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I gave the book a proper read, finally, not just reading the pictures and the bits and bobs that appealed directly to me. While I'm extremely fond of Crown of Salt, I think it's got one too many 'save or suck' rolls where if you biff a check, your character dies with no real way of surviving things. I confess games like Mork Borg aren't my usual wheelhouse, but I figure with the Descent and the underworld full of brine and salt being so dangerous, it would be extremely hard to justify replacement PCs. 


You're not in a place anyone is supposed to be. You're in a forbidden, dangerous hellhole. And maybe there's one other adventurer there, like the survivor you can find, but past a certain point it'd become ridiculous. I also felt like, with how much information the PCs might get cluing them into the fact that gathering the Crown is a horrible idea, there's plenty who would just turn around and leave.


But I think this is just my personal tastes. In terms of save or suck rolls, I think it's a lot more interesting when you're transformed, changed, cursed, inflicted with some terrible (but not game removing) fate. The art goes hard as always. I really, REALLY liked the spinoff goblin adventure and kinda felt it had a much more solid adventure design? Felt like the goals the PCs had was better defined and having NPCs with contrasting personalities to work off is always a delight.

I've been thinking about the subject of save-or-die rolls recently. One way to use the ones from Crown of Salt without changing anything about them is to make them obvious to the players. Saying "there's an old, rotting rope ladder here" or even going as far as "hey if you use this rope ladder, there's a 1 in 3 chance it breaks and you plummet to your death". This encourages the players to think of workarounds (e.g. tie their own rope). And if they can't or won't, there's always the informed choice to gamble with the 1 in 3 chance of death.