{"id":9774,"date":"2025-05-21T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9774"},"modified":"2025-05-09T10:56:58","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T14:56:58","slug":"the-spires-of-kuyyin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9774","title":{"rendered":"The Spires of Kuyyin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Wes Stroud<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Self Published<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cairn 2e<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[…] Now, the once-mighty fortress lies in ruins, the steel and iron that once shined over the valley now tarnished and rusty. The spires that had greeted visitors and new residents now lie fallen and twisted. The spirits of the fallen citizens of Boccol, the mages, the guards, all roam the crushed and twisted hallways, seeking that which will let them finally cross over. Creatures have made their homes in the remains. Some venture here to retrieve the mythical treasure. Few come back, and those that do speak of stranger things still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This thirteen page adventure presents a small ruined complex with about fourteen rooms. Dragons and ghosts and abstracted treasure compliment descriptions that are an absolute mess to wade through. Whatever was supposed to be going on here, the vision did not come through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am overwhelmingly confused by this. There was some vision for the vibe of this place but I don\u2019t think it comes through at all. It is supposed to be a ruined palace\/fortress type thing. A dragon shows up and wrecks the place and now there are a lot of ghosts\/spirits running around. The ghosts show up in several rooms. I think we\u2019re supposed to get a sense of melancholy, of them doing their daily tasks, and of horror. And they are everywhere. But they come off very perfunctory. It\u2019s hard to really communicate that, but the vibe from the wandering table perhaps best relates the issues. \u201cSkeletons, animated by Kuyyin\u201d or \u201cWight, animated by a rune when Boccol was destroyed.\u201d This is a reason WHY the undead exists. It doesn\u2019t really communicate what they do, or hoor, or melancholy, or anything else. You just get the sense that they are illusions (and not very evocative ones at all) doing things that don\u2019t really matter to the adventure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s the map. This is a pointcrawl, so a kind of flowcharty block diagram of rooms with lines connecting them. This loses a lot of the vibe that a real map would bring and, I think, sows confusion how things are connected. I know it should be si,plier, it\u2019s just a line, right? But any sense of verticality or space is just lost via that block diagram map. At one point, the very start, we get \u201cStream – the stream runs some 30 yards under the earth before the cistern pool. 2:6 to find an air pocket. The water is cold.\u201d I THINK cisterns usually have a top? They are like wells, right? I\u2019m just left confused. I guess it could be an underground aquifer? I\u2019m open to the cistern issue being a lack of understanding on my part, but then there are other places. Like \u201cSpire – a massive chunk of metal pierces through the ceiling, nearly touching the visible<\/p>\n\n\n\n

center of the lake. A door can be seen that, when entered, leads to (6) after a while.\u201d A door, in the spire? Is this a tower that has collapsed? I just don\u2019t get it. And this happens over and over again. Another room has \u201cPulleys, cables, and platforms are frozen across the span of this room. The East wall has a number of hatch-doors, small enough to squeeze a person through. A set of levers & cranks line the North wall. The South wall is a maze of gears and springs\u201d Is this a chasm? Are we supposed to leap from one to another? I just don\u2019t get the intent of the room from the description. Or the main throne room which says \u201cAs large as this space is, the vault below the floor is equally large\u201d Can we see it? I\u2019m not really sure what is going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not hating on this. I do think that the map abstraction just doesn\u2019t work. And that the ghosts thing just isn\u2019t hitting the way that perhaps the designer intended. These work together, I think, to help sow some confusion with the actual room descriptions \u2026 it\u2019s hard to figure out what the designers intent was for each room. You can get the basic here, that there IS something in the room, but, more than the vast majority of what I see, you can\u2019t really figure out what the vibe of the room is supposed to be. It\u2019s like many of the things need just one more sentence \u2026 which probably means that the existing text needs to be reworked, or framed in such a way to bring additional context to them (re: the map, for example.)\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is free at Itch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/alfalcon.itch.io\/the-spires-of-kuyyin<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Wes Stroud Self Published Cairn 2e […] Now, the once-mighty fortress lies in ruins, the steel and iron that once shined over the valley now tarnished and rusty. The spires that had greeted visitors and new residents now lie … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9775,"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-9774","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\/05\/jCZdpW.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9774","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=9774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9776,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9774\/revisions\/9776"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}