My second book received a rather scathing review by a well respected but infamously irascible critic. I generally avoid reading his work because it skews so negatively and attracts a fair share of trolls, but I made an exception.
"This is from another time…" he suggests, "and not a good one."
I am 55 years old and played 1st Edition AD&D and 1981 BX when they were new. Admittedly, I write in a style out of time. People who prefer OSR to actual Old School would do well not to read my previous book or the forthcoming one. I write dramatically, include DM commentary, and love lore-dense lead-ins in the style of late 70s to mid 80s TSR.
I use a conversational tone. Perhaps you'll appreciate it, maybe you'll hate it. "There is, I guess, no accounting for taste," the critic says. Trite and true.
Spire does have a significant lore section, but not excessive. For example, it's half as long as
ASE1: Anomalous Subsurface Environment. ASE1 definitely does a better job of linking lore to actions in the dungeon. This is as it should be. It's an adventure for character levels 1-2 and it would be a challenge for an inexperienced GM to pull efficiently from ~40 pages of preface on the fly.Spire presumes that a GM running a mid-level adventure would appreciate less load up front and more agency within the module. It describes the sentient weapons and includes rollable tables for the wandering monsters, the NPCs, and the rumours. But it's a source book, not a cookbook. There are ingredients, but it falls to the GM to decide how they come together as the dungeon unfurls. So much has to do with player decisions.
Sure, I could have made it very prescriptive from start to finish. No. The first book wasn't that either. It was 288 vignettes of people at various points in their lives. Take the material and run with it. Make it your own.
Anyway. Free book. One troll commented that it might be overpriced. Be warned, I guess.
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