{"id":9759,"date":"2025-05-10T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9759"},"modified":"2025-04-26T06:58:37","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T10:58:37","slug":"blood-cradle-of-the-snake-monks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9759","title":{"rendered":"Blood Cradle of the Snake Monks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Adventure Squared
General\/Universal\/OSR - But really 5e
\"Low Levels\" - Ha!<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Who are the Snake Monks? What is the Blood Cradle? Why are the villages being terrorised? Uncover the answers to all of this and more when you explore the Blood Cradle of the Snake Monks!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 36 page adventure uses about nineteen pages to describe fifty rooms in dungeon full of \u2026 serpent people! The rooms contain a variety of challenges, classic and not, with conceptually decent, if fun house, ideas. But its all done in a weird flat bullet minimal format \u2026 that is somehow also quite long? Also, someone REALLY liked the snake scene in Raiders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s art if the creator says it\u2019s art!\u201d No, it\u2019s not. This is labeled as a generic\/universal adventure compatible with OSR blah blah blah. It\u2019s actually a 5e adventure, mostly. Just because creatures have HP and AC doesn\u2019t make it OSR. Even if, tonally, you can manage something akin to the OSR, and even if you dump in enough cash for a gold=xp payoff, there is a WILDLY different power balance going on. The boss here has like AC18 and 180HP. A far cry from the 20HD monsters of B\/X and 1e. What is that, like, forty or fifty HD? \u201cLow levels\u201d my ass. This is 5e. Oh, oh, but it also says things like, in the monster appendix \u201cWe put in some modifiers for you to use if you wish\u201d, which means creatures have a line that says something like \u201c+3, +1, -1.\u201d This is just a fucking dystopian hellscape. Write it for 5e or write it for the OSR. Fucking christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This thing sucks ass in every single way. Except one. It\u2019s got some pretty decent room concepts. A room with a valley\/put that is LOADED full of snakes down there. A room full of treasure chests and urns and things that rearrange themselves to block the exits. The room with three apple trees \u2026 with apples \u2026 A room where you move some portable walls around to literally wall off a deadly fog. The super dark room where torches only light 1 foot around you. A room full of ethereal whisps swirling around \u2026 which are snakes. There are quite a high number of these \u2018specials.\u2019 Certainly no one can accuse the designer of just having a room with a monster in it to stab. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don\u2019t know what to say about them. They suck? None of them really realize their potential. This takes a variety of forms, with things sabotaging the rooms concepts, but in its most fundamental form, they are presented as nothing more than concepts. Imagine sitting around with your friends, drinking, brainstorming ideas for a dungeon. \u201cThere could be a room with a pit in it full of snakes!\u201d  or \u201cHow about a room that sucks up the light full of shadow monsters!\u201d or \u201cYou could get trapped by the treasure you want\u201d! This is what this adventure is doing. The opposite, I guess, of trap and door porn. You can go too far, and most adventures do, in the mechanics and descriptions of the effect of an area. You want just jus the right amount of detail, of the critical pieces, to help the DM run the room without being prescriptive. And then there the opposite end of the spectrum, where this lies, which only gives the BAREST concept of a room concept. These are essentially one liners of each room. And relatively short one-liners at that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not to say that the actual room keys are one line long. Oh no. They are going to take up about a third of a page to half a page each. How can this be?! Well, the formatting sucks ass. First, it\u2019s single column. And it\u2019s using a very terse bullet like formatting for the rooms. This means A LOT of whitespace for something like seventy to eighty percent of a line. Then, it\u2019s padded out. A room name, A three word description. Room dimensions. And a bullet system that only a mother would say is good. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
22- Crystal Caverns\u00a0
Natural cavern approx. 70x100ft. High ceiling (70ft).\u00a0
Uneven natural rock floor interspersed with stalagmites and stalactites jutting from the floor and ceiling.
-Crystals\u00a0
\u2022 Grow from all of the surfaces but mainly concentrated on the walls.\u00a0
\u2022 Refract light in mesmerising patterns.
\u2022 Valuable- 1KG is worth 50GP.\u00a0
\u2022 Extremely sharp when broken and can be carved into cutting tools or weapons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can see, from that, two types of bullets, a hyphen and a traditional round one. The hyphens are the major headings with the bullets containing additional information for the hyphen item. What\u2019s missing is the indent. And we can see, here, from this room key, the three descriptions of the room. \u201cCrystal Caverns\/Natural Caverns\u201d and then the \u201cUneven natural rock\u201d line, and then the \u201crefract light\u201d line. These are all very business-like descriptions. There\u2019s no real joy or inspiration in them. Yes, on some level you have described the room, but the room isn\u2019t sticky, there\u2019s no firing of the imagination. It\u2019s a fucking giant crystal room full of dazzling lights. You need to witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational english language. Oh, and sections are hyperlinked. That room full of chests? It\u2019s hyperlinked to a \u201cChest Table.\u201d Which actually takes you to the \u201ceffects of the fog\u201d table. The actual chest table doesn\u2019t exist, but there is a \u201ctreasure table\u201d full of things like \u201c50sp\u201d and \u201c200cp\u201d and \u201cshovel\u201d or \u201cflask of oil.\u201d I think, perhaps, we differ on the definition of the word avarice. And, of course, the improper use of randomness is prevalent throughout. \u201cHere are six things that could be in the drawer!!\u2019 is not the proper use of randomness<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rooms in concept only, no real room descriptions of note, and a format that makes no sense at all. Triple word score for AVOID.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $4 at DriveThru. There is no preview Sucker!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/519371\/blood-cradle-of-the-snake-monks?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Adventure SquaredGeneral\/Universal\/OSR – But really 5e”Low Levels” – Ha! Who are the Snake Monks? What is the Blood Cradle? Why are the villages being terrorised? Uncover the answers to all of this and more when you explore the Blood Cradle … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9757,"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-9759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/519371-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9759","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=9759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9760,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9759\/revisions\/9760"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}