{"id":8795,"date":"2023-10-09T07:12:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-09T11:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8795"},"modified":"2023-09-26T11:14:48","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T15:14:48","slug":"castle-ravir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8795","title":{"rendered":"Castle Ravir"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By The Basic Expert\nThe Basic Expert\nOSR\n\"Mid to High\" Levels<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The castle is named after the black dragon Ravir the Black who lives there. He has accrued followers who are helping him gain treasure (through violence), in order for him to use the treasure in a draconic ritual to achieve godhood. This is a great adventure for mid to higher-level characters that can be dropped into your campaign anywhere where you have a marsh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This twenty page dungeon has about sixty rooms on six levels. It\u2019s got a dragon on the last level, and is devoid of the life that makes a good product come alive, instead substituting padding and backstory in the rooms descriptions \u2026 when there are some.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, ruined castle in a marsh. The dragon that lives there extort caravans passing by, enriching himself, blah blah blah, needs the cash to become a god. Vaguely Hoard of Tiamaty. He\u2019s collected a following of humanoids that worships him. Which is just a pretext to shove in a bunch of different humanoid types for the party to fight. Lizardmen, orcs, goblins, kobolds, and evil men, among others. But, hey hey, don\u2019t worry, while they don\u2019t get along they put all of their differences aside when it comes to protecting the dragon, so, no faction play. Note how we are now up to two pretexts, before the dungeon even starts, to justify having a monster zoo to just stab and nothing else. No order of battle, just entering rooms and stabbing shit. No NPC play, just entering rooms and stabbing shit. You enjoy that. So much more could have been done if there were factions, or, even if ANY references were made to the cult-like behavior of the people inside. Instead we get \u201cCleric level 3.\u201d You gotta imagine this shit first. What\u2019s going on? How do people in the real world act? Then, after coming up with some good, solid shit you can go stat it out. Otherwise you just get \u201cCleric level 3\u201d in a room for you to stab. what fun \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s see, a wanderers table. Yup, they are doing nothing. Orcs, goblins, lizardmen, bandits, gnolls, kobolds, ogres, evil men. Perfectly boring with no flavour to the thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our room descriptions almost always start with \u201cRoom 1 – This room is \u2026\u201d or some slight variation. This room appears to be. Sometimes the designer steps it up with \u201c8 goblins are in this room\u201d or some such. That\u2019s why we don\u2019t call things \u201croom 1, instead we say \u201c1 – Makeshift Guardroom\u201d and then go on to describe the room. All of this is bad padding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s a lot of appears to be and seems to be thrown in.There\u2019s a lot of backstory mixed in to the rooms, sometimes half or a third of a column of information that is completely useless. This isn\u2019t a historical document, it\u2019s a document meant to be used to run a game at the table. Monsters are just mixed in to the text with no formatting, so, good luck pulling out the information you need to run a game. \u201cGenerally there are no guards here.\u201d Great, so there are no guards here. Are there generally gods here? Or elephants? \u201cThis is the kitchen for the caste (or what is currently being used as a kitchen \u2026\u201d and then describes a kitchen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes the descriptions get REALLY good. Like \u201cAn evil level 3 cleric is in this room along with five goblins.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Minimal statting, if it weren\u2019t for the padded out backstory and text. There\u2019s nothing to this adventure, beyond what you might get in Palace fo the Vampire Queen. Sure, more words, but to no other effect. Enjoy your land of imagination!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $4 at DriveThru, with one five star rating, of course. You\u2019ll get a few pages of rooms in the preview, so, enough to figure things out on your own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/413187\/Castle-Ravir?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By The Basic Expert The Basic Expert OSR “Mid to High” Levels The castle is named after the black dragon Ravir the Black who lives there. He has accrued followers who are helping him gain treasure (through violence), in order … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/ravir.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8795","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=8795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8796,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8795\/revisions\/8796"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}