{"id":8732,"date":"2023-08-30T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-30T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8732"},"modified":"2023-08-16T11:40:48","modified_gmt":"2023-08-16T15:40:48","slug":"castle-rabid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8732","title":{"rendered":"Castle Rabid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Kormar Publishing\nKormar Publishing\nOSR\nLevel 3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Deep in the forest, a forsaken keep holds treasure and the secrets of a crown won and lost. Seek fortune in the dust of fallen nobility, navigating through beastmen, a chaos cult, and bizarre sadists from beyond this earthly realm. Beware the horrors of CASTLE RABID!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 25 page digest adventure features a three level dungeon with around 35 rooms. Beastmen, cultists and alien dero are highlighted through a bullet heavy, but clear and evocative writing.The themes are inconsistently displayed, but the individual rooms are solid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beastmen mean Warhammer! And, I guess, weirdo druid-like cult people also mean Warhammer? And Dero! A fine take on dero! To quote their description: \u201calbino knee high freaks, black saucer goggles, totally hairless\u201d And, they bring a little bit of tekno to the table with their pneumatic exsanguinators and etch-a-sketch writing tables that they are always taking notes on. We toss in a few \u201chulking mutants\u201d and we get the low down: dero come up from underground, do some experiments and are taking notes while corrupting the former bandits in a ruined castle, with some cultists thrown in to help control the masses of unwashed they have to deal with. All in the form of a standard three level dungeon crawl. Which, I think, is an issue. But I\u2019ll get to that \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, Gart the hunter got this hunting lodge\/inn thing on the edge of the forbidden forest. His daughters gone missing. He\u2019s pretty sure its those smelly unwashed religious tyes that took out the nearby ruined castle. Or, in the designers words \u201cGart is a fine hunter, but he\u2019s getting old. There are six other kids that need wrangling. He offers a wagon and two draft horses, Bert\u2019s dowry, to anyone who can return his daughter to him alive.\u201d Later ol Gart is referred to as \u201cFather of the year.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the first sign in the adventure that the designer gets it. Those sentences are enough to let me know that something in this adventure is going to be worthwhile. It might be a shitshow of formatting and long text, but dude knows whats up. Joke adventures sucks. But adventures that know that they exist in an absurdist world? It is rare indeed when those are totally fuck ups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The formatting here is going to be controversial. It\u2019s bullets. Like, HARD. CORE. bullet points. Like, three per room or so. SOmetimes more. SOmetimes less. The pure unadulterated lack of shame in JUST using bullets is wild to see. It\u2019s jarring an offputting, but I can\u2019t argue that it doesn\u2019t work.  The first one is usually what you are going to get from approaching a door to the room. The sounds or smells or something. Pretty nice. And then the second is what you would immediately notice. Like, the big ass fucking ogre in the room, who \u201cSupposed to eat trespassers, but has a taste for pack animals and would love a captive audience for his terrible jokes.\u201d And then maybe a tertiary description of the room. \u201cWalls strewn with torn banners, crooked elk heads, and rusted polearms. A skeleton is impaled on one of the elk horns. Rotten smelling furs piled in the center of the room as a bed.\u201d So, first things first, then whats obvious, then the details of the room. That\u2019s exactly how you\u2019re supposed to write the fucking thing. Uh. Like, exactly. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen it done with such rigor before, at least not without those terrible \u201cLight: Door: FIrst Sight: fucking headings that I loathe so much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the writing, the imagining of the room, it\u2019s pretty good. That\u2019s the first room of the dungeon I\u2019ve quoted above. The ogre gets a little detail. Pack animals, captive audience. It could help bring him to life if needed. And the torn banners and CROOKED elk heads? That\u2019s great. Rusted polearms. This room has been IMAGINED and then described. That\u2019s exactly what a room should be handled. A skeleton on an elk horn is just that extra bit to let you know your\u2019e playing D&D. I\u2019m really pretty happy with almost all of the room descriptions, much more so than usual. Not over the top, but a really good job of imagining it. Like those Dero, reimagined as a kind of tiny Grey alien. And cultists wearing furs and animal horns. Beastmen that are beastmen. It\u2019s done well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s no order of battle, which is kind of bad. Treasure seems light? There are a couple of hoards to be found, with spotty treasure description. The  maps are pretty plain affairs, about ten rooms per level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I\u2019ve got a problem with this adventure (and I do) it\u2019s that the vibe is off. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know how to better explain it. It feels disconnected. From itself? I don\u2019t understand it as a \u2026 lair? The beastmen. The cultists. The dero. The other people running around \u2026. It just doesn\u2019t come together as a whole. The individual rooms? Fine. But they don\u2019t seem to be working together. I don\u2019t mean that there\u2019s a red dragon in one room and a gold one in the next room. It\u2019s just that it doesn\u2019t feel like one complex. It never feels like a home to beastment, or cultists, or dero. I don\u2019t know why. SOme sort of disconnect between the rooms? Again, the writing is good and the theming should be, in theory, great, sith the cultists, beastment, dero triad. But they really don\u2019t ever seem to \u2026 riff off of each other? No. I don\u2019t know. They feel disconnected form each other. Yes, I know I\u2019ve said that a few times now. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m trying to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s a decent adventure. If the disconnect thing wasn\u2019t there then it would be a REALLY good adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2.50. The preview is all 25 pages. You can kick some ass with this one, and it doesn\u2019t deserve the three star rating it has on drivethru.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/446647\/Castle-Rabid?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Kormar Publishing Kormar Publishing OSR Level 3 Deep in the forest, a forsaken keep holds treasure and the secrets of a crown won and lost. Seek fortune in the dust of fallen nobility, navigating through beastmen, a chaos cult, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,15,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dungeons-dragons-adventure-review","category-no-regerts","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/rabid.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732","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=8732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8733,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8732\/revisions\/8733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}