An introductory adventure by Sean K. Reynolds For Numenera (Cypher System RPG) What the heck is this doing on itch.io? Ashes of the Sea is a slick, high-gloss 35-page production released for 2018’s Free RPG Day, consisting of a 15-page adventure, a little bestiary, and a quick start guide for the Numenera RPG system itself. It’s not at all what I’m used to for itch, with all the extremely high production values I’d expect from Monte Cook Games. I saw Numenera listed, and I’ve played Cypher System games before, so I figured I’d check it out, not suspecting it was a big boy publisher slumming it down with the amateurs. It’s not something I’d review for this, but it is free and on itch.io, so here we go. A brief mention on the system/setting…Cypher System is the Monte Cook d20(ish) system he designed after leaving D&D, first introduced as Numenera. The world of Numenera is Earth a billion+ years in the future, with strange technical, magical, and just plain weird artifacts (Numenera) scattered throughout a vast and shattered landscape. Adventurers are typically looking to discover ancient artifacts, repair ancient artifacts, use ancient artifacts, and then attempt to stop disasters caused by activated ancient artifacts. It’s a pretty adventure-ready setup, and the art for the game is gorgeous, but it’s also allergic to maps and solid diagrams. The system embraces theater of the mind in its interactions and descriptions, ensuring a vague, almost dreamlike imagination state in players. The adventure itself is a pretty standard plot, with the one-shot party of pregens (or PCs) stumbling upon a teleporter and getting sent to a random village in the midst of cold snowy lands. The players are prodded by harsh cold-weather rules to rapidly head down to the village, where they bumble around doing village things until it’s just assumed that they catch the hint that they need to go to “the Icon”, the weird thing depicted on the cover. Some side quests are offered to go kill stuff in the valley if the players are someone the most efficient players in the world and the GM needs more to kill more time. Hoping aboard the railroad they enter a cavern beneath the statue, they mess around in some weird domes, and are given enough plot coupons to fix the teleporter they arrive at to in turn leave. Simple enough. All of this is written in nicely laid-out long paragraphs in two-column layout with neat art sometimes tangentially related to what’s being described. Very traditional. I’ll grant that what I liked here is going to be ephemeral. The format will irritate some but I do like the generous sidebars communicating GM suggestions and tips, and often the sidebars have helpful illustrations as well. The adventure plot is pretty standard for Numenera but it shows what the world is about, so that’s a success there. Despite the linear nature of the adventure things aren’t exactly a railroad…the players can definitely screw up and make it harder on themselves, and there’s even an allowance for the PCs being so obnoxious they fight the entire village and murder a significant proportion of them. Resolution is also admirably open-ended, which is a lot better than the standard Pathfinder or D&D Free RPG Day offering. There’s a lot that can be improved though. The biggest would be to have a map. I know your system is extremely allergic to tactical combat, but it’s still a good idea to have map(s) if you’re going to be travelling and exploring. As a possible side-effect of the wordiness of the adventure’s prose, the objectives of the adventure are also rather obscured, both in the MacGuffin-needer (broken teleporter) and the MacGuffin-mine (the Icon). As it is, I imagine the players being a little confused about what they have to do as they bumble around. It’s also slightly overstuffed for its one-shot scope, but that’s something a canny GM can get around. Most objectionable: There are no ashes of any sea. The best use case for this thing is to introduce players and game masters into the Numenera system and world, but probably not exactly like Sean and Monte intended…not only does this introduce the system decently well, it also shows the cracks and deficiencies of the adventure writing in the system, and honestly the more basic problem that while Numenera on the outset seems rife with almost infinite possibilities, it tends to wear thin when writers try to actually grasp at consistency. It’s a pretty dream, but there’s no map here, making the whole system a little…shallow. There’s also not much to mine for broader use, again because of that ephemeral nature. Final Rating? **/***** You can have fun with this but it won’t have a long-lasting impact.
0 Comments
A dungeon adventure by Brynjar Már Pálsson, levels 1-3 For Shadowdark RPG. Now we’re talking. Brigands of Bristleback Burrow is a tight 8-page document that uses six pages to convey a twelve-room “goblins in a hole” dungeon, including a nice single-page bestiary. It’s not ambitious or groundbreaking, but within the tight limitations of its scope, it’s just about as good as you can get. This is my first Shadowdark adventure and judging by this one the system has a solid OSR spirit. So stop me if you’ve heart this one, there’s some goblins, you see…they live in this hole. They have divided leadership, this fat wannabe warlord chief and his mutinous shaman. There’s also human bandits they work with. And an ogre cook. And part of their home hole is an old flooded mine, infested by skeletons. Oh and the goblins also have pet hyenas. It’s all pretty standard fare, but what sets it apart is that Bryniar has jolly well played some D&D. It shows. There’s so much to say about what I liked here. First of all, there’s nary a hint of “they attack!” Goblins (all of them given one-word personalities) default to assuming the party are here to be mercenaries, and indeed both leaders will try to use the party against the other one. Hyenas are chained up, giving environmental interest automatically. The ogre is sweet and kindly. Even the skeletons are being controlled by a sentient undead wight who will do her best to negotiate with the party for a favor. Marvelous. Next, treasure is all interesting and flavorful, and makes sense for its location (sometimes hidden). Magic items are cool too, feel like a lot but I don’t have a Shadowdark baseline. Also there’s an active timer in the random encounter table that’ll eventually lead to a chaotic mass mutiny, goblin vs. goblin. The map is multi-leveled, with loops that actually matter, multiple entrances and exits, and an impressive amount of terrain variations that matter…I don’t know how tactical Shadowdark combat gets, but Bryniar clearly likes a fight with interesting areas. Honestly, what can be improved mostly boils down to “a bit too much muchness”. A slightly less fanatical adherence to bullet points would make some rooms make a little more sense, while things like the “bandit/goblin generator table” are cute but hard to imagine using extemporaneously at the table. I’m not certain about Shadowdark balance, but I think some of the danger levels might be a little too gnarly for a party of level 1s. I could do the standard reviewer thing and complain about the lack of special wacky weirdness, but honestly that wouldn’t be an improvement, it would just make it a different kind of project. The best use case for this thing is to download it, maybe pitching the author a buck or two while you do so, and immediately put it in your folder for when you need a goblin hole; it’s the best darned goblin hole available. There’s sadly not a ton of unique content to mine, but things like a magical demon pact item could definitely be ported elsewhere. The adventure’s very genericness means that if you’re playing Shadowdark, OSE, 5E, Pathfinder, AD&D, or whatever you can use it. High utility little adventure. Final Rating? ****/*****, only really prevented from reaching the fifth star by its scope. The author should be very proud of this one, some of the finest vanilla I’ve ever seen. A final note, as a crime, this adventure just had a single one-star rating on the website when I came upon it, next to all the unreadable dreck pumped up with dozens of five-star ratings. Criminal. A forest point crawl* by Amanda P, levels 1-3 For Cairn or OSE. *Hexmap and minidungeon I didn’t set out to find the precise opposite of last week’s adventure, but boy howdy did I find it…Tannic is a 36 page(!) digest adventure where the PCs are presumably charmed by the twee little village of Tannic into finding three lost teens, located in a six-room dungeon “ten hours away” on a teeny hexcrawl map that’s getting called a point crawl. The idyllic little region is untroubled by anything beside a burned-down second village and the tomb of the old local lords, so no points for guessing where the teens have gone. The adventure has a ton of very detailed filler, including festival games, relationships of villagers to two of the missing teens (nobody loved the other one), and what feels like a hundred pages of Forestry Service plant pictures. There certainly are plenty of specific names. This thing claims to be good for a single session or two if the players are particularly inefficient. My initial interest in a 36-page regional adventure cooled somewhat when I noticed the ‘zine sizing and 36-point font. Er…fonts. There’s a somewhat random assortment of formatting decisions here, a lot of bolding and bullet points and plenty of description, but then there’s things like one of the lost teens not being pointed out in the bolding. It’s a well-meaning product with cute little hand-drawn illustrations and cartography, and layout might be baffling, but I was never completely lost. There are some monster stats in the back for both Cairn and OSE, but then there are also notes like a bunch of haunted bog iron having “stats as gelatinous cube”, which should certainly be a confusing fight. Although it’s 1d6+1 of them against level ones, so I guess your players won’t be confused for long. There’s a weird running theme, which I know isn’t due to OSE so I’m blaming Cairn, of drinking random and unsafe water, including nasty brown water in a tomb? The best I’ll say is that this adventure communicates a vibe. There’s some of what I liked in the vibe, nothing wrong with a New Jersey Pine Barrens adventure. Its heart is in the right place with the NPCs, both villagers and monsters, all having motivations and personalities, I don’t think a single thing here is just “they attack!” Specific names are all given for most of the characters a party expects to bump into, which helps in the running. The last two teens are charmed by an undead guy, nifty final confrontation potential there. Treasure, while hilariously stingy, is generally quirky and interesting. When I get to what can be improved, I get confused a bit. The tomb map for all its tiny size tries to have loops and multiple ingress points, but as it is the alternate paths don’t allow for bypassing anything. The product honestly more than anything else suffers from too much space to play with…cut this thing from 36 pages to 18, and I think not only do you have tighter descriptions, but you have more uniformity of formatting, too (things like having the dungeon map shown twice, once before the keys, once after, just feel like space filler). Bullet points occasionally being used is tasteful, but when everything is bullets it feels choppy…this is another case where simple narrative two-column formatting not only saves space, but also makes the writing flow better. Also, if you’re going to advertise something compatible with gold=XP like B/X (OSE), you need to have treasure values higher. This doesn’t make this a great adventure, but it makes it at least average. The best use case for this thing is to help in discouraging someone from playing Cairn. Okay, that’s mean, the best use case for the actual content is pulling out the bits, there are a few nice encounters that I could see myself adding to a random encounter table (although interestingly, none of them are in the random encounter table). Unfortunately, “runaway teens” adventures are about as common as “goblins in a hole”, so I can’t see myself really favoring this one. Final rating? */***** in OSE. It’s probably a *****/***** Cairn adventure, I dunno there. When running OSR games, be it megadungeon delving, hexcrawling, or pick-up games, you’re typically going to run some version of the old Lake Geneva open table, where either explicitly or just because of how life works every session is typically with different players. Sometimes if it’s a small group, the DM will just keep the XP spread consistent for all players, making everyone the same level (or XP-level in B/X-likes) despite the flexible roster. Running a West Marches with an explicitly open table and a roster of over two dozen players, I don’t have that as an option, so I have players with up to a six-level range between the highest and the lowest. It’s been a real opportunity to see an aspect of old-school play that I haven’t seen discussed as much.
First of all, new players to the campaign coming in at level 1 and partying up with “big brothers” at level 4, 5, or even 6 tend to learn a very interesting playstyle. Most OSR systems will have the initial party playing very cautiously…sneaking around, stacking the deck, and negotiating. A complaint is often that eventually as power goes up, players will often lose those tendencies when traveling and going through the initial levels of the dungeon(s), but when you have someone following along with 2 whole hit points, that instills some good caution still. The new players also tend to be on a bit of an accelerated leveling curve, getting an equal share of treasure will give them XP very fast, but they still have to be careful and use their brains trying to help contribute despite the power disparity. It also helps everyone to think about overcoming obstacles with more than just “press my pile of hit points against the other piles of hit points”. New players also get to see the more advanced spells, nifty gear, and game knowledge of the older players and that tends to be something that the new players really get excited about acquiring. Secondly, being willing to run parties with disparate levels helps enforce the fear of character death. We’ve all had characters we really enjoyed playing, that we’d be sad to lose…but if there’s a “trad game” adventure path being played, then if you die, you get a new character you roll up with the same levels as everyone else, equipped with Wealth By Level, all fat and happy. Not so if there are parties setting out with level disparities, a player who lost his nice fifth level fighter is going to have to embrace the suck of having to worry about a single bugbear hit again. It actually makes resurrection magic far more valuable, just like it used to be. Finally, preparing a campaign for multiple-level parties will often help prevent you as the writer from making “level zones” strictly and artificially gradated. When I wrote my West Marches hexcrawl, I had to account for the fact that a first-level wizard might be venturing out a hundred miles from home…and I also have threats on the random encounter table of the nearby lands that even a tenth level fighter will want to work to avoid fighting. All the design goals of the OSR emerge naturally when you allow a wide disparity of character power in your parties. And it turns out that’s actually a blast to play. I’m going to be trying to provide a little more review-style content here, because I know I’ve benefitted from reviews personally a lot. I don’t have a blogging budget though, so here’s what I’ll be doing on Monday for the next little while…I’m going to look around for free adventures (or TTRPG supplements) on itch.io, pull a random one out of the hat, and take a swing at a brief review. I expect that, things being as they are, a good 99.9% of what’s out there is crap, but rather than hold up these things to be pilloried, I’m going to hold these to a generous standard. I have no sympathy for people churning out junk for $1 a pop, but if it’s free I’m going to assume its at least coming from a place of earnest self-expression. So, I’ll be listing:
What Little Remains… An Xword Dungeon by molomoot, levels…??? System Neutral. Oh boy, I’m sure there are about half a dozen red flags going off already. A one-pager (actually two pages) from some kind of competition/challenge where you take a crossword puzzle, solve it, and then turn it into a 14x14 little map. Clever idea although I’m not sure if it sparks joy. Basic plot is fine, you have a happy little death cult’s lair, the cultists have all recently buggered off, and so now their temple is ripe for the looting. Part of the “cover page” (I think this is designed so it can be a trifold?) has a little six-question bit of homework filling in the details of who the cult were, why they left, and who other factions are that want the loot (!)…in other words, the bits that make this dungeon unique. I don’t actually have the hate for one-pagers that most reviewers have. As somebody who runs a lot of open-table sandboxes, little lairs like this are great for placing in hexes for a session-sized chunk of D&D just discoverable on the map. Ideally, a good one-pager presents a scenario that meshes well with the rest of the world but has its own little story going on, giving whoever showed up at the table a nice little bite-sized chunk of classic gaming for the night. Despite all that, there are real challenges to the format…they have to be generic enough to be able to fit into the standard fantasy map, but you also want specificity in to spark imagination and ideally lead to inspiring more adventures. This one…struggles with that latter bit. First, though, what I liked: The map, within the very tight confines of this crossword format, has about as much interest as is possible. There’s some verticality, some looping, a water feature, and a secret room(s)…that’s all great, and genuinely impressive in just eight rooms. Pretty too. I’m going to complain about the lack of stats in a minute, but the two dungeon monsters described, a fighting statue and an ashy swarm of ghosts, are both neat and are described as having interesting fights (again, hurt by the lack of mechanics). There are statues to mess with to uncover passages, with riddles/hints, there’s a neat idea with the treasure vault opening, and a nasty trap in the secret room that as described would be a TPK but I can definitely see ways in which it’d be interesting. Molomoot knows at least some how to play this hobby. Public domain art is tasteful and enhances the product. Because of all this, what could be improved is actually…most of it. The biggest problem with this product is a lack of specificity, and it’s so very easy to fix that. Those six questions about the cult? Just fill them in, if I want to change the details I feel more than free to but it’d be great to know the who/why. Those two nifty monsters? Stat ‘em for your system. Let’s be honest it’s probably 5E, that’s fine, anyone in this hobby can translate the Linga Franca that is 5E into their own system of choice, but some mechanics would be very nice. This also grants a level range (again, I feel empowered to ignore it as the DM). Names are good too…the statues, why not make them faded Saints of Death? Again, I can change if I need it. Finally, although I like the ideas of a trap that fills a chamber with water, and a vault that only opens while reciting a prayer, more levers are always good. What happens when the players wedge open the vault? What happens if the players undo the water trap? You have a trap that diverts a river…maybe something in the pool becomes accessible while the trap is diverting the river? Just a little bit of expansion, even in the one-page format. There’s a best use case for this thing in the classic one-page-dungeon scenario of “you come upon a lair, and it’s…(shuffling in a folder, grab this trifold)…a death cult’s abandoned temple”. Sadly, I had to then go and do my homework for a little bit while the players build their dice towers. Now that I have done my homework via this review, I probably will put this in my random lair table. The other classic use case, stealing bits from this, has a few nice parts in the statue screwing around in particular. There’s definitely promise here, I’d look at Molomoot again. Final rating? **/**** even on the One-Page curve, but with some details added it could have easily been higher. |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|