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A jam submission

AnaqwaldView project page

A remote vale ringed by steep hills. A lodge surrounded by gnarled black spruce. What secrets lurk in this winterbog?
Submitted by Alewife — 7 days, 12 hours before the deadline
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Anaqwald's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Coldest (How far below zero can you get?)#34.4784.750
Most "Northern" (We're from Minnesota, it's okay.)#33.7714.000
Overall#93.3883.594
Most Deathless (You know it when you see it.)#132.3572.500
Darkest (How deep into the darkness of man can you go?)#162.9463.125

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

Host

This is a brutal, frigid adventure. I particularly enjoy the hypothermia and frostbite mechanics. The illusory veil cast by the bogwitch is a fantastic element. This looks like a blast to run, well done.

Submitted

I really like Mysta Hyttet and I can see your love and knowledge for ale comes through. The rules for hypothermia are fun and I would think works well. They do what I tried to include in my random table, adds some flavour and fun without hurting anybody.

In general your DR-checks could potentially be a little on the high side, but that's just up for play testing. 

All in all a great adventure for dropping between two places, something you as a GM always need. And the setting and atmosphere reads really horribly. (in a nice way.) 

Submitted

This is a great adventure, well written with good flavour. I like the mechanics for freezing and hypothermia which serve the coldness theme very well. Tavern, just being a trap for feeding the swamp witch, is a great idea. Ale-chemy is just hilarious!

I found it very difficult to read. The font is like cramped together and could have benefitted from more space between letters and columns. And it doesn't have much contrast to the background, a border around the letters could've helped here. My impression is, that you tried to squeeze the information of 2-3 pages into one single page. I'd like to encourage you to try using bullet points instead of whole sentences, to let the text breathe a little.

The content is great it's just the presentation that doesn't serve it well.

Submitted

This is a really great adventure to lay down between two other locations. I think the mechanics for hypothermia are excellent, but don't feel overly punishing, but they also provide a compelling reason to go into this strange obviously problematic inn.

A lot of the random encounters really make the bog feel like a living place. The peat moose, the grappling peat beneath the snow, even the ainking into the bog and grasping hoarfrost. I love it. I might need to plug this in somewhere in my game.

My constructive criticism is that it is indeed very hard to read. The font choice, although thematic and cool makes this problem worse. I had to take time just to parse where to start, and to identify the important points, or even which bits are different sections.

The placement of the Swamp Moose stat block right under a reference in blue and bold to the ice cellar was really confusing. I was like, is the swamp moose more than a random encounter?

I think the sections need more delineation, an easier to read font and maybe more liberal use of bold, italics, and colors to pull out the important information. I would usually suggest simplifying the language and parsing the words down to the most important elements, but in your case I find the language so evocative I'd hate for you to lose that.

On an entirety different point, I think the hag needs to have some kind of magic (maybe she's supposed to use her own herbal concoctions?), but her stat block really reads like a melee encounter and I feel like that isn't the feel you're going for with that adversary.

Overall, after parsing this one, I think it is one of my favorites, but my immediate reaction was to dislike it because it felt needlessly overwhelming.

Submitted

This is a really great adventure to lay down between two other locations. I think the mechanics for hypothermia are excellent, but don't feel overly punishing, but they also provide a compelling reason to go into this strange obviously problematic inn.

A lot of the random encounters really make the bog feel like a living place. The peat moose, the grappling peat beneath the snow, even the ainking into the bog and grasping hoarfrost. I love it. I might need to plug this in somewhere in my game.

My constructive criticism is that it is indeed very hard to read. The font choice, although thematic and cool makes this problem worse. I had to take time just to parse where to start, and to identify the important points, or even which bits are different sections.

The placement of the Swamp Moose stat block right under a reference in blue and bold to the ice cellar was really confusing. I was like, is the swamp moose more than a random encounter?

I think the sections need more delineation, an easier to read font and maybe more liberal use of bold, italics, and colors to pull out the important information. I would usually suggest simplifying the language and parsing the words down to the most important elements, but in your case I find the language so evocative I'd hate for you to lose that.

On an entirety different point, I think the hag needs to have some kind of magic (maybe she's supposed to use her own herbal concoctions?), but her stat block really reads like a melee encounter and I feel like that isn't the feel you're going for with that adversary.

Overall, after parsing this one, I think it is one of my favorites, but my immediate reaction was to dislike it because it felt needlessly overwhelming.

Submitted

A bit hard to read, but there are some great ideas like hypothermia! Very nice :)