{"id":9900,"date":"2025-08-04T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9900"},"modified":"2025-08-04T12:13:47","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T16:13:47","slug":"the-valleys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9900","title":{"rendered":"The Valleys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Matthew Jennings
Missspire Publications
OSR
Levels 5-8<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
So, you have helped your brothers deliver your family’s hard cider all over these valleys and you’ve never even heard of Arcadia. When you asked the parents about helping Rigs out with a delivery, they dispar- aged the idea. Said it was “out past Broken Valley\u2026 straight up a mountain…in giant and barbarian territory \u2026 a bad idea”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 129 page heartbreaker uses seventeen pages to describe a ruined village full of kobolds and a red dragon. Your level eights are helping a mary sue move and hew new house isn\u2019t working out right. It is a classic heartbreaker, full of wall of text, extraneous detail, disorganized, and conversational. I\u2019m not even sure how you run this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ah, the heartbreaker. Let us wax poetic on the creations of a single designer with a vision of what they want, and falling far short of reaching it. I salute you, and your singular visions, even if I ant absolutely nothing to do with them. GenCon approaches, and I\u2019ve always to have a booth where I just sell heartbreaks and my Worst list. There are many ways for me to not want to have anything to do with an adventure, and a heartbreaker is perhaps the saddest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019re old buddy RIgs wants you to help move Karen. You are levels five to eight, so, sure, why not? In this adventure your old buddy is a level 3 in like five different classes, Karen the Herbalist is a level seven magic user, and the old hag living on the mountainside is a Level eleven cleric and a level five illusionist. Which, maybe, makes sense because one of the towns has a golem factory where they make and export them. This is not my D&D style. It sets my teeth on edge and reminds me of the bad old days of adventures with Sphere of Annihilation garbage disposals. But, whatever you\u2019re in to I guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a single column wall of text adventure and regional setting. I guess it describes \u201cThe Valleys\u201d and then has a small adventure set in it. For level five through eights. Again, we can see that \u201cdelivering your families hard cider\u201d and \u201clevels five through eight\u201d is clearly a sore point with me. Anyway, the first ninety or so pages describe, abstractly but in many words, the various locations in the valley. Then there\u2019s the adventure of about twenty pages, and then a description of the various magic items and creatures. Is it a regional guide with an adventure in it? I don\u2019t know, the product description makes it sounds an adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I really can\u2019t emphasize enough the mess of the text. Things are just dropped in to it without much thought. Your hooks, with your buddy RIggs, appears on page seventeen in the appropriate physical location where he might be found. And then seventy pages later comes the adventure. WHich then starts with \u201cKaren will send the boychild that didn\u2019t runaway on the porch off with a handful<\/p>\n\n\n\n
of gold coins to fetch some lunch for her friends,\u201d Uh. Ok. Sure. Time to refer back to page whatever earlier in the adventure to find Karens home, I guess. You\u2019re gonna be doing a lot of flipping in this adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, the adventure. You show up, have a long and tedious lunch with Karen, who you are instructed to be as long-winded and rambling as possible, then you help Karen move in to her new home.  Which involves going through a trunk to the connected magic trunk, coming out in the ruined village, and fighting a bunch of kobolds and a 10HD red dragon. Oh, and Karen is with you the entire way. Invisible. And when you reach the dragon then \u201cKaren ends the fight almost before it gets started with a lucky Polymorph Other, changing the dragon into a blood raven.\u201d Groovy, I guess. That IS the role of a mary sue. Anyway, so you\u2019re fighting kobolds. As level five through eights. A large group is the kobold common room with fifty in it. Fifteen males, 25 females and ten children. So, fifteen kobolds. Dump in a fireball, I guess? Anyway, the ruined town has about twelve locations, one being the clocktower with the dragon it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is TEDIUM, beyond words, to wade through. Information is scattered everywhere. A section heading may be important or it may be just more background information. And, given the page count, it is almost always fluff. Unless of course you actually needed it. And the whole conversation tone of the long form paragraphs \u2026 There\u2019s this thing that some event based adventures do. FIrst this happens and then this and then this and then this. This isn\u2019t really scene based, in the way those are (and, I\u2019m differentiating between scenes and the \u201cfirst this then this\u201d style) but the encounters, the various keys, many are in this format. And sometimes the format, the conversation, runs across rooms. And then there are just other things dropped in out of nowhere. \u201cKaren will ask what the burned corpse smells like. If the answer is \u201ccinnamon\u201d, she\u2019ll know there is a female red dragon involved\u201d Uh. Ok. Does it, in fact, smell like cinnamon? I don\u2019t know. I guess if I go wade through everything else I can see its a female red dragon somewhere in the adventure and then make the inference? It\u2019s just bizarre, these random assumptions coming out of nowhere with no context to them. Second person read-aloud abounds \u201cYou pass an iron brazier upon entry that fills the room with the smell of sickly sweet herbs and incense but all you really notice is the idol of Naama on the far wall.\u201d except it\u2019s not really read-aloud, in the traditional sense? It\u2019s not set apart and you really wouldn\u2019t know its read-aloud except for the fact that there\u2019s some second-person tenses to it. It\u2019s all just a mass of text, with a running conversation throughout, changing tenses, changing tone, changing meaning and purpose, willy nilly. It\u2019s a fucking stream of consciousness adventure. Which can be a fun way to write and deliver SOME sorts of entertainment information (like a review \u2026) but is absolutely terrible in a piece of reference material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s not much here. It\u2019s a regional setting, I guess. The actual adventure is a nightmare of finding information, scattered throughout the book seemingly at random. I know, I bitch about organization a lot, but this is just on a whole other level. Imagine I put half of the room one description on page 18 and the other half on page 86. The whole tone (which, I admit, is a matter of taste) is just off with the level 5-8 thing and the hard cider thing and the helping a chick move thing. The mary sue. The kobolds as enemies? Second person? I salute the hubris, but am horrified by the result. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is $4 at DriveThu. The preview is six pages, and is actually the first six pages of the actual adventure portion. So, decent job. Check it out. It really does a decent job of conveying in a nutshell the issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/524001\/the-valleys-a-grunions-and-flagons-mirrspire-module?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
EDIT: I take it back. It’s not a heartbreaker. Future Symbolism …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Matthew JenningsMissspire PublicationsOSRLevels 5-8 So, you have helped your brothers deliver your family’s hard cider all over these valleys and you’ve never even heard of Arcadia. When you asked the parents about helping Rigs out with a delivery, they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9895,"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-9900","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\/grun.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9900","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=9900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9903,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9900\/revisions\/9903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}