{"id":9451,"date":"2024-11-11T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9451"},"modified":"2024-10-28T11:41:21","modified_gmt":"2024-10-28T15:41:21","slug":"the-sunken-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9451","title":{"rendered":"The Sunken Temple"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Mr Pilgrim Tomes
Self Published
OSE
\"Expert Levels\"<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A sunken cathedral on a quiet mountain lake hides a long forgotten temple to Mathanoga, God of Knowledge and wizardry. Abandoned by Man for centuries ,  but protected by the legend of man-eating fishmen lurking in it.  Or until a few weeks ago the young wizad Elric embarked on its expedition. With help from the accademy of Greykeep he found the temple and began to explore it, hoping to uncover its ancient magical secrets. Now the wizard is missing and the accademy has put a bounty on its head: its weight in silver to whoever will find him and bring him home alive and well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This twenty page adventure uses about eight pages to describe a temple complex with about fifteen rooms. It\u2019s a basic adventure of this type, with basic encounters, non-evocative room descriptions and straightforward puzzles that are poorly described. I guess that means it\u2019s inoffensive? Which is not a recommendation in any way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh no! Some wizzo has gone missing! You\u2019re sent by the guild to find him. As the intro tells us, the fishmen in the temple \u201chave attacked Elric\u2019s camp, fatally wounding the wizard.\u201d To be clear, in this context, \u201cfatally wounded\u201d means that he\u2019s made it through four or five of the temples rooms and then turned himself to stone. Which is a different definition of fatal then I would use, but whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s dig in to this, shall we! Room one is the upper lever, with the rest of the temple being underground. As yes, a room with a statue and an altar, with the altar having the inscription: \u201cI\u2019M KEY TO EVERY DOOR SOUGHT BY SAGES AND SEERS SINCE THE DAYS OF YORE\u201d.\u201d That\u2019s it. What do you want to do? No, fucking with the statue and altar don\u2019t do anything and there\u2019s nothing else to find. What do you do? This is, obviously, a riddle. Answer the riddle. ANSWER THE FUCKING RIDDLE! Did you answer it? No, there are no clues. No, you cannot continue the adventure until you answer the riddle, because that\u2019s what makes the secret door appear. At least Gandork knew there WAS a door. This, of course, a classic example of putting your adventure behind a skill roll\/secret door\/etc. You shouldn\u2019t fucking do that. Yes, the DM can fudge it. Yes, the DM can also buy a different adventure, one that is actually good and doesn\u2019t put the adventure behind a secret door. Anyway, the answer is at the bottom of this review if you\u2019d like to play D&D tonight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, hey, let\u2019s move on to a different room, yes?  Let\u2019s see \u201cFirst Trail: The room is designed to test the intelligence of newcomers, and to remove those unfit for study.\u201d Oh fuck me. It\u2019s a trial dungeon. Great. I fucking hate trial dungerons. Lets are the weakest example of a pretext for an adventure. And, of course, we have the aside text telling us that the \u201cfirst trial\u201d room is a test to weed people out. No shit. Who woulda thunk it. Overly explaining and justifying rooms. Bleech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How about another puzzle room them? This one has an orb in it. It has \u201cthe four alchemical symbols carved in it\u201d  and on the four walls a dwarf head, a bird head, a flaming head and a fish head. So, yeah, I think pretty obvious. Except, of course, I\u2019m not sure I know WHAT the four symbols are? If you asked me, I don\u2019t know, I\u2019d good the fifth element and steal from it? There\u2019s no description of the symbols at all. The whole adventure is like this. It just seems to leave out pieces of information or hand wave past it. It\u2019s weird as all fuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know, the combat encounters seem bullshitty to me also. They get stuck at the bottom of room descriptions, where they might be more appropriate in the middle IE: if there\u2019s a statue and approaching it activates a monster then maybe we say that around the statue description instead of describing a hole bunch of other shit and then dropping the monster at the end. I think there\u2019s another room with a statue in it with an inscription on it and if you read the inscription you get attacked by four monsters. This seems MAJORLY arbitrary and I think is the kind of shit that turns players in to bad players that are unwilling to engage with rooms .When something as simple as reading a statue inscription kills you \u2026 why read anything? Yeah yeah, explosive runes, etc. But this aint that. We WANT people interacting with the rooms, not doing some pavlov shit so they learn to not engage with them. Risk\/RewardPush your luck are the goto\u2019s, not arbitrary wandering table tables. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I guess, ultimately, it\u2019s inoffensive. Not bad, just not good at all.\u00a0Oh, and, yeah, before I forget, PUT THE FUCKING LEVEL RANGE ON THE FUCKING ADVETURE.<\/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\/en\/product\/497244\/the-sunken-temple?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Fucking riddle answer is Knowledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Mr Pilgrim TomesSelf PublishedOSE”Expert Levels” A sunken cathedral on a quiet mountain lake hides a long forgotten temple to Mathanoga, God of Knowledge and wizardry. Abandoned by Man for centuries ,  but protected by the legend of man-eating fishmen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9450,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/sunk.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9451","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=9451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9452,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9451\/revisions\/9452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}