A social “adventure” by Richard Ruane, levels don’t matter. Written for OSE. Merry Christmas everyone, I hope all of you are having a wonderful holiday. I’m reviewing a winter holiday adventure, so you know I’m having fun, right? Ho. Ho ho ho? A Quiet Midwinter claims to be written for OSE and contains many Dyson Logos maps over it dozen pages, but the confused plot is about a fey winter representative taking the role of Santa Claus looking for naughty and nice lists from infernal and heavenly sources, sitting around a little town waiting for it. Or, quoting the module directly: “what a Hallmark Holiday movie might be if it were about a group of queer fantasy RPG characters.” There is no exploration, no danger, no interest, and no substantial reward given to the PCs, the entire “adventure” here was written to fill out gossipy statblocks about interpersonal drama between multiple high-ranked ~4HD humanoids. A halfhearted attempt at investigation boils down to “there is a 50% chance someone in [location] knows where the seer who gives the naughty/nice list lives”. Oof. I’m trying to think about what I liked. Cover looks nice. Adobe stock art being used is vaguely charming. Format is clean. What can be improved here besides just deleting this embarrassing nonadventure? Well, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong about the paper-thin premise for a holiday one-shot, but there needs to be an actual game on offer. The nice clean Dyson maps are completely and utterly wasted as it is, but if you want genuine investigation, having them with clues sprinkled around and individuals marked could make sense. Amusingly, no village map is provided, which actually would be helpful in timing things, if timing mattered. In a real-adventure version of this, multiple individuals are moving around, there are timers going off throughout, and missing things would have genuine consequences. Social adventures aren’t a terrible idea, what the adventure wants to do is possible, but your protagonists should never be NPCs, the main characters at the table are the players. So…do all that. Also reward something better than 1d6pp, that’s Scrooge-like. The best use case for this is as an example of what not to do. Don’t put maps in that don’t matter. Don’t go long on NPC statblocks that will never be in a fight. Don’t…do all this. Very instructive. Second-best use case is using it to start a nice warm fire in the fireplace. Final Rating? */***** Bah humbug.
0 Comments
I've posted plenty of reviews of free products, and I've been hyping the new adventure site contest, but I guess the raison d'etre of any authorial blog should first to shill my own products...which I do a poor job of, it would seem. And yet when I release a free product that's and adventure site, I really should highlight it. Thus...K6: The Great Mansion Heist.
This is the sixth entry in my "One Session Kits" series of pay-what-you-want adventure modules, a set of kits designed to, well, let me quote my own blurb: "Sometimes, you just need an instant adventure. Perhaps your usual GM got sick. Perhaps you are introducing new friends to the game. Perhaps you want to try out a new system, to shake things up a bit, or maybe just blow off some steam. That calls for a one shot; a self-contained adventure where people can sit down at the table with no prior knowledge of the setting or plot, and wrap up after four hours satisfied with the ending of their story. That’s what the adventures in the ONE SESSION series are designed for; insert them into your ongoing game or play with strangers at a con. Bring your own ideas, equipment, and props in and mix and match all you like. ONE SESSION kits are designed to give you not just an adventure, but also all you need to run the adventure besides the dice." It's my an ongoing effort with these things to build up a series of adventures that work independently as one-shots, and can also be placed into an ongoing campaign. Often enough, they start out as parts in my own campaigns...in the instance of this one, the avaricious Merchant-Lord Salmo, ruler of Salmo's Town, managed to annoy my players enough to get himself robbed. Grab a map, key it, work out alarm procedures, guard routes, and of course reactions and ramifications...suddenly, there's a complete adventure here. The consequences and "further adventures" ideas are all things that happened in my own campaign. All this is well and good, but to make a one-session kit I also add the "everything else". An accompanying map publication has all the maps ready to print on A4 paper, while pregens are provided for anyone wanting to run the adventure at a con or as a one-shot. The final touch, and one I've always enjoyed, is a page of paper minifigures, designed to be cut out and used as minis in the aforementioned maps. It's a lot of extra work on the publisher side, but over the years I've had enough feedback saying they appreciate all the extras that I'll keep doing it. Please check it out for free, and if you do enjoy it consider chipping in a couple bucks to the cause...but either way I'm going to keep making adventures, there's really nothing else like it. Still forty days left to submit...we already have several sites, with locations ranging from howling wintery mountains, scouring sandy deserts, and remote giant-haunted hills. My own submission is written, but awaits testing; while it's a location in my ongoing campaign, I have a family group post-Christmas that'll be running it as a one-shot. The map is ready, in all its beauty:
Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… The Hidden Fête of the Krakonspiracy12/18/2023 A dungeon adventure by Michael Dingler, levels 2-4. Written for OSE. Driven by a passion for the circumflex, with a watery hub-and-spokes style Dyson map in hand, Mike Dingler had a vision, one of secret shapeshifters and hidden councils. Fourteen pages gets us thirty keyed rooms along with an introduction, a rumor table, random encounters, and a little bestiary, all written in the nicely standard “paragraphs with bolding” style. The somewhat sprawling map is supplemented by little subsections reproduced on the relevant keys’ pages, possibly more than needed considering the linearity but it’s a nice touch. Well-formatted adventure. The story of the dungeon is that an “Ur-krakon” is hanging out amidst some semi-sunken ruins, dreaming cosmic dreams. The beasts’ mere presence is enough to empower a bunch of sea critters, letting them shapeshift to infiltrate land-dweller society in some sort of…Krakonspiracy. The initial plot is hooked by the rumor table but peters out towards latter half of the zone, but the big krakon dominates everything there, so that’s nice. A couple teleporters, one requiring a secret bad guy badge, have the potential to radically shift an ongoing campaign on a deep level. Also bumping the krakon once gets the offender sleepily slapped, but bumping it twice wakes the big guy up, a region-level disaster at the very least. Water combat is handled in a hilariously brief fashion, “if it’s knee-deep, -1 to hit, if you’re swimming it’s -1 to hit and damage”. As the reader can probably tell, there’s a lot of what I liked here. Hub-and-spokes isn’t the best type of map, but it does at least give choices. After the rather meh initial block of rooms the party makes it to a vast dim chamber, with the looming black presence of the ur-krakon more felt than seen over deeper waters, great scene. There are individual encounters along the spokes that have diplomatic potential, although everyone within the dungeon is badguy, so treachery can be expected. Loot is plentiful, although too often easy to retrieve, while the magic items are both flavorful and cool. Screw a +1 dagger, how about a +1 golden dagger that can scribe a spell on the back of a living creature, which if cast then kills the creature? You could quibble about power levels for the noted level range but that’s cool. The fights (and there will be a lot of fights) generally have something to them beyond hacks and although there’s not a massive order of battle, rooms do react to neighboring rooms. The default patrols are innocents who will be prone to follow anyone’s orders. Good stuff. What can be improved here are all things within the writer’s not-inconsiderable skillset. For one thing, more hiding of things/trickiness to the loot would help. There’s a coracle (described as “leather-and-bone”, good) that just sits there, making moving around in the magic mutation brine easy. Better if it were hidden, or had a waterline leak, or hosted a rabid attack barnacle. The lip service to the whole thing not being just a hack is good, but more motivation and goals (mini-faction-play) would be great. The initial premise, of a fête full of conspirators, along with a large variety of aquatic races, means this should be something rife with politics…and, tragically, it isn’t. Thus, the best use case is, sadly, going to have to go into the one-shot bucket (more likely 2-3 sessions with a typical OSE group). The adventure has a lot of implied cosmology and hooks that would make it pretty disruptive to the standard campaign. Individual encounters and ideas have some mining potential, but that pervasive fish flavor is going to be all over everything. It’s the Japanese snack food of early-level drop-in adventure modules. Final Rating? **/*****, it’s nicely put together but ultimately it never achieves beyond “competent”. A dungeon adventure by David Harvison, level [whatever can handle a mummy]. System neutral, let’s just assume Cairn. Yo, it’s the return of the One-Page Dungeon. A crossword-based OPD was good, so this can’t be too bad, right? As I said in my very first itch review, “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.” This little thing uses an eight-room Dyson map with admirable verticality and impressive nonlinearity, so it should be perfect, right? Everything in this site should be working a lot better than it is. It’s a very tight little site, a couple open pits with a bunch of interconnected caves…very possibly the best map for its size I’ve ever seen out of Dyson Logos, a place that would be brilliant for procedural, map-as-you-go dungeon exploration play. Put a couple dozen kobolds down here, I’d have no problem turning this place into a fun 2-3 hour session. And yet, what is actually here are a bunch of extremely high-level monsters, and even though only one set (3d6(!) “zombie ghouls”) are immediate attackers, the designer does expect the party will fight most if not all of them. Every monster down in the pit has a yellow exclamation point over its head, a little quest to fulfil, and one expected to be completed by grinding in this little zone. The main questline is that the demon Pyx down near the bottom needs quest components from other rooms to be freed from his imprisonment. If he’s given sufficient donkey hooves (not joking), he’s free and then treacherously attacks. I’m not joking. Okay, so what I liked here beyond the great (squandered) map is that its heart is clearly in the right place. Having multiple sentient monsters in your dungeon with desires and goals is excellent and should be the default. There’s not a lot of drop-in support to the site, but the hag in (6) explicitly has “certainly something your party seeks!”, which is exactly the hook you’d want for a plot-coupon style game. A tiny random encounter table does have a rival party, nice. Finally, I’ve decided I do like the one trap (although it’s not telegraphed)…stairway turns into a slippery slide, sends hapless victims hurtling down the well into a rotating secret door, deposits them in the middle of those 10.5 zombie ghouls. Nasty, but fun. Thus, what can be improved is…so very much. I suspect this was not playtested, in playtest for example you get a picture of how to telegraph that trap, or else actionable reactions after it gets triggered. More traps would be nice. The WoW-esque “quests” are a little clumsy, but having NPCs with goals is good, better to make it organic and think about how actual conversations could reveal the goals. The open-pit design of the map also makes fly and other similar spells game-breaking, but the monster choices call for a mid-level party, the whole place would benefit from being populated with 1-4 HD monsters instead. Finally, there’s a lot of multi-level interactions in the form of ledges, a little tactical or exploration thinking would really make those areas pop. I’m grumpy. The best use case for Pyx’s Pandemonium Pit is probably stripping out that map and making it a hex spot populated entirely by random tables. It’ll be okay in a plot-coupon style of game where the hag’s “insert McGuffin here” is what the railroad conductor needs for a night. Just such a waste. Final Rating? */***** even on the OPD curve it’s disappointing. A dungeon adventure by Madeline, level designators are for losers. System neutral…or system hostile, given the sci-fi sheen. I’m tired of complaining about the maps, so for December I’m pulling from a Dyson Logos Jam in the hope that average map quality will go up somewhat. We’re going to start with this Tomb of Xul Lan Kwat here, a six-page adventure that keys a nineteen-key Dyson map that’s had the color balance messed with. All to the good, but then we see “system-neutral” and no level listed, and there’s some worry creeping back in. It’s got the standard stuff you expect with a “scifi fantasy horror” like weirdo monsters and mutations and is almost entirely focused on being a one-shot. I suspect that someone somewhere has an unholy Cairn hack-hack that’s all about this exact setting. The plot is that it’s a tomb. The flavor of tomb is “dead god(dess) dreaming”, which is I believe the second most common flavor after “noble with Jerry Springer issues”. Standard stuff, party is going in with a special box to seal away bits of the goddess that are causing issues, there are mutant monkeys, emo gnomes, mushroom women, and evil dire crayfish to bump into, a small mutation chart to ruin most characters completely, and occasional descriptors of magic computers to coat this fantasy premise in the thinnest patina of scifi. It’s only slightly static on the Tomb Staticness Index, and written in a clear format with a minimum of fuss. Jaded intro there aside, what I liked in this one is how it coheres and flows into a reasonable environment. The monsters are decent, although being system-neutral means that they don’t have mechanics to match their distinctive personalities and vibe. It’s a gross, unpleasant area that well captures the feeling of “dead(ish) goddess warping this place”, and although the map is more linear than I’d prefer, there’s enough here for exploratory gameplay in bits and pieces. If “Dark Gonzo” isn’t a flavor you mind, then it’s a competently executed flavor. A failure state that leads to a full-fledged campaign is admirable, if not particularly realistic. The first of what can be improved would be to open that map up. Make a teleporter or two, let the water feature that dominates the whole place be a little less brutal to traverse. If you have any system that cares about loot (OSR or 3.P), more places need hidden treasure as well, but as I mentioned this is pretty clearly a one-shot, so the games are made up and the points don’t matter. Horror trappings are decent on this one, but a line or two on the entry level to up the feelings of dread wouldn’t go amiss. Having stats for any specific system along with a level range aimed at would be helpful for modulating threats as well. Still, the best use case for The Tomb of Xul Lan Kwat is clearly as an atmospheric, gonzo, horror one-shot. It could be placed in a hexcrawl and the scifi bits could be either played up or sanded off depending on the system, but it’s world-changing enough in its consequences I’d be careful there. Unless you’re playing in a Dark Hersey sandbox campaign. Horror’s not to my taste, but a little amplification could definitely make this a decent horror game session. Final Rating? I’m going to give it a slightly kind **/***** because I could imagine playing with it. Don’t think I will though. December is upon us, and you know what that means...Christmas carols, holiday parties, travel to the old home...and the contest has begun. I'm already had one submission (remember, submit here), and dozens of others have already announced their plans to write something. Judges have gathered, our red fountain pens primed. I have started work on mapping for my own submission, which again cannot win but the other four judges will also be harshly ranking.
Spread the news far and wide, and start your own scribblings...after all, the holidays are a great time to playtest with your unsuspecting friends and family. It won't take long, I promise. Yesterday, I whipped together a reference document for my co-GM in our long-running West Marches campaign, giving him notes on a little tomb the players are going to stumble upon soon. It's not what I'd call submission-ready, for one thing it uses a Dyson map that doesn't have a commercial license, for another it's very specific to our campaign. Still, I figured I could post it here as an example. Players in the Valley West Marches/Skyshadow Isles game, don't go below the break...otherwise, see below (my comments in italics). |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
April 2024
Categories
All
|