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Skin Crawl's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Favorability - how much do you personally like the submission? | #16 | 3.569 | 3.800 |
Overall | #20 | 3.429 | 3.650 |
Theme - How well does it match the Jam's Theme? | #20 | 3.820 | 4.067 |
Usability - How "pick up & play" is this for a Warden? | #22 | 3.256 | 3.467 |
Polish - How is the overall look/vibes/writing & design? | #26 | 3.068 | 3.267 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Interesting premise. I like the clock system you've used here.
Hiya! Reading this through now, taking some notes... here are those notes!
First thought is, what a great name for a module... i have to imagine you did one of those lean back in the chair moments when you came up with it
Oof the marketing-talk in the opener is making my... skin crawl (truly can't come up with a better term haha). Great work, from "skin deep" to "stalwart appliance," just vile haha. great stuff
oh wow we are NOT PULLING PUNCHES on the truth of dupliskin. damn. REAMS!! you are really picking some nasty words. hell yeah
the clock raises the stakes in a very satisfying way. room descriptions very evocative, i would hate being in this place even if there were no skin ghoul related shenanigans.
great body horror! not usually my subgenre but i like the way you presented this, kind of centered around the foul corporate sheen masking some real nasty business.
As a fan of body horror, this is excellent. The idea that everyone around the players is potentially a baddie to be a fun touch.
I like the idea of NPCs moving around but there’s so many options it could be really hard to keep track of who is where.
The time tracker on the inner spread is an excellent touch to help the warden keep track of game state. While reading the Watch the Clock section I was confused at first when seeing “time marches on” (yes, I did accidentally skip the rest of the sentence) and it had me questioning if that was simply when the warden feels like it’s time to move the game clock forward. Emphasizing that (bolds, Title Case, etc) could help there. I understand that it wouldn’t be as evocative with only having “Increment clock by 1” but could eliminate some confusion / extraneous game mechanics.
This rules. Really clean, great map and mechanical instructions, really creative. A few minor layout issues, especially on the spread, but nothing that meaningfully detracts from the work. Only things I'd really like more of is some sort of mystery for the crew to chase: I don't know if the adventure has a clear path for the crew to discover what's going on or why, but it's not really necessary and even if you wanted that it's not a super heavy lift for the DM.
Really appealing and printer-friendly art direction! I do feel the text is a bit condensed to its detriment, though, and some columns are lack spacing between one another. The map legend is also pretty squished in there.
That aside, you've written some excellent body horror here! The dungeon essentially tells the story the company and their product - I think a lot of dungeons tend to miss that. The more you explore, the more you learn, and the worse things get. I also really, really enjoy the timeline of events, they're explosive without being railroady or too narrow. I get a good sense of the narrative arc a one-shot might take by reading them. Well considered and great work overall!
Thank you for the feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed giving it a look! Layout is definitely my weakest area I feel, at the very least I sort of rushed my layout here so your points are all very handy!
Overall I love the concept - theme is great and it's super creepy. If I were to run it, I would definitely focus the Dupli-Skin marketing around the product being synthetically grown 100% ethical skin, to enhance the payoff when the players reach the den. Both NPC and room descriptions were super evocative, and would be easy to run at the table in that sense - though tracking NPC movements may be a bit complicated. I would like to see an NPC to be keen on offering a free sample - or I would try to manufacture a situation where a pc needs to get Dupli-Skinned to save their life (just to make use of your infection table). I would also love to see you play up the horror on the events table. Rather than just npcs changing locations have them doing something at the same time (like farm staff transporting a garbage bin filled with skinless corpses for disposal).
It was a really enjoyable read, and look forward to running it at some point :)
Thanks, that was exactly The sort of thing I wanted to evoke! NPCs and their movements is something that I struggled to handle in a way that kept it dynamic, I feel like the table method was an acceptable solution: the intention being that as time progresses, there is more paranoia about the nature of the people they meet as they move about, but more direct horrors in the table would also be a good inclusion too!
I'm glad you enjoyed giving it a look I hope you enjoy running it if you get a chance! 😊
Delightfully grotesque and thematic—best I've seen yet in that regard. I think Camilla in Skin Deep might be covered in Dupli-Skin ;-). Any other Skin entries in this jam? "Skin Trilogy" would be fun.
I think this is one where graphic design isn't just about aesthetics, but usability. In terms of looks, the most bothersome thing is the lack of space between some elements—a lot of things are smashed right up against something else, and there's no interior margin for the dark boxes, etc.
More importantly, though, some additional thought in terms of design and layout would go a long way to making some of the more complex mechanisms more Warden-friendly. For instance:
There are maybe too many named NPCs, though I'm not sure of that. It is useful to have personality prompts when they turn out to be needed. However if the Warden actually tries to introduce and track the location of all those people, it's going to be a lot of mental overhead. I thought Skin Deep was bad for that, and you have more than twice as many as I do.
Instead of making the advancement of time a random encounter, you could make it happen whenever a duplicate encounter is rolled (instead of having that encounter a second time). That would avoid repetitive events and also naturally accelerate the pace of the plot if the players start doing too much backtracking, as the chances of a clock tick would go up each step.
Yes! Glad to see you share my thoughts on Camilla probably having Dupli-Skin XD. I'm not sure, a Skin trilogy/Duology would be very fun ;)
Thanks for the feedback, it is all very helpful! The layout-adjacent issues are definitely the thing I was most unsure of, it is the element I am least confident in overall and I think that suffered a bit due to my rushed entry: The dark-box inner margin is something I have been meaning to sort out but didn't get around to this time, it is definitely on the list to amend post-jam.
The number of NPCs is a tricky one; having more staff makes the paranoia around the Dupli-Skin Walkers more potent, and I thought a more dynamic roster would work better than listing each in a specific location, but I can see the number of them being an issue.
I really like your suggestion for timeline advancement, I think I'll have to test it out when I run this one next!
Whoa man. Actual chills. This has been one of the more evocative things I’ve read all month. Well done. I had a couple issues with some layout choices, but overall a super solid showing. Can’t wait to terrify my players with this one.
Hey Headless-Press, please adjust the price of your module from “pay what you want” to Free for the duration of the Jam. afterwards you are allowed to monetize however you want. Thanks!
Ah my mistake! I'll sort it now!
Hey Headless-Press,
my apologies, I have made a small rule change in favor of allowing submissions to be open for Donations, the edited rule reads as:
During the Jam you may list your game as Free or open to Donations. Someone pointed out to me that so long as submitters and judges download from the submissions tab instead of the individual pages, it will always download like its free. the original intent of this rule was to keep people from feeling inclined to donate simply to be a part of the Judging process. My apologies to those who were affected by this rule.
I hope this helps!