by Rachel

Well, I didn't get the Assembly Guide done for Composer's Cat BUT Nine Lives' work-in-progress has been submitted to Open Owl for consideration :D. Also, I think I might've played 100 games of Ascension: Deckbuilding Game this month?!?! I'll have to count my tallies tomorrow. It's nice to have the online league back :D. I've also been enjoying a resurgence in friendly matches too. Here's some of my January highlights (remember, I'm SkyeEnchantress):

On to February!

Game Over On borrowed time...

Happy Saturday and happy playing!
-Rachel

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A new rpg publisher has been added to the database: Thieves of Time

A new episode has been added to the database: ".dungeon//remastered" by Snow

A new episode has been added to the database: Clint, Anthony and Mike run the show

A new episode has been added to the database: [S5E2] Subways and Smoke

by KatharinaKuo

Title: Space Between Time
System: Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition)
Publication: A Time for Sacrifice
Authors: Ben Burns
Publisher: New Comet Games
Playing time: 1-2 game nights à 4 hours
Genre/Style: Exploration, Puzzles
Pre-made characters: No
Number of pages: 16 pages (+10 pages of maps, handouts, NPC stats)
Location: Starts in Havana (Cuba), then travels to Cozumel (Yucatán)
Time: July 1930 (can easily be moved a few years)
Mythos reference: Portals and the existence of places beyond time and space
Starting point: The characters travel to Cuba for a joint conference between Miskatonic University and the University of Havana, where Professor Williamson asks them to accompany him on an expedition to Cozumel.
Review basis: I have read the adventure and will not be running it.

What it's about:
Prof. Williamson recently found the diary of his father, who disappeared 50 years ago while exploring Mayan ruins on Cozumel. The investigators are to join Prof. Williamson in finding out what really happened and travel to the ruins to do so. When they perform a sacrificial ritual on an altar there, one of the statues begins to speak and tells them about a “space between time” and how to get there and back again. At another altar, a sacrificial ritual allows them to learn about a “well of knowledge” and its dangers. Behind yet another altar, they finally find a portal that leads to the “space between time.” This is a non-Euclidean area, of which a total of 25 rooms have been created in the adventure. To travel back to Earth, the investigators must first drink from the fountain of knowledge to learn the ritual for the return journey and find the necessary ritual dagger in one of the other rooms. However, the fountain is protected by a guardian. Whoever kills him becomes the new guardian—a fate that befell Prof. Williamson's father 50 years ago.

Content:
To get straight to the point: I find the plot too abstruse. I like the idea of an otherworldly space, but this adventure reads more like a (bad) computer game to me: First, the investigators find statues that, for no apparent reason, give them exactly the information they need for the adventure. In the “space between time,” they can then conveniently learn a ritual to return. Right in the first room, there is also a light source to help them find their way around, and thankfully, someone has left a ritual dagger in one of the rooms so that they can actually come back. For me, that's a bit too many coincidences to make the story seem realistic (as far as one can speak of “realism” in fantasy adventures). On a positive note, I must say that some of the rooms contain cool ideas – I especially like the protector. However, other rooms consist only of atmospheric descriptions, without the investigators having anything to do in them. Here I see the danger that it will feel more like sightseeing at the gaming table, without the investigators having any influence on the plot.

Presentation:
The adventure is presented in a relatively clear manner, but in terms of functionality, it cannot compete with the simple layouts by Chaosium or German Cthulhu publisher Pegasus. In particular, I would have liked to see important information highlighted in the body text so that the right passage could be found more quickly. The writing style is quite compact. A few passages could have been shortened, but overall the editing is very solid. The handouts are fine, but a little too comic-like for my taste. .

Conclusion:
For my taste, the adventure is too scripted and implausible. However, it is well suited as a source of ideas for trips to areas outside our world.

This review was first published in German on https://www.tanelorn.net/

A new episode has been added to the database: Season Six Recap, Part 3: Is it Stuffed?

by bryce0lynch

By Christopher Letzelter
Anachronistes Press
1e
Levels 3-7

Player characters are called upon to remove invaders taking up residence in the land recently granted to a local nobleman. After his surveyors and retainers were killed or driven out, it’s obvious that this problem is bigger than just a band of upstart humanoids – does your adventuring party have the brains, brawn and grit to secure the place?

This 48 page adventure presents a ruined abbey and grounds with around ninety rooms on several levels. It’s got a great realism vibe and the 1e crowd will be thrilled. It’s also more than a little wordy with the DM text, with all that entails for usability.

Sir Useless has a new land grant and sends in his surveyors. They make it to the site of an old abandoned abbey that everyone knows about. One dude returns, everyone else slaughtered. Sire Useless sends in his men to clean up the humanoid problem. Only two return, everyone else slaughtered, so he gets some specialists. The abbey has some grounds, also detailed, and is mostly ruined, so you get a couple of old parts of the abbey, ruins, an upper floor and a couple of dungeon levels which represents their basement area and some catacombs. This is supported by some nicely clean and gone maps. It gives the impressions of realism while the ruined walls, collapsed areas and the like provide ample opportunity to adventure. Nice CC maps, I think, without going overboard, exactly the right mix of legibility and art. Or, would be if it had reacting monsters on it. Cause I’m gonna print out the map and mark reacting monsters on it so I can run the adventure. WHich means that the designer should do something like that for me.

I want to call out this encounter description on the abbey grounds, which I think exemplifies the spirit of the adventure. The read-aloud is “Copses of hardwoods grow at the long ends of a stagnant rainwater pond. Algae and pond scum float on its surface among reeds and cattails.” and then the first line of the DM notes: “The water surface is about five feet below level land, exposing roughly twenty feet of muck and mud all around its perimeter.” It goes on a bit more for the DM notes but that’s a decent little description both for the players and then a little more to help the DM bring the encounter location to life with the ring of muck. Pretty nice. Oh, hey, yeah, the reason I’m calling this out is because the GREEN SLIME in the water!! Dude told you it was there! Stagnant. Algae and pond scum floating. And you stuck your fucking hand in it?! After wading through the fucking mud?! This is a perfect example of verisimilitude working in an adventure. The creature chosen fits in to the environment perfectly. Abandoned abbey grounds, so we get the stagnant pool, and then the perfect monster choice for the stagnant pool, placed in a way that is obvious in retrospect. That’s good. And while not every encounter reached these heights there are enough of them trying to do this that this kind of “fantasy realism” comes through. Enough to have fun but not enough to be boring.

The village description, where Sir useless has his manor, gets the following description: “traveler-friendly amenities include the tavern, an inn/ procurement house/brewery, a temple (aligned with NG or LN deities), and Sir Feris’ estate (there is a modest guest cottage on the grounds of his walled estate);” That’s fine. This isn’t a village adventure. It hits pretty much what the DM needs. I could quibble about inserting a fun name or fact, but it’s good enough. What the adventure does do, though, is go through a little description of the seven or eight strangers that have passed through this off-the-beaten-track village in the last couple of months. Perfect! If you ask around about strangers, as one might, then this is what you’re going to learn. That IS where most of the effort in the village should lie. Or, at least IN THIS CASE. We provide what the DM needs in the situation they need it in, not as a rote exercise in all cases.

The abbey grounds are fine, as I mentioned before. A little fighting, a few things to puzzle out. Undead in the catacombs, unaligned necromancer in the upper floors with with retinue of hired NPC’s and gnolls, with a few natural creatures/monsters tossed in. Decent little en vironmental things. Treasure feels a little light on coins in a gold=xp game, but a decent number of magic items also. It all kind of channels that spirit of the sample dungeon in the 1 DMG, from the secret door to the scroll in the stream.

But, it’s not for me. Maybe for you. But not for me. And you know why. Mucho Texto, along with some very basic formatting that does little to alleviate the text overflow. There’s bold for the read-aloud, and super-duper bold for more emphasis, with italics. It’s all pretty basic and a little overwhelming to the eye, making it seem like EVERYTHING is important. But, meh, not my fav but I could I guess get over that.

The degree of text present here is quite large. And I don’t mean “relevant text.” There is a substantial amount of backstory present just about everywhere in this adventure. Most of the abbey is a ruin because local villagers took the stones, but left most of the main abbey intact because of superstitious fear. Ok. Does this matter expect to explain WHY the abbey is partially ruined? I don’t think so. And there is almost never a reason in a D&D adventure to explain and/or justify something. Yet we see that over and over again in this. In addition there this is kind of appeal to the historical abbey and its usage. “These fields were used for combat practice – the north for equestrian use, the south for melee training. The path was built of tightly-fitted slate flagstones; most of them have been removed, the rest carpeted by a century of dirt and grass overgrowth.” None of that text matters. The flagstone doesn’t exist or can’t be seen. This is straight out of the Dungeon Magazine trophy room nonsense description, the worst room description of all time, or at least in this aspect.

I can appreciate that this is a pretty damn good historical abbey ground. (And, again, nice map!) And I DO find the stone removal for houses appealing at some level. Yeah, this is the way things work. But it, and so much more here, has no impact on the adventure beyond really leaning in to that historically accurate thing. But you have to balance that with usability. And making the DM dig through a lot of not-pertinent information that is interesting trivia in order to get to and/or not emphasize the important parts of the rooms shows a lack of understanding of how a room entry is used and, in fact, what its purpose is. Some of the rooms approach wall of text territory, and no matter how much the “well _I_ like that stuff” crowd want to crow, wall of text territory is not good.

This is an ok adventure and it has that kind of lower-fantasy vibe that I find appealing. Maybe a little too staid, with the appeals to THE FANTASTIC coming mostly through churchy shit. But, I can see people wanting that. What I’m having a hard time with is that there are NUMEROUS other adventure that one could select that DONT have the wordiness/usability issues this has. I would almost always pick up one of those and select it rather than this one. I could quibble about monster reactions, coinage, level fives, and so on, but, in a world in which every adventure ever written is available, why torment yourself?

This is $8.50 at DriveThru. There’s no previews. You gotta put in a preview man! At least showing a few encounters so a prospective buyer can get a sense of your writing and formatting style so they can make an informed decision.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/551514/tagma-angelik...

by bryce0lynch

By Edwin Nagy
Parallel Dimension Gaming
OSE
Level 1

Construction camps along a new mountain pass are being destroyed, and danger awaits along every twist and turn. Can your heroes uncover the source of these deadly attacks?

This 33 page adventure details a little wilderness journey and a small thirteen room mine full of murderous dwarf miners. It’s fucking weird; it’s got the underpinnings of something decent, but never goes all in on it and pads everything out terribly. Lost potential, I guess.

Getting trade goods from Town A to Town C means taking the river through Town B, which is run by a tough, and probably corrupt, business family who controls a portage. So Prince Dipshit builds a road through the mountains directly to Town C, bypassing Town B. Groovy. Except the road construction camps got attacked. Since this is an important project he hires a bunch of no-names to go figure it out rather than sending the army. Well, to be fair, the party is supposed to present each of the towns guilds, which does seem chiller. Playing up the guild angle would have been nice, but as is you don’t get anything more than “they represent each of the towns major guilds.”

And that IS the major problem with this adventure; it hints at things but never goes there. The “evil town” doesn’t get much more than the fact they are shrewd and a maybe a little shady. The freedom fighters get that “they meet in the basement of the local pub and are all talk.” Clearly these things, covered in the thirteen page intro, are meant to provide some play opportunities, false paths, other various sorts of entanglements and fun. But they don’t show up again.

Instead you get to plod along a half-built road, with a work camp about a day apart, four in total. Here’s a sacked one. Here’s an abandoned one. Here’s one with three dudes in it. Focusing in on that last one, you have three guys patrolling camp. Nothing else. There’s a mention that they are charmed and that the party can roll to detect that they are. That’s it. Stats? No. Direction, like they attack, or challenge the party or something else? No. What do they know if they wake up? Nothing. In spite of this being about a column … of large type. What’s a boy in love supposed to do? “The horses are anxious to eat and drink not having been fed in a few days.” Ok. And the dudes? What about them. NOTHING. Absolutely Nothing. It absolutely boggles the mind how one could leave out something so trivial. And, there are lots of editors and producers and the like attached to this.

No one cares. Remember. No one cares. Your publisher does not care. If something decent pops out then thats great, but they do not gie a SHIT. Someone, somewhere, has to care about the adventure that’s about to get published. Sometimes we pay an editor to care. Rarely a small press publisher cares. And seldom does anyone else. If you pay them then they care. If they pay you then they do not care. Usually. Blech. I hate it when I’m not optimistic.

Somewhere along the road you’re gonna be the victim of a rockslide. Caused by a dude who triggers it. I guess the party sees him do it? The entire layout isn’t clear, there’s the road being constructed and a ravine and a dead-end and a mine entrance and none of it makes sense. In my own head I don’t know who you see the dude who triggers the rockslide (and then retreats in to the hidden mine entrance.) And, therefore, I don’t see how the party finds the hidden mine entrance. And this is important because this is where the actual adventure is. I’m open to being wrong here (Page 14 of the document/page 15 of the PDF) in that I’ve missed something or an not understanding something. But I don’t think so. So, good luck finding the actual adventure.

Inside the mine you’ll get a bunch of boring rooms that described in a boring way. “Crossroads This is the first area of worked stone, with passages leading in each cardinal direction.” Exciting! And then six lines of text telling us where each corridor goes. Joy. That’s the fucking map. That’s the purpose of the fucking map. I know some of you fuckwits like it when the text explicitly describes the room exits and where they lead, but I think we can all agree that when it SUBSTANTIALLY outnumbers the room description/text then we’ve lost site of the goal. Don’t do things by rote. Do them because they make sense in the situation you currently find yourself. Yes, there are guidelines, but don’t follow them off of a cliff.

Anyway, inside you find some dwarf miners. I guess this is a kind of illegal mining operation and they feel threatened by the road being constructed. I don’t think there’s really any way to tell this. You can see where a barge might come up one of the mine entrances and infer, I guess. But, also, the miners always come screaming out of the darkness and attack the party. That’s it. No playing dice or whatnot. They just come charging out of a hallway and attack. All … eight of them? In two encounters? Plus Lareth, of course, in charge of everything, with no foreshadowing or hint. Wasted potential everywhere, Lareth. Mom always knew you were gonna grow up to be a failure.

Not mentioned: the single encounter on the wandering table that only occurs once. About a messenger found dead on the road. Roll twice on the random message table to determine the contents of his message. Don’t fucking do this. That’s not how randomness is used in an adventure.

This is $5 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Joy. That seems to be a trend these days. We need a preview, a substantive preview that shows us some encounters, so we can make an informed decision on if to buy or not.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548592/arden-s-adven...

by bryce0lynch

By Graeme Davis
Mondiversi
OSE
Levels 1-5

Rudgen’s Square is a small open space in one of the more modest parts of a city. You can place it in any city or large town in your campaign. Named after a long-forgotten hero whose cracked and weathered statue – now headless – sits on a plinth atop a fountain at its center, the square sees a modest but constant stream of foot traffic, and a few small-time merchants have set up stalls around the edge selling all manner of goods

This 22 page adventure details about four hours in a street market as things happen around the party. It’s two pages of content, padded out, in a museum tour of an adventure. At least it ends with people shitting and puling their guts up in public while zombies attack. It just needed more of that.

Dude claims to be the inventor of the “multi-plot” adventure, for Warhammer, back in 87. I don’t know, it’s just a lot of things going on at once. Maybe. I take it for granted now, but, also, the concept of Romantic Love, right? In any event, our definitions of “a lot of plots going on at once” are a little different.

You are sent to the marketplace to find The Maltese Falcon, or whatever. Slimy junk merchant has it and he wanted like a bajillion million dollars for it. This is the first place the adventure breaks down, and maybe the most critical. Do they just stab the dude and leave? Do they steal it and leave? Or do they hang around for a minute? The entire adventure hinges on the party hanging around for a bit. If they do not hang around the marketplace then the adventure is not going to work. For it relies on, about every fifteen minutes, some kind of event happening in and around the party. There are a number of plotlines, seven or so I believe, and they unfold over the next four hours at about one event every fifteen minutes, related to one of the subplots. A dude smuggling himself out of the city as a poly’d horde. Food poisoning. A Romeo & Juliet lovers tryst. The dude that has the Maltese Falcon has sold a crime lords kid a love potion that actually turns him green. Maybe the answer to DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! Should be Yes if its the crime lords son and you’re a shady merchant?

Anyway, every fifteen minutes or so some observant person in the party, asking questions about whats going down, is going to be asked to make an intelligence check to get some kind of extra knowledge. I hope they succeed on the roll. A lot. Or else everyone is going to be quite bored tonight during the game.

The inherent concept here, of having a lot going on, is in fact correct. That should be the default for just about any adventure, and a town and/or social adventure adventure especially. There SHOULD be a lot going on at once. That gives the world a lived in feeling and creates a sense of urgency; you can’t deal with everyone at the same time, right? Faction play in a dungeon. The outdated mind map relationships I like for villages/social encounters. But the problem, gere, is one of passivity.

In a perfect world, for the party at least, you steal the Jade Skull and/or kill the slimy stallkeeper. And then leave the square. So don’t stick around. So nothing happens after you get the skull. That means that the action must take place between the initial bargaining dialog (“ONE BILLION DOLLARS!”) and the party putting in to motion their inevitable wacky scheme. And during that time they must succeed in a number of intelligence checks to see other trivia going on. And there scheme must take more than four hours to implement, all while they stand in the fucking square, so they can the rest of the plotlines develop. Oh, chick sitting by a statue alone. Dude comes up to her, her obvious lover. They approach the horse merchants. They go off together. Noblemen come in to the square looking for her. They leave. Couple comes back to hide ta the horse merchants. Etc. And this sort of thing unfolds for each of the plots.

So the entire concept here is for the party to NOT take action. You must be in the square to see whats going on. You must be there at the end for the shit/puke/zombie fest. You must succeed on your rolls to get the context of what is going on. There are these competing passive things going on. It is, obviously, putting interesting things behind skill checks. Don’t do that. Share interesting things. Don’t make the party beg and plead over the course of four hours in order to be able to get the hook from the king. You WANT the party on the adventure and them invested in it. Watching what happens with the check, understanding a bit of the situation and missing other parts, is what is going to make this a fun and zany side-quest that the party is invested in. And then they must stand around, taking four hours to implement their plan, in order to see any of it at all. You want the party invested, so don’t put that shit behind skill checks. And rework the adventure such that the timeline is greatly advanced or something else, in order to handle the “stab and grab”, or some derivation therein, of the party.

You know the deal, other than that how was the play? Meh. Some decent chaos at the end when people start shitting themselves and vomiting and a bomb goes off killing a bunch of people and then they reanimate and start Brains!’ing. That, alone, as the climax, perhaps deserves some set piece treatment instead of just another paragraph. The rest of the adventure is full of long timeline events that lean toward the prescriptive end of the spectrum as well as long descriptions of “The Stall of Martha Johnson.” And the bombing is pretty random. Some old woman drops off a bomb at the junk dealers, leaving her shopping bag, and then sprinkles poison on food at several food stalls. Which is weird. I thought it was just some kind of rando deus-ex thing, but there is another thread, one event in which a protection racket causes a mess at a food stall. So maybe its a protection thing? But blowing up a stall and killing a bunch of randos? I get that the bandits want revenge for a fake love potion, but, mass murder? That seems a tad excessive, even for an RPG?

Dude might be a fine DM. And he might have invented the “multi-plot adventure.” But this is not a good implementation, either in its form or function. Long backgrounds and trivia. Detailed events to dig through, a set piece end that is not a set piece. And an overall assumption about the length of the time in the market that is almost certainly not accurate. Yeah, we want to play the game tonight, but too much of that, or too blatant, breaks the illusion of agency.

This is $10 at DriveThru. There is no preview. Bad Publisher! No cookie for you! We need a substantive preview to determine if we want to buy it.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/548756/mayhem-in-the...

A new episode has been added to the database: Muses of Play

A new episode has been added to the database: [PREVIEW] Design Session #72: Our Starting Lineup