{"id":9060,"date":"2024-03-18T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9060"},"modified":"2024-03-05T09:25:07","modified_gmt":"2024-03-05T14:25:07","slug":"the-palace-of-evendur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9060","title":{"rendered":"The Palace of Evendur"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Tom Garner\nCrawler Solo\nB\/X\nLevels 1-3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Your party is approached by a local storyteller who spins a tale about the empty and overgrown Palace of Evendur, once home to a powerful planar travelling wizard, who went missing more than a life-time ago. The players must unravel the mystery of the palace, erected at the edge of a strange and enchanted forest\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This thirteen page adventure uses four pages to detail a small \u201cpalace\u201d with ten rooms. It does everything wrong. But, also, it does it wrong is a kind of classical way. You know, the way some kind-hearted but well meaning person might. But it\u2019s still wrong. And unusable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A five paragraph long read-aloud starts off our hook, with a bard dude offering you 30gp to go look at this disappeared wizards home and solve the great mystery: why did the wizzo build his \u201cpalace\u201d on the edge of the woods? Not what I\u2019d call a great mystery, but whatever. After many pages of worthless padding later, we get to room one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And are confronted again by a long section of read-aloud. This is the norm for this adventure. You need to wade through it. It says things like \u201cYou are standing before \u2026\u201d or \u201cYou are in a large throne room \u2026\u201d Rom after room. And then sentence after sentence after that. \u201cUpon the throne appears to be \u2026\u201d Every read-aloud makes an appearance. Too long. Using boring descriptive wors like large. Things APPEAR to be. Over-revealing details of the room. As well as the perspective thing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then comes the stat blocks. A full on stat block, inline with the text, in full MM glory. Including Treasure Type and description. This gets in the way, actively, of trying to understand the text of the room in order to run it. At one point I think I waded through a page and half of text, only to find out that there was a notable chandelier in the room, in the next to last paragraph. Well, fuck. And it\u2019s important. And it\u2019s not in the read-aloud. Well fuck me. This is a textbook example of why that kind of shit should not be done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re looking for a key, it turns out, so you can get in to the garden room on the half moon. No real clue that\u2019s what you need to do, but that\u2019s what you need to do. When you kill the armor in room two (4HD, surrounded by a bunch of 2HD flying swords. And a 4HD murder rug. At level one \u2026) it drops the key. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After slogging through room after room of things artistically saying \u201cwhat\u2019s the password?\u201d then you meet a kindly dryad in the garden who tells you her tragic tale, and then returns to her tree. But, wait, the missing wizzo planned for this! The tree dies! She\u2019s now driven insane! Kill her! Yes, this is the way of this adventure. Play by fiat. And not the good kind of philosopher-king. The bad kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s see. It has almost no monetary treasure. At all. But, you do get three wishes, as a party, when you go in! You don\u2019t know it, but you do. Also, all three good types of crystal balls are stuffed up a chimney in one of the rooms. Three of them. In fact, the whole place is littered with magic items. And maybe \u2026 500gp of mundane treasure? Until you kill the dryad. She has \u201ctreasure type D\u201d buried under her tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why? Why would you do this? Why would not just roll the treasure and put it here? Why tell us it\u2019s D? You put fucking treasure in to every other room. Why would you not put it in to that room also? The main room? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is fully representative of The Bad Old Days. When T$R shoved things down our throats. When the interactivity in an adventure was strained. It\u2019s weird, both this and the previous review were, I think, straining the boundaries of kiddy D&D, that slur that folks used to described BASIC to differentiate it from their 1e master. It\u2019s the full on Eliminster \u201cHeel!\u201d thing. Neither adventure go fully there, but they are getting really close to it. It\u2019s not the whimsy and wonder of an OD&D game, but a writing and orientation to a simplistic interactivity. Not in just stabbing. But in blatant passwords and find the blue key syndrome. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $1.30. The preview is six pages. You get to see some of the padded intro and the first room, as well as part f the second. That should be enough to tell you what you are signing up for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/preview.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/470618\/the-palace-of-evendur-basic-adventure-module?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Tom Garner Crawler Solo B\/X Levels 1-3 Your party is approached by a local storyteller who spins a tale about the empty and overgrown Palace of Evendur, once home to a powerful planar travelling wizard, who went missing more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9059,"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-9060","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\/2024\/03\/evendur.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9060","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=9060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9061,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9060\/revisions\/9061"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}