{"id":9829,"date":"2025-06-21T07:29:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-21T11:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9829"},"modified":"2025-06-09T10:30:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T14:30:37","slug":"the-snake-temple-ruins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9829","title":{"rendered":"The Snake Temple Ruins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Olly Tyler
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-2<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The local town of Penderham has been beset by raids for a year by a bandit gang that they cannot track down. The bandits are led by a battle hardened and wily orc called Nurgal who has assembled a group of orcs, goblins and two harpies. Before terrorising the local trade routes and villagers his band found themselves a perfect hidden and fortified base inside the dungeon of an ancient ruined temple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 37 page adventure uses about seventeen pages to describe about 32 rooms in a two level dungeon complex. It has some interesting room concepts but the length of eac room combined with an incoherence in the writing makes this one of the more opaque offerings I\u2019ve seen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not sure which way to go at the start with this review. The adventure borders on being incoherent. But, also, it has some decently interesting room concepts at times. Room concepts that can hang with some of the best designers if they were done right. This is a non-trivial accomplishment. It\u2019s hard to say just how many adventures I\u2019ve seen where Stabbin is the only interactivity. Or, perhaps, some simplistic traps. But there\u2019s something else going on here. I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s AI or if it\u2019s just an EASL issue. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, on to the good stuff. There are a few really interesting room concepts here. They combine a kind of mashup (future symbolism \u2026) of ideas that are familiar yet new. In one room we\u2019ve got one entrance and a waterfall in a corner \u2026 and a snake inlay wall design  on the far wall \u2026 with jeweled eyes. Fucking withthe eyes causes the entrance to close and the room to being to fill with water \u2026 there is a rusty iron ring in the silted over pool under the waterfall. Pull it up to unstopper the place and open the secret door that is behind the waterwall. Rusty iron ring, under the silt. Secret door behind the waterfall, snake inlay with jewel eyes \u2026 this is all just classic stuff. Classic in its components, anyway. That\u2019s a good OSR room. Other rooms have nude bodies on slabs covered in point delicate crystals (open wounds? Breathing in the dust? Oops \u2026) A multi-level moonlit harpy room. Nice rooms. Nice room concepts. Good interactivity in them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But man, this things rough. Those nice concepts are hidden behind some really rough stuff. That waterfall room, that fill up? The door that shuts? It\u2019s a portcullis. How does a room fill with water if its a portcullis? Does the LLM not know that or was this an EASL issue? That same room, the map. It\u2019s a normal dungeon room, somewhat smallish, square, with a waterfall in the corner. The hallways near there have some water features. The map water gives the indication that the waterfall is a leak, something that should not be there, with the soggy hallways and nearby rooms now having damp floors and ankle high water in places in the rooms. But the secret door behind the waterfall, the whole door trap, the iron ring to unplug the room \u2026 this implies that dungeon is built that way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something stinks here. There\u2019s a room near the entrance. It has a door to a small 10×10 cupboard. It has old sacks and cloaks hanging on hooks and laying onthe on the floor. Got it? Oh, right, also, there\u2019s a skeleton in it that attacks you when you open the door. Got it? Inside it is a secret door. It leads to a FORGE \u2026 with NO. OTHER. ENTRANCES. . Like a real forge, 50×60, columns down the center, coal and wood to stock the forge, sheets and rods of steel. AND MULTIPLE HUMANOID SMITHS WORKING. Everything gets dragged through that cupboard? No signs of it in the cupboard? A fucking skeleton attacking when you approach it?! Come on now. No way a real person wrote this. Or,maybe they did. That 10×10 room with ancient red dragon in it was a thing at one point in time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s more than a little to not like here. The read-aloud is in second person form, with all of you see and you feel shit in it. Things \u201cappear to be\u201d all over the place, \u201cYou enter what looks like a wood paneled armory.\u201d. The read-aloud over-reveals the room contents destroying the back and forth between players and DM. The room contents read like Victorian laundry lists of objects found in the rooms. This makes room descriptions long in places, with a column or even a page not being unusual. The RA tells us that there are lumpy sacks on the floor, but not what they contain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Did I mention the healing font? It never runs out. Well, it does, but refills once a month. Sounds like a business opportunity to me! Gotta get that side hustle on! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve mentioned incoherent a couple of times now. It\u2019s not really in relation to things like that waterfall room which just don\u2019t make sense. It\u2019s incoherent in that the organizational structure of the paragraphs seem out of order. It\u2019s like you write a five paragraph essay, in the classic style, and then Put a detail paragraph first and second and then the conclusion paragraph, then the last detail paragraph and then the introductory paragraph, if that kind of makes sense. The details and the summaries just seem to to appear in the text without any sense of where they should be. This is most notable in the town sections, which also serve as the backstory and hook, in which the information the party finds out, and from who and where, just appears kind of willy nilly interspersed with summaries. You find out information from various NPC\u2019s and then the adventure tells us we can go to those NPCs to get the story of what’s going on \u2026 but those are only real NPC\u2019s and we just read about the details of what is going on \u2026 which was still confusing as hell. It tells us that there are raids happening. There\u2019s a survivor reporting goblins and orcs. There is evidence of that. And yet the adventure then acts like who is raiding is a mystery. What?! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not sure what is going on here. I know, with the ai art in the piece, folks are going to lean that direction for the letter drops, the weird incoherence order of the information and the disconnect in logic in rooms. In my naivete I am not as quick to jump to that conclusion. Either way, the work is a confusing mess, difficult to dig through, with the high points not being high enough to justify looking at this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $5. The preview is fifteen pages (beyond being PWYW) and shows you the entire intro and about ten dungeon rooms, so, good preview, AI overlords!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/524972\/the-snake-temple-ruins?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Olly TylerSelf PublishedOSELevels 1-2 The local town of Penderham has been beset by raids for a year by a bandit gang that they cannot track down. The bandits are led by a battle hardened and wily orc called Nurgal … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9826,"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-9829","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\/06\/ruins.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9829","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=9829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9830,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9829\/revisions\/9830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}