{"id":9872,"date":"2025-07-21T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9872"},"modified":"2025-07-04T12:26:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T16:26:21","slug":"knight-of-the-corpse-trials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9872","title":{"rendered":"Knight of the Corpse Trials"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Odinson Games
Self Published
Cairn<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Sir Zebadiah was once a war hero, celebrated for purging witches from the Wenderweald. Now he exhumes his subjects and puts their corpses on trial. His squire begs for intervention before her liege damns the barony entirely. You’re sent to capture Zebadiah alive\u2014but the villagers want him dead, his loyalists stalk the woods, and the dead themselves rise for justice. Will you bring the heretic to justice or suffer his corpse trials?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This fourteen page adventure features about eighteen locations in a village\/woods pointcrawl search for an errant and fanatical knight. It has a decent premise and detail in places, but it falls down severely when it comes to locations. Cutsy layout detracts from what otherwise could have been a decent adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou must arrest the false knight zebadiah and bring him to justice.\u201d Well, actually, I think he IS a baron and knight, so, not really a false knight. Basically, dude burns witches. He got cursed and is now REALLY on a tear, digging up bodies, trying to find the last \u201creal\u201d witch he burned, his sister, who he thinks cursed him. The villagers get pissed and the dead are rising in revolt against having their graves molested. He runs off with his men in to the woods to look for more bodies. So we\u2019ve got a village on edge with soldiers about, and a fanatic in the woods. In comes the party. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not super down with the hooks, they are all very honor, faith, justice oriented. I\u2019m more down for some RealPolitik framings in situations like these. What was that runaway bridge adventure where the lord said something like \u201cif you can do it without violence then I guess that\u2019s ok also\u201d, or \u201ctie up the loose ends.\u201d Essentially the hooks presented are all the same, with the party being of mine moral character, and I prefer to see some variety. Sure, a fine moral character hook. But also a RealPolitik one, or some other mood variety. Otherwise, it doesn\u2019t really matter who hires the party, you\u2019re just wasting hook space to describe essentially the same hook with different actors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The general set up and specificity, especially around the village proper, are pretty good. We get some key NPC\u2019s and a little villager generator with a two part name generator, trait, personality, and quirk. Excellent, although a page of these pre-gend would have perhaps been better. There\u2019s also an escalating tension table which serves as a kind of event generator. You really feel the reality of the situation the villagers are in. \u201cGrieving villagers claim their dead at the graves and squabble with tense guards.\u201d or \u201cMoreina doles silver to grieving widows outside the keep.\u201d or \u201cJaanus leads a mournful family to collect their exhumed dead gibbeted in the square.\u201d or \u201cEdvin leads flagellants around the Temple, crying \u201cRepent! Repent! Repent!\u201d\u201d Excellent window dressing to communicate mood and perhaps even spur some deeper play. \u201cSeveral stockaded villagers beg for water beside it.\u201d With guards about this could be fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dude is hiding out in the woods, running around digging up graves, and he\u2019s got a short little three-day timeline associated with his actions, which ends with him razing the village after burning his niece alive. Ouch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The overall framework, the situation, the window dressing, this is all great. But things fall apart when we get to the keys. This is one of the, few, locations and typical for the location descriptions: \u201cRainrot Pit:  creek runoff drains into the cavernous hollow. Dappled light catches on gold down there. + A hex-smuggler stashed 300 gold pieces in a dry bag but the draw-rope was cut.\u201d All of that fabulous situations and specificity , etc really don\u2019t show up at all. So this is not a bad location description: \u201cThe Breedpool: mosquitoes cloud the reeds and algae films the still, black water. Helm-sized eggs float in the pool.\u201d But then there\u2019s nothing there. Yes, a monster has a 50% chance of being there, but that\u2019s just a stabbing. The more interesting play just isn\u2019t available. Dude has a timeline and he might be at one of these locations, but then the location is just which screen the Mortal Combat match has a backdrop, with it contributing little to nothing to the play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this is a shame. I suspect that there is MORE than enough room in the fourteen pages used to provide just a little more depth to the various keys.  Even if they are meant to be used as backdrop, they could be made in to more interesting backdrops. But it\u2019s gotta use one of those modern hip edgy layouts. And it\u2019s gotta use a fucked up font in place in order to make things hard to read. I just want more out of this. As presented it falls in to something like \u201ca large social situation\u201d adventure, which I can dig. But the way the material is presented doesn\u2019t really help that too much. It seems like it is fighting against that. We need locales, people, timelines, situations, ad then a little bit on using them all together, as the DM, to put it all together. You\u2019ve got this situation and the designer should be giving you the tool sections to help run that in the loosy goosy way that these things usually play out. And there is an attempt at that. You can see the village map and brief descriptions, the forest map and loose descriptions. The NPC section, the events section. But it just never gels to come together in the way I would want it to. It\u2019s like, I don\u2019t know, half a page of text is missing (in addition to the locales \u2026) <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the conclusion, you need to capture the dude to get the full payout. But, also, \u201cThe villagers will be enraged if they see Zebadiah captured and will demand his death, descending into a riot.\u201d Noice. A couple fo extra sentences there would have been ice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not a train wreck. But it also just misses the mark of what I consider decent enough to run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2. No preview, but it is Pay What You Want, so I guess the whole thing is a preview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/527846\/knight-of-the-corpse-trials?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Odinson GamesSelf PublishedCairn Sir Zebadiah was once a war hero, celebrated for purging witches from the Wenderweald. Now he exhumes his subjects and puts their corpses on trial. His squire begs for intervention before her liege damns the barony … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9868,"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-9872","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\/527846.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9872","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=9872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9873,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9872\/revisions\/9873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}