Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
A jam submission

The Caerus And The CuratorView project page

Submitted by Lofty Jungle — 1 hour, 40 minutes before the deadline
Rated by 13 people so far

Play game

The Caerus And The Curator's itch.io page

Rate this game

In order to rate this submission you must be logged into itch.io and have submitted your own entry. Anyone with an account can leave a comment.

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

Submitted

Some cool ideas here! There are a couple of places where you could opt into some Mothership-isms, to look a little slicker. For example, the Flesh Stitcher could be -5 Speed, rather than 'dex', or the Strength Check to escape the curator's pin could be a 'STR Check [-]' denoting disadvantage, rather than being at -10. I also caught that the Foundational Relic table has a d10 column, but only six entries. Perhaps two could be merged, and it could come down to a d5 table? The unspoken rules of Mothership Modules seem to be resistant to rolls other than d5s, d10s, and d20s. 

One final Mothership-ism: Armour is usually represented as an AP value rather than a percentage. P.28 of the PSG has the details.

The 'magic items' are all really neat; I could see reaching for this module to use the relic table if my players went really off-road one session. My player brain saw the monofilament talons and immediately thought, 'Aha! I can cut my way out of this tomb into the alien past!' If you end up doing a longer version, I'd love to see more about the moon-bird-curator culture.

Submitted

The Archive reminds me of ATLA's Library of Wan Shi Tong, which must be based on something else in mythology, but the wiki doesn't seem to know and neither do I. Which is to say, good job evoking a myth which may not even exist in the first place!
As a player, I am so tempted by the prospect of alternate uses for the relics, as receiving Foundational Relics may be frustrating if the players can't use them to meaningfully progress their goals or the goals of the Village, not that every item needs that kind of use. I know that is more on Warden while playing, but I think I'd rather have one d10 relic table with slightly more utility over a table and a half with the important stuff being uninteresting to the Villagers and PCs.
It would also be interesting to have a sentence on how the Villagers would react to Curator-slaying PCs. The fact that it is easy to get invested in the Villager culture is a credit to the writing! Bravo (or Brava, or the gender-neutral Benissimo)!

Submitted

I like the concept of The Archive a lot, and I think you have a lot of room to expand on it. The Settlement panel and the last panel with the past and present Archives seem to be rephrasing a lot of the same information, so i would remove one of them or combine the information. I also don't think you need the Archive Eggs section. You could just add a line to their mention in The Settlement section that a Curator comes if they're damaged. 

And I don't know that The Curator needs its own panel, since some of its behavior is rephrased elsewhere and I don't know that it needs a communication section outside of something like "teal lights indicate approval and red lights indicate disapproval. You could probably pare it down a lot. 

I like the traded miracles section. It could be combined with the Settlement section. 

This does feel like science fantasy, as someone else said, but I think that could be fun. I like the tone of it, I would just like the concepts here expanded more. Use the space to flesh out some townsfolk. What is their culture like? Why are they indifferent to all the bizarre happenings? Does the Archive extend into any other times? Could the PCs go there? Good work!

Submitted

Overall it's a bit heavy on "gotchas" where unavoidable events or traps spring without much in the way to warn players. They should have warnings, ways to avoid them, clues about theme elsewhere, or weaknesses to exploit in order to escape their effects. A specific example would be for the alien countdown to be readable with the right skills.

There's a lot of interesting ideas, but the trick will be to tie them into an interesting adventure. There's a lot of space dedicated to the vault puzzle, but the solution isn't particularly compelling, and the temporal processor thing felt kinda unnecessary. I think you need to get down to the core questions. What's the Curator up to in the big scheme of things? Why should the crew care? What's the survive/solve/save?

Submitted
  • Art of the monster is cool, but so low res it must have been stretched, which is not a good look. The egg art seems like an afterthought the way it's cut off.
  • Headings are relatively clear, but everything is bunched together. Tables look good, but the rest of the layout could use work to guide the eye. (get rid of the eggs for more space!)
  • What are Atmospheric Anchors? Talons should be referred to by their full name.
  • There doesn't seem like a lot to do here. Donate some weapons and leave? If they don't take anything can they just go when the timer runs out (nothing taken, nothing donated is still 1:1).
  • The mission was to find out if they survived, which you know at the start of the module. Adding another lure to investigate the facility would improve the plot.
  • The 'past' aspect seems tacked on to satisfy the jam criteria rather than being meaningful to the story. Why does an entity with time travel need ancient items?
  • The Curator's behavior (beyond an unavoidable first interaction) could be better described
Submitted (1 edit)

Art: Software-generated map and public domain art. Nothing really works together because it's from different sources and not developed for the module.

Writing: Reasonably good writing. Too much science-fantasy for me. Feels like Dungeons & Dragons in space more than Mothership.

Game Design: Very railroaded. Assumes players will go into the Archive just because it's there and the elders prompt them. Then it locks them in, the monster shows them what they're expected to do, and they can't leave until they do as they're told.

Theme: I'd prefer to see some development of the mythology around the Curator, maybe in place of one of the loot tables.

Layout: Tight line spacing makes for hard reading. Would be better to reduce font size and leave more breathing room between lines.

Utility: Good on this front. As long as the players are happy to go with the flow, I'm confident I could run this as intended without much prep.

Favorability: Probably fine for groups looking for a more D&D-like experience with dungeons and loot, but not my cup of tea.