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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9538564" data-attributes="member: 7045072">Hey Rob!Thanks for the review of Prison and glad you liked it.  Here's a couple answers to the questions you pose and a bit of history on the adventure.So... Prison of the Hated Pretender was first published back in August 2012.  It was one of the first adventures I wrote for others back in the days of the OSR, and like the rest of my early work it was a free PDF on my blog.  Originally it was written on a single long call at work, and edited later that night.  The entire adventure was an experiment on a minimal viable funnel - funnel adventures being a newer idea back in 2012.  The shorter (also free) version is much messier but still available out there.The updated version from a few years ago was from a period where I was trying to figure out how to run dungeon crawls in 5E.  It's a project I ultimately set aside, but I think Prison still stands up as a playable 5e experience (not sure how much mainstream 5E players would tolerate it, let alone like it though - which is not a dig at 5E - the tone and play style are sufficiently off from the norm of the play style/community I suspect).  I still think it largely works in 5E (and in other scene based games, including story games) because it's not a dungeon crawl in any meaningful sense, but a few puzzles wrapped around a central one - the prison's entire day and night cycle.Now your design questions.Broken Huts exists for two reasons.  First it helps set a more "mud core" tone and was originally designed to be the funnel starting village, the characters would be 0 level broken hut youth heading to the Prison on a dare.  Second it offers a haven, though a minimal one making the adventure a little easier to slot into low level wilderness crawls. Of course it also provides rumors, and some potential miserable NPC types to replace party members. I suppose a third reason is that I find places like broken huts fun - as you point out they have potential for characters to take stewardship roles even at low level and so can pull players into the setting at early levels. It was expanded from a simple rumor table titled "What are the dirty bumpkins in their broken huts saying about the tower" largely because people who played the adventure told me their players wanted more about the place. I know in one Youtube actual play (using Trophy Gold) the party ends up trying to figure out how to export the place's horrible turnip wine. I've only run Prison once myself but the players got out of Broken Huts fast.As to hooks and story, the Prison is a 1-2 session (though I have heard of parties spending many more somehow???) adventure, and it's secondary purpose is to drop onto point or hexcrawls as a location (with or without broken huts).  In the dungeon crawl/old school tradition the character, being motivated by treasure (especially at early levels) will seek such ruins out and try to loot them - no additional story is necessary. The same with the mysteries involved.  One gets a few names and ideas about the who, how, and why of the prison exists, but these don't need to be tied into anything - they are there for the referee to bend to their own world.  Perhaps the Beaked God is a going concern and the Hated Pretender really was once a despot of a vast cruel nation (there is another adventure tangentially featuring him - also free on my current adventure archive) but maybe he's just a random petty king some weird forgotten bird cult pulled some nasty sorcery on.  Story, especially for a location based adventure, is a thing that I find is best offered as a side dish or entirely contained within the location.  It's a style thing and likely an artifact of the old OSR, where adventures were ideally strewn across a referee's map and the players would find impulses (mostly grave robbing) to find and explore them. Anyway - glad you liked Prison, it's held up well over the past decade.You can find links to my other free adventures from the OSR days (they are less polished and less 5E friendly) at my blog:[URL unfurl="true"]https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/p/pdf-adventure-archives.html[/URL]My current paid adventures are largely published by my imprint Ratking Productions on DTRPG and I generally try to include a bit of advice or referee notes.</blockquote>

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