An adventure by Knucklepunk Games, level 1. Written for Shadowdark It is the tail end of the first half of 2024, and so Kickstarter’s 2023 New Hotness, Shadowdark, has finally shipped. For every hundred unboxing videos, that of course means there’s one new actual game of the system being played. And for every hundred games being actually played, there’s a new playtested, brilliant, creative, and interesting adventure being published. And for every playtested adventure being published, there are of course ten thousand cash-grab “adventure” modules being released in the vain hope that some poor moron will screw up the “$0” setting in the Pay What You Want entry field. How do you like those odds, punk? The mysterious Knucklepunk Games is extremely excited here about the GODLESS setting, having released The Hall of Eininnell on the world but threatening to release many, many more publications in the future. Fourteen pages of an excretable ALL CAPS font are herein used to describe a linear “adventure” in a “dungeon” of eight rooms, five of them mapped. Prose gives the occasional ChatGPT feel but we know mortal hands typed this by an artisanal sprinkling of typos and misspellings throughout the document. Experienced itchers have already started hammering away at the ole’ EJECT button, but we’re here to examine crimes as much as glean gold, so…let’s see what’s in the chalk outline, shall we? We begin with a description of the GODLESS setting, which is as mandatory as it is trite; gods have departed after the dragons all disappeared, elf empire has fallen, human kingdom where YOU are dwelling is basically Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s England without the wit, just muddy little hamlets in the midst of howling but somehow also dull wilderness. YOU are MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY in the TOWNE OF KHON who START IN THE MEADERY OF OLD TOM and I really can’t convey how tight this railroad is. A DARK MANTLE attacks, canonically utterly destroys and impoverishes the players’ farms in particular, and OLD TOM points the party to nearby semi-occupied elf ruins (the titular HALL OF EININNELL) for loot, but players are also given agency by being told they can choose to instead serve the local knight as miserable “surfs”. I have a brief moment of hope from these spellings that legendary writer Jim Theis yet lives, but the subsequent bits about a linear trip with punishing random encounters, a linear monastery, a secret serial killer elf monk, and a vault beneath the ruins that holds “FAR TOO MUCH GOLD FOR PLAYERS TO ENTIRELY BRING BACK TO THEIR HOMES” as well as a dragon statue disappoint me with the lack of “lithe, opaque nose” twists. The dragon statue is of course a petrified dragon but in a bonkers twist if a player reads the puzzle beneath the dragon THE MAKE A WIS SAVE OR CUT THEMSELVES AND TOUCH THE STATUE AND FREE THE DRAGON which, by the way, WAKES UP EVERY PETRIFIED DRAGON IN THE ENTIRE WORLD AND ALSO BRINGS BACK THE GODS. “PLAYERS WILL LEARN THAT NOT ALL PUZZLES SHOULD BE SOLVED”. Also PLAYERS WHO AWAKEN THE DRAGON MAY BE COMPELLED TO PRAY FOR HELP, which takes the form of a single x3 attack or turning the praying player into a high-level saint cleric. This all sounds like I’m joking but I’m being completely serious. Man, I guess I need a what I liked bit here following my usual Crapshoot Monday format. Um. I like how my brain has been tickled by the all-caps insanity so thoroughly that I can now taste the color blue. I like the mapping software that was used for the linear five-room upper map (the one that has keys of “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “X” of course). I guess what can be improved is to take the entire premise and maybe not be insane about it? Dropping kayfabe for a second, the usual issue of a poor/no map is a big reason for the lack of choice in this “adventure”, having concrete geography enables agency, it doesn’t constrain it. Just assuming that players want to have fun adventuring is a good bet for any writer, all the arm-twisting isn’t necessary. As a broad note, anytime you use AI art, as in the cover here, you are going to definitely have more people looking carefully over your text itself to see if AI tools were used there, too. It’s clear to me the best use case for this thing is as a safe and effective psychedelic. The adventure is unusable outside of its very specific bespoke setting, and I pity the hapless miner who attempts to actually pull out useful bits from this bizarre mélange. The only use case here as novelty artefact. Final Rating? */***** but I definitely would recommend checking this out in the hopes that another such strange publication is perpetrated again.
3 Comments
Prince
5/20/2024 05:14:28 am
5 star review for a 1 star adventure. You love to see it.
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Jacob72
5/20/2024 11:10:54 am
Ugh. This looks like utter kiech, undeserving of the single star you gave it. The 1e DMG random dungeon appendix would come up with a map with more variety.
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Commodore
5/22/2024 03:21:32 pm
Oh, it really is special in how awful it is. I didn't even get into things like the underground random encounter table (for LEVEL 1) including "1d4 dragons" on the results. It's majestic in its horror.
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AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
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