{"id":8927,"date":"2023-12-20T07:18:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T12:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8927"},"modified":"2023-12-06T09:20:21","modified_gmt":"2023-12-06T14:20:21","slug":"the-secret-of-cykranosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=8927","title":{"rendered":"The Secret of Cykranosh"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Wayne Rossi\nInitiative One games\nOSR\nLevels 1-3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Bandits have been using a cave as a base to raid caravans, but the learned know that ancient secrets lurk beneath the mountain, and that it was where the ancient sorcerer Eibon was last hiding before his disappearance to far-distant Cykranosh. Unearth the secret!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a six page cave\/dungeon containing eleven rooms. It\u2019s got a little bit of everything, the way an adventure should! You\u2019re not gonna hate your life, either playing it or running it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Caravans are going missing, blah blah blah. It\u2019s a cave, let\u2019s get our fucking noses in to it an explore! Inside you\u2019ll find a eleven room dyson map from 2015 \u2026 which makes sense because this adventure was written in 2015. I don\u2019t know, it finally popped on my list. ANyway, a nice little Dyson map. Some caves, finished rooms, same level stairs, features on the map, tunnels running under another part of the map and a well that leads down in to a lake. Frankly, one of the better Dyson maps I\u2019ve seen. That Exploration pillar that WotC used to like to tout means more than simple box rooms connected by lines. All of those features I mentioned help develop a sense of exploration while playing that puts players in the right frame of mind. In addition to providing features that can work for, or against, the characters during play. Good map, for it\u2019s (small) size.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let\u2019s get to it! Room one is: \u201cThe entrance to the dungeon appears to be a natural cave \u2026\u201d Oh, fuck. Ok, so, yeah. That\u2019s a lot of fucking padding. Telling us what the obvious feature is, the entrance, as well as a great appears to be appearance. The room continues \u201csteps have been hewn into a natural tunnel. The limestone cave is empty and contains natural stalactites and stalagmites. \u201c That\u2019s quite a bit better. We\u2019re not winning any awards here, but it\u2019s terse (even with the padding) and it does paint a decent little picture. I\u2019m not mad at it once the knee-jerk loathing of padding is accounted for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And you\u2019re gonna find much of the same in all of the rooms descriptions in this. It does make an attempt to describe every little thing that Dyson stuck onhis map. So, a room  with an irregular back wall gets this descriptions \u201cThis room bears the scars of heavy objects having been moved through it, but has not been occupied for some time. The well in the center opens a chute to the small lake below. The niche on the back wall has a 3\u2019 wide octagonal scar on it.\u201d That description is significantly weaker than the opening room, with all of the rooms falling somewhere in that spectrum that those two create. Note also the 3\u2019 niche, an attempt to describe that feature on the map \u2026 without really doing anything with it. That\u2019s common here \u2026 a brief throw away line without it really impacting the adventure \u2026 which means that it probably shouldn\u2019t be appearing as words in the adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a decent variety to the encounters here. A puzzle or two. Shit sitting at the bottom of a lake \u2026 I love it when exploration is rewarded. You\u2019ve got the bandits running around \u2026 which for the purposes of this adventure means \u201ceveryone is sitting in one room around a big table.\u201d And then there\u2019s a wizard with his pals looking to do a blood sacrifice. Some evil temple stuff, Some vermin. And \u2026 a sealed coffin! Little bits, here and there, that add variety to the adventure without it actually feeling like everything is just thrown in randomly. Just enough to tie things together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sure, the bandits don\u2019t make sense. All huddled together in one room. And the wizzo is camped out in the other side of the dungeon, seemingly at peace with the bandits in their lair. Things are just a little bit too zoy and those bandits a little too uninquisitive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019re not winning any awards here. But, neither are we making the players or the DM hate their lives and rethink their most treasured hobby. Would I run this? Meh. I wouldn\u2019t walk away from it. The issue with many decent adventures continues to be \u201cthere\u2019s something better to run.\u201d So I\u2019m not going out of my way to run this. But, as something you are throwing out to the world? It\u2019s not terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/product\/163302\/The-Secret-of-Cykranosh?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Wayne Rossi Initiative One games OSR Levels 1-3 Bandits have been using a cave as a base to raid caravans, but the learned know that ancient secrets lurk beneath the mountain, and that it was where the ancient sorcerer … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8926,"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-8927","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\/12\/cykr.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8927","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=8927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8928,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8927\/revisions\/8928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}