{"id":9454,"date":"2024-11-13T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-13T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9454"},"modified":"2024-10-29T08:11:31","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T12:11:31","slug":"a-walk-in-the-harwood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9454","title":{"rendered":"A Walk in the Harwood"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Hilander
Self Published
OSE
Level \u2026? I guess we don\u2019t use levels anymore? The Big Bad is 10HD.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The folk of Almsville enjoyed a quiet existence far from the worries of city life and foreign wars, but recently a strange spirit has been seen in town, a weeping woman beckoning strong folk into the Harwood, pleading with them to free her from her curse. Just last week the mayor\u2019s son, young Constance, disappeared, stealing away in the night with a sword and shield taken from his father\u2019s wall. The town fears the worst, and Sister Verity senses unease amongst the local spirits. She has sent word to the City, pleading for help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This twenty page adventure presents a hex crawl with about fifty hexes and twenty-ish encounters. It can turn a phrase now and then, but it\u2019s simplistic in its implementation, mixing plot with what should be hex situations \u2026 and not doing either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us assume I have a hex crawl adventure. It\u2019s a thousand hexes. Your starting hex is along a border. I develop a page of backstory that within it contains a plot. The essence of the plot is that the prince has gone missing while searching for a monster. I populate the hexes at some density of encounters. Then I stick the prince in the hex next to the starting hex and the monster in the hex next to the prince. The other hexes don\u2019t really have anything special in them, no help to defeat the monster or things to save the prince or anything like that. It really is as straightforward as I just described. Yeah, the other hexes have some stuff in them, but, also, it\u2019s not really SITUATIONS. Yeah, there are monsters and treasures and weird shit. Some of them are just scattered randomly in the hexes without roads or trails leading to them and not really \u201cin the way of\u201d something you can see from a distance. I think we could all say that this is a poorly designed hex crawl. It meets the definition that it has hexes that you can explore, but there\u2019s no real reason to and a decent number of them are VERY unlikely for you to stumble across in pursuit of other hexes. And, no real situations. Not really things for the DM to riff on and explode and for the players to exploit in a more strategic sense. This would all lead to me saying that yes, it is a hex crawl but it\u2019s not a very good hex crawl, missing what makes a hex crawl a good hex crawl. And that is this adventure. It can, at times, turn a decent phrase of description, but it also seems to miss thes of what makes an adventure an adventure. The WHY of how things are put in to an adventure to drive gameplay.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The mayors son is missing, trying to free some ghost chicks curse. The city is on the edge of the ghost wood. There\u2019s a haunted house one hex away, before you get to the wood proper. A hex away from that, in the woods, is the witch chick who controls the woods and knows everything going on. A hex away from that is the big bad monster. None of the other woods encounters really contribute to this ghost lady\/woods\/monster\/son plotline. They are just things like \u201cFrank lives here in this house and can\u2019t get out because of the animated vines\u201d or something like \u201c50 albino goblins, bloodthirsty, live in a cave complex here.\u201d  They might stretch to, say, two or three paragraphs, including a read-aloud paragraph, but there\u2019s not really situations unfolding. This is far, far closer to Isle of the Unknown. Perhaps not quite as obviously from a generator, but also not with anything larger or more interesting going on in them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The town is minimally described, which is fine. It does, however, have an encounter table. Thisis one of them: \u201cOld Farmer Dale has seven daughters whom he\u2019d like to marry off; Patience, Prudence, Mercy, Grace, Faith, Hope, and Charity. None live up to their names. \u201cYou could do, really, but I wonder for which?\u201d So, yeah, but, also, what\u2019s the point? Yes, it does add a bit of local color. But I think that\u2019s all it is, Some local color to add in to some kind of home base place, that the party is likely to return to time and again. And in that case I\u2019m not sure I make this a random table at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s frustrating here is that sometimes the text is decent. At the site of a drowned woman in a river: \u201cThe skies grow cloudy here, and a cold breeze blows down the river. A single tree stands beside the water, its roots reaching in to drink\u201d We\u2019re going to ignore the \u201croots reaching to drinks\u201d purple prose, but the rest of it is decent. It sets a good melancholy mood for the site of a drowned woman. There\u2019s a forlornness that this description invokes, helped along by the room title \u201cThe Drowned Lady.\u201d THis is how a room title sets the stage for what\u2019s to come. It gets you into the right frame of mind for the description to come, helping to conjure more than the sum of the words used. The adventure des this a time or two, and when it does it\u2019s a really great description. But those are by far the exceptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I mentioned that haunted house a hex from town. That place has 23 rooms in it. They are described in essentially ONE COLUMN. Jesus fuck man! You get such rooms as perhaps this one: \u201c10. Guestroom. Huge plants.\u201d Well, that\u2019s something right out of Vampire Queen I guess. I\u2019m not really cherry picking. It\u2019s almost all just a room title and one or two words, an object to be found in the room. \u201cRobes 300gp.\u201d Yes, the room titles are decent (although, perhaps \u201cRUINED guestroom\u201d or \u201cOPULENT Guestroom\u201d would have been better.) but that\u2019s it. It\u2019s an extreme minimalism. To fit in twenty pages, I guess?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IN other places there is a distinct note of information missing. One fine example is \u201cIf the hill is dug into, it will reveal a large hoard of golden coins and rare treasures\u201d With no details of what that is \u2026 although the consequences are spelled out large. It\u2019s baffling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is, I guess, a mix here of two adventure styles. The hex crawl\/exploratory  where you create your own adventure and a plot adventure in which you have something explicitly to do. I guess, if I squint hard enough, i can see adding some plot to a hex crawl to get things moving \u2026 but then you put the endgame to it next to the basE? And the hex encounters are not really the sort of strategic\/dynamic situations that make hex crawls thrive? And the dungeon is straight out of Tegal? Nope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at Drivethru with a suggested price of $3. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/500040\/a-walk-in-the-harwood?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By HilanderSelf PublishedOSELevel \u2026? I guess we don\u2019t use levels anymore? The Big Bad is 10HD. The folk of Almsville enjoyed a quiet existence far from the worries of city life and foreign wars, but recently a strange spirit has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9453,"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-9454","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\/harwood.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9454","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=9454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9455,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9454\/revisions\/9455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}