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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gus L" data-source="post: 9697773" data-attributes="member: 7045072">So as the author of this.First, there is no "superweapon" in the Prison of the Hated Pretender.  There is a broken down magical device for predicting the future that is tied to the wards of the tower. The Pretender (as detailed a bit in the follow up adventure) ruled through strange magical devices, and presumably the paladins who imprisoned him found it fittingly ironic that one of his own sorcerous mechanisms was used to torment him. Maybe dragging the thing off to the middle of nowhere made sense at the time because it seemed dangerous or useless? Who knows - cultists aren't usually min-maxxing logic machines.Really it's there because when the adventure was originally written in 2012 it was partially an experiment in how to handle prophecy in Old School games. Secondly because it's a starter adventure and the prophetic device serves to allow the referee to add some sort of hook to the larger game world.  A table of sample prophecies is provided, but they aren't required, and the adventure encourages the referee to add whatever they like instead.To take a more general lesson ... I find critical questions like this about the "realism" of adventures are usually ill considered. They tend to focus on a conception of how a fantasy world should be - which is fine - but it's just as subjective as the thing being critiqued 99% of the time.  What I say the magical realm of adventure looks like is no more or less valid then what you say, or what Gygax said. Feeling otherwise and demanding rationales ... it's a sort of smugness that John M. Harrison calls "the great clomping foot of nerdism".  "Realism" in fantasy RPGs, and fantasy more generally, seems to me a secondary concern to creativity and function - either that of the story, the metaphors the story is using, or in the case of games the way a system or adventure runs.This doesn't mean everything in an adventure is right and good for every table and referee - rather that everything is up for change and to be bent to one's own use.  How useful a published adventure is then becomes partially a function of how well one can bend it to fit one's table. Not every adventure is for everyone, and perhaps the whimsy of ancient magical devices being abandoned is not for everyone's table. That's fine ..  they can even play the endless grey corridors and combats with 2D6 orcs that I find tiresome ... or whatever they find appropriate.I'm saying you have my explicit permission to replace the thing you don't like with a group of angry orcs (pig faced killers who are unredeemably hostile to other life being the realistic element of RPGs).</blockquote>

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