{"id":9842,"date":"2025-06-30T07:08:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T11:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9842"},"modified":"2025-06-16T19:10:14","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T23:10:14","slug":"three-witches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9842","title":{"rendered":"Three Witches"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Michael Robinson
Rutibex
\"OSR\"\/5e
Levels 3-5<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Greetings Adventurers! Embark on an exciting hex crawl adventure in the new module – Three Witches! Explore a diverse and dangerous realm, where three rival witches vie for power and influence. Unravel the agendas of the Desert, Forest, and Mountain witches. Will you ally with one to defeat the others? Can you resist their corrupting influence? The fate of the realm lies in your hands!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 145 page adventure uses 35 pages to describe twenty hexes and about thirty rooms over three dungeons. A bland outline, I\u2019m not even sure there\u2019s a pretense that this is OSR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hey man, I\u2019m reviewing a longer work! Know you all want this! Let\u2019s see \u2026 \u201cFor OSR and 5e!\u201d Usually that means its a 5e adventure with maybe a page of stat conversions for OSR systems. This doesn\u2019t even do that. It is clearly a 5e adventure, even though the cover and marketing indicates that its compatible with OSR. Sure, in the same way that a Funyun is compatible as a hammer. I could take all of the stats in that Star Frontiers adventure and do my best, on my own, to convert it all over to B\/X. But, then, is that worth marketing? So, fuck you Rutibex. After this one I\u2019m moving on with my fucking life, such that it is. Fucking garbage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of this product is the witch class, with the usual long ass spell descriptions taking up most of the page count. That\u2019s about 35 pages for the hex crawl and dungeons and about 110 pages for the witch class, spells, and a couple of new monsters. Joy. Love this. A 140 page adventure with a hexcrawl and three dungeons and five pages of bullshit tackon? Super cool. But the other way around? No thank you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s no lead in here. I gather that there is a region and that there are three witches here all crying for power. We know nothing about the region, or town, or people, or even the witches and their vying for power. We just get a wandering monster table for each terrain type. Here we go! \u201cA fairy ring. Entering it could transport the players to a fey realm or cause other magical effects.\u201dNo? How about: \u201cA cursed statue in a small pond, with a puzzle that, if solved, breaks the curse and grants a reward.\u201d These are typical. No detail at all. I get it, wanderer. Short. Terse. But, man, you write the fucking encounter. Put the fucking thing down on the fucking page! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is, of course, a pretty blatant symbol of whats to come. Let\u2019s look at those hex descriptions, shall we? \u201cA barren and scorching desert, where only the hardiest creatures survive. A large sandstorm obscures the horizon, making navigation difficult. The players may encounter a band of nomadic raiders, a hidden oasis, or a mysterious ruin.\u201d Again, this is a fairly typical hex. A little one liner that is super generic about the terrain and then \u201cyou might encounter\/see A, b, or C.\u201d This is not creativity. This is not, IMO, a hex crawl. This is just a bunch of crap thrown down on page that requires a DM to do a metric FUCK ton of work to turn it in to an adventure. That\u2019s not my fucking job. That\u2019s not why I bought this fucking adventure. I wasn\u2019t hoping for \u201cfrozen tundra. Maybe there is something here for the party to interact with?\u201d Thats the fuck the job of of the fucking designer. I swear to fucking god. How can someone think that this is an adventure, or adding value, or making a DMs life easier? Or even inspiring to run? There\u2019s nothing specific about anything in that fucking hex crawl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let us move on to the rooms in the dungeons. \u201c”As you step into the cavern, your footsteps echo ominously through the dimly lit corridor\u201d Second person read-aloud and purple. And the, how about this: \u201cThis corridor serves as the foreboding entrance to the Cavern of Bones, setting the tone for the grim discoveries that lie ahead\u201d That\u2019s the DM text, describing what the room is. You know what would be better? Designing a room in which you show us that this is a foreboding entrance rather than telling the DM that this is a foreboding entrance. It\u2019s absurd to put in a line of text that tells us that room one, the entrance, is the entrance. In another place you come upon a pit trap with some bones at the bottom. The DM text tells us \u201cit’s rumored that the bones within the pit belong to thieves and adventurers who sought to plunder the cavern’s secrets, only to meet their demise at the very threshold\u201d This is clearly not written for a DM or for a player. It\u2019s written to be read. And an adventure to read ranks just above \u201cshameless money grab\u201d at the bottom of the list of adventure sins.. In another room, the Guardian Chamber, the read-aloud tells the players \u201cAs you step into the circular expanse of the Guardian Chamber your torchlight flickers \u201c Now how the fuck are they supposed to know that its The Guardian Chamber?! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is absurd, and not in a good way. Page long rooms are the norm. Overwrought read-aloud in the second person. DM text telling us background and \u2026 I don\u2019t even know what, information that no one can possibly know or care about? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The hex crawl is abstracted encounters. The dungeon encounters are torturous to wade through. Bad read-aloud. Bad DM text. Standard challenges. And there\u2019s not even a pretense of this being OSR. Nope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $4 at DriveThru. The preview is fifteen pages. OIt shows you the hexes and the first part of the firs dungeon. More than enough to see what you\u2019re in for, so, good preview at least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/524814\/three-witches?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Michael RobinsonRutibex”OSR”\/5eLevels 3-5 Greetings Adventurers! Embark on an exciting hex crawl adventure in the new module – Three Witches! Explore a diverse and dangerous realm, where three rival witches vie for power and influence. Unravel the agendas of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9837,"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-9842","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\/3w.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9842","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=9842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9843,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9842\/revisions\/9843"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}