{"id":9870,"date":"2025-07-19T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9870"},"modified":"2025-07-03T09:07:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T13:07:24","slug":"that-old-familiar-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9870","title":{"rendered":"That Old Familiar Song"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Crumbling Keep
Self Published
OSE
Levels 1-3<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Your mother used to sing you a song when you were young about circling birds, but it would always end with her tears. Now you find yourself in a forest of crawling dead things and strange happenings, and the events of the song are coming true! What does it all mean? And what is the creature that stares at you with your own eyes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This fifteen page adventure has five populated hexes, one with a small five room keep. It\u2019s got one of those bullshit narrative game framing devices. Otherwise it\u2019s just fiveish simplistic hexes in a font\/layout optimized for your phone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Time marches on. We\u2019ve seen responses to various trends in D&D adventures over the years, such as the inclusion of VTT maps, hyperlinks and so on. This time we\u2019ve got an adventure \u2018optimized for mobile.\u2019 In practice that means a GIANT FONT on a small screen size and some hyperlinks in the adventure to make moving around it easier. I can\u2019t imagine ever using this, but, it exists so someone somewhere must need it. But is it GOOD? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s looks at the opening page: \u201cDim light filters in from a sun that struggles to rise over the horizon. It\u2019s early, perhaps earlier than you\u2019d like, but sleeping was not easy last night. It\u2019s eerily silent as you all mill about, gathering your supplies to get back on the road, and a low mist gathers around your legs, obscuring the ground. Suddenly, a large group of crows rises out of the woods, their caws rising in an insane chorus as they fly in a circle before heading northwest. Ask: Which PC\u2019s mother used to sing them a song about circling birds?\u201d Yup. It\u2019s one of those. A narrative bullshit thing. The followup question is \u201cWhy did you think she would cry after singing the song?\u201d So, even better, it\u2019s got some trauma dumping shit attached to it. This is not fun and is inappropriate to put in to a game. The trauma shit. I think the narrative shit, explicit as it is here, is lame as fuck and tends to not fall in to my definition of what a \u2018game\u2019 is. It\u2019s a fucking activity. But, if we are going to go down that path then FORCING your players in to some kind of trauma dump is bullshit. Yeah, I think the trigger warning shit is general nonsense. \u201cSomeone dies.\u201d or \u201cThere are snakes.\u201d But, also, if you\u2019re gonna put crap like this in your game then, yes, you get to trigger warning it. And, further, if you feel the need to trigger warning something then you probably shouldn\u2019t put the fucking thing in your game. This is all edgelord bullshit. You write a couple of decent adventure that I would consider Best, then I\u2019ll ease up on my diatribes and consider that you might be able to stick something edgier in. But, again, we\u2019re all here for fun, not for trauma bonding in a group circle where we work out our feelings. Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with that. EXCEPT WHEN IT HAPPENS IN THE FUCKING D&D GAME. \u201cSketch the symbol your mother had tattooed on her wrist that she never explained.\u201d Go fuck yourself. I\u2019d walk the fuck out of this nonsense and demand a refund if I stumbled upon this at a con.. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The style is OSE. \u201cBirds flying over head (squawking ominously), Bones litter the ground (animal and human, clean and unmarred), Stone Altar (northern end of the field, ancient, crumbling\u201d It\u2019s fine. OSE Style is easy to do. You still have to write a decent description. These are ok. Nothing special, but also not terrible. Meh. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is, though, a lack of understanding of what a D&D game that infects the encounter keys. Let\u2019s look at one of the encounters: \u201cPained Man (half embedded\/phased into the rock wall, there\u2019s no way he should be alive, can only wail, has lost his faculties)\u201d You getting nothing more than that. Seriously, that\u2019s it. Has the designer never played D&D before? This is clearly an element one wishes to focus on in the room. The party WILL be investigating. And, yet, nothing more. It\u2019s just fucking window dressing. Similarly, there\u2019s a chasm in another area. Down below are a lot of bodies. Absolutely nothing to do in the text mentions that again. The party WILL be fucking going down there. They WILL be searching. If you didn\u2019t want them to then don\u2019t fucking thell them that there is shit down there to do and look at . You put something there, so you need to help us run the inevitable situation where the party goes down to investigate it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, I didn\u2019t describe the adventure. You start with that rad-aloud from above, do the trauma dump thing, and then, for some reason, wander around in the woods. I guess cause those birds circling and your mom? Whatever. You wander hexes until you maybe stumble in to one with an encounter in it (five of them) and hope you don\u2019t wander off the edge of the map. IE: I\u2019m sure it was playtested as a railroad rather than a hex crawl. Eventually you find a cave with some abomination in it that looks like your twin. Whatever. No explanation. Just a mystery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Garbage adventure with nothing special going on except some pretension. If you’re gonna do some pretension in your adventure then fucking disclose it so we can avoid it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $3 at DriveThru. The preview is three pages. You get to see the start with the narrative nonsense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/528159\/that-old-familiar-song-a-tinderbox-mobile-adventure?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Crumbling KeepSelf PublishedOSELevels 1-3 Your mother used to sing you a song when you were young about circling birds, but it would always end with her tears. Now you find yourself in a forest of crawling dead things and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9866,"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-9870","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\/07\/528159.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9870","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=9870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9871,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9870\/revisions\/9871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}