{"id":8676,"date":"2023-07-22T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-22T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8676"},"modified":"2023-07-10T08:37:53","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T12:37:53","slug":"stirring-of-the-slumbering-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8676","title":{"rendered":"Stirring of the Slumbering God"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\nBy Ethan B\nNo Artpunk #2\nOSE\nLevels 3-5<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The frontier town of Vacuous Hollow is on a precipice of chaos. Wizards of some kind are digging in places they should not, trying to be sneaky about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 28 page adventure is bat shit crazy. A couple of dungeon locations, flavour out the ass in every aspect of the adventure\/ The rantings of the deluded entice for those who can withstand studying them. A mess. A glorious glorious mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Humite! Humite! Humite! Kumite! Oh, wait, no, it\u2019s the Black Lotus Society in this adventure, not the Black Dragon Society. Shit. Anyway, I gave my only skillet away yesterday, so this morning I got nothing to cook an egg in. So, it\u2019s back to breakfast Chartreuse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ethan B has got it going on. A HUGE number of elements are present in this adventure. Everything every adventure has ever, in the history of the world, included is also included in this adventure. You want an intro? You got a short little intro that ends with \u201cDon\u2019t despair for the future. Like plagues and famines, an ancient chaos god is just another disaster. The world has seen worse apocalypses. It always recovers.\u201d You want rumours? You got rumors. \u201cThe Green Dragon of Viper Rock has stopped demanding whiskey, and it\u2019s piling up. (T) The thing must be dead (F) but nobody has been brave enough to check (T).\u201d Fucking flavour man.  You want hooks? You got some fucking hooks. A madman with ten rings to give, a wizard who encourages you to throw a broick through a window or something to fuck with his buddies digging up the god. Timeline? Sure. It includes a nice blood rain and meat spoiling under starlight. Oh, and the chais god waking up. \u201cOr you can just ignore him. He won\u2019t be a problem in your lifetime. Unless you\u2019re an elf.\u201d The wizards in question who are digging dude up like to do a horoscope once a week to determine their actions. One of the portents? \u201cA group of killers with no home will raid your domain and ruin your plans.\u201d Sometimes it rains. How about some changing shit in one of the caves, it flooding. Are we are the blood rain level yet? \u201cAfter the first flooding from blood, the floor will have an inch of congealed blood crawling with maggots and flies and ghastly beetles\u201d There\u2019s a little regional encounter things. There\u2019s wanderers. A couple of dungeons. A little town of, like three businesses described, just the shit you need. Dude in the church can \u201cprovide healing services at a generous rate of 5000gp and a Geas \u2026 usually a forbiddance from harming snakes.\u201d That\u2019s all you\u2019re fucking getting, besides a little price list and name. Fucking A man, that\u2019s what ytou need from the church in town and the dude delivers it  PERFECTLY. It\u2019s aimed at actual play in so many ways. Just enough to bring the encounter to life with the name and the geas shit \u2026 I can riff the shit out of that. And a little nod to the mechanics of play with the price list and utility of wanting\/needing a healer in town. The town has \u201cenough industry to equip an expedition in to the dungeon.\u201d YUpyup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dude has packed a bunch of shit in to this adventure. It\u2019s mostly a disorganized mess, or, close to being so anyway. But man, that fucking content is wonderful isn\u2019t it? Dude is delivering the flavour. The specificity that brings something to life, that inspires the DM so that they can riff on it. He\u2019s delivering it, page after page. Never baroque, but delivering just enough stabs of it to run a mother fucking game of Dungeon and fucking Dragons man! A beatutful woman, appearing as a blue misty form \u2026 as she gets closer it turns to a black mist and an ugly hag. Know what that is? It\u2019s a wraith. Fuck you, every single one of you pieces of shit that have described a wraith as \u201ca wraith.\u201d Fucking delivers man, just like this dude has. Angrily weedeater giant wasps. Good descriptions. These descriptions are specific. It delivers a sentence that is specific and moves on. It doesn\u2019t pile on with line after line of overwrought description. Here\u2019s your specificity, here\u2019s your mechanics. Here\u2019s your oob. Lets keep this thing moving along. It\u2019s very good in this respect. The specificity, and thus ability to inspire the DM with a single line of description, is among the best I\u2019ve seen. Hey, man, also, I learned, from this adventure that people without a face have a CHA of 3.. Sly little comments. Great little encounters. I\u2019m in LUV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, mostly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thing is a mess. I\u2019m being more than a little hyperbolic here, but still. I can, perhaps, forgive the timeline, weather, regions, town, rumors, etc. All the extra shit, not being the best organized and integrated. That\u2019s a tough thing to get right for a DM to run during play. I am less forgiving on actual encounters. Scattering important description elements throughout the encounter. What room am I in? It\u2019s in the second paragraph. How many things are trying to eat me? It\u2019s at the end of the description. It\u2019s not so much excess words. I think the adventure does a good job of keeping things relatively tight. But it is the order in which those words appear. A good rewrite here would help a lot in the individual encounters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this isn\u2019t enough to make you turn away from the adventure. It\u2019s got a love of D&D written all over it. The tough of absurdity that makes a good D&D adventure, without it being gonzo or a jokey adventure. Great encounters. Great detail. Maybe the last few encounters on the last level of the dungeon are a little weak. But otherwise full of gold. I\u2019m drinking at 7:30am on a Monday morning, your adventure doesn\u2019t make me hate my life, and I no longer own a skillet. Have a Best and do better next time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/princeofnothing.itch.io\/no-artpunk-ii<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Ethan B No Artpunk #2 OSE Levels 3-5 The frontier town of Vacuous Hollow is on a precipice of chaos. Wizards of some kind are digging in places they should not, trying to be sneaky about it. This 28 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,10,3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeons-dragons-adventure-review","category-level-4","category-reviews","category-the-best"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/pHPHeu8OCnETcx932iG4ymm4jN3eBJ_Li3tUKXATMb0.webp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8676","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=8676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8678,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8676\/revisions\/8678"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}