Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Hollowed Priests of the Forgotten God3/4/2024 An “adventure” by Thomas and Madeleine Keene, level ???.
Written for Vaults of Vaarn In these delves within the dark reaches of itch.io, I am not a member of any community, rather a Jane Goodall-esque outside observer of these strange hominids, learning of them only from their artifacts…there are the aggressive and dimwitted Mork Borglings, the self-important and artsy Troikites, the sweet and naive Shadowdarkans, the deranged Into the Odders, and the ubiquitous OSEnai. The sweltering dark gene-forges have bred members of new systems native to the itch.io ecosystem, like the zealous Cairnies and the gentle Heroes of Adventure, but there are a thousand tiny systems, unremarked by the wider world outside of the occasional hurled adventure at zoo-visitors. One such system is Vaults of Vaarn, an acid trip dream set in a fantasy high-tech post-apocalypse. It’s much less cool than that sounds, but it does spawn adventures, or at least pdfs pretending to be adventures. This is one of those. What then is the thing itself? Hollowed Priests is mostly about a god dying, when it did its name disappeared from reality entirely, leaving black voids in books and scrolls that contained its name, and also in the priests dedicated to it, tearing voids in their bodies and souls. The adventure part comes in when the PC(s) take one of the d20(!) hooks leading to the main library of this forgotten god, retrieving [thing] while risking [danger] and also encountering [scene]…I’m not exaggerating, all those brackets and random d20 items. There’s no map, no geography, no flow, no plot, just a bunch of d20 rolls claiming to be an adventure. What I liked about this non-adventure is that genuinely interesting flash of creativity about the dead god’s blotted-out name, which is a cool idea with some fascinating worldbuilding implications. The tables have some neat ideas too, although the rigorous adherence to filling every list with twenty entries means the quality is a little uneven. Props for that initial premise, though. You know what I’m going to say about what can be improved…GIVE ME A MAP, A DIAGRAM, SOME KIND OF ANCHOR TO THE PHYSICAL WORLD. While not strictly necessary to map it, even just having a physical location in mind while writing your adventure does wonders for grounding the action. Riffing on that more broadly, imagine how your putative adventure is will flow in play…having creative ideas is great, but there a point at which you have four people sitting down with beer and chips looking for 2-4 hours’ entertainment, how do those creative sparks actually work when the rubber meets the road? This is why playtesting is always an improvement. The best use case for Hollowed Priests of the Forgotten God, one might say unfortunately the ONLY use case for it, is as an idea-generator for worldbuilding. There’s a nifty seed in here, one that I could see growing in several directions of varying quality. Weird item chart is also neat. Final Rating? */***** because it’s not an adventure, it’s somebody excitedly (if slightly pompously) telling you about his nifty idea.
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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