019s a caveat to that statement. ALl of the descriptions are also too long. Padded out. How can it be both? Well if you just deleted the padding then you\u2019d have a pretty focused and decent description. \u201cThere are ancient etchings upon the dolmens, their meaning lost to the elements and the Long-Ago, but each standing stone bears a small stone votive-bowl at the base\u201d So, if I just deleted the \u201ctheir meaning lost to the elements and the Long-Ago,\u201d then it would be a decent description. Terse, with some decent specificity. Dolmens. Moss-covered. The etchings are ancient. Stone votive-bowls. Not bad. Not rock star, but not bad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And thus it is with just about everything in this. It\u2019s ok. Those wanderers are better than most adventures use, but really still not great. The hex descriptions are ok, better than a decent number of adventure in giving us situations for the party to work through or use to their advantage. But, still, padded out and you have to dig through them to run them, as with the NPC\u2019s. Monster descriptions are almost there, almost giving a description of the monster instead of their society, etc. Everything int he adventure is almost where. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just like the core concept idea. Sure, you\u2019re chasing this dude through the swamps, I guess, while the four titans follow behind with their destruction. But there\u2019s no real motivation to do so. Why not just move on? And if it is a more typical hex crawl, with just the slave and titans as window dressing \u2026 I don\u2019t know. It doesn\u2019t seem like there\u2019s enough here to take advantage of. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think the entire thing just needed a little bit more work. A little bit more trimming\/focus. A little bit more on the chase\/motivations, and the window dressing of the refugees. A little bit more, in just about every single aspect of the adventure. It is interesting to see, though, something come so close in so many different areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $10 at DriveThru. The preview is ten pages. You get to see the first hex location, Lud proper, but it\u2019s not really a great indication of the hex situations to come. The descriptive style, both positive and negative, are fully on display though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/397329\/Hard-Ticket-to-Lud?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Noora Rose Monkey’s Paw Games OSR Level 1 In the Long-Ago, this was not a marsh but a rugged mountain, ruled by a fierce people of stone with singular, burning eyes. The remains of their Empire lie scattered about … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8580,"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-8582","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\/05\/lud.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8582","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=8582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8583,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8582\/revisions\/8583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}