Play trifold
The Golden Crossing's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| WRITING — How does this read? does it emanate with horror, humor, drama...? | #8 | 3.862 | 3.952 |
| GAME DESIGN — How good is the game balance or concepts there in? | #10 | 3.722 | 3.810 |
| THEME — How well is the jam theme used? | #12 | 3.768 | 3.857 |
| FAVORABILITY — how much do you personally like the submission? | #15 | 3.536 | 3.619 |
| Overall | #16 | 3.662 | 3.748 |
| ART — How good is the art/graphic design? | #20 | 3.955 | 4.048 |
| LAYOUT — How well does the module get across information? | #24 | 3.582 | 3.667 |
| UTILITY — Does complexity inspire game prep? Or Is it very "Pick-up-n-Play"? | #33 | 3.210 | 3.286 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- There is a ton of depth to this module, but far more than should be advisably confined to a pamphlet: it's an eye-straining puzzle to decipher the various codes and systems of the module in the first place, and will easily take a few weeks of effort to expand across multiple pages of your notebook of choice before you can even begin to consider running it. Any personality or atmosphere inherent to the module (what's there is excellent) is lost in a sea of tiny, dense descriptions that ultimately translate to massive blank spaces the Warden will need to fill themselves.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
What you have here is brilliant. I didn't see everything but out of what I did look at, the Golden Crossing is my absolutely favorite. I would love to see a more detail piece depicting the ship itself and the format of the room connections took a minute to figure out but those are nothing compared to how awesome everything else is. Amazing work!
Art: Super nice interior with crispy graphic design and map. Outside is also good but maybe a bit more standard. The illustration of the Watch is nice, though.
Writing: Really good. I haven't actually seen Eyes Wide Shut but I feel like that's what you're doing here? Anyway, masked rich person human sacrifice sex cult is a good theme for Mothership.
Game Design: Let's face it, you're doing a lot here for a trifold. How you've done it is extremely clever, from the exploration mechanics to the icon system. It's extremely impressive, but also inevitably means some sacrifices (in addition to the ones mandated by the plot). For one thing, the Warden will have to ad-lib a lot of NPC motivations and environmental setpieces if this is going to be anything other than a long series of combats with beautiful background scenery, because you only allowed yourself a few words per room and per character. Similarly, you had to gloss over the intro by just saying the Warden could roleplay through the players' welcome and subsequent capture, which I think makes for a better story than just starting in a cell. I'd love to see this as a zine.
Theme: I feel like I might be missing something. I get that the ship is figuratively "mythical" in-game, and the Guide is ancient. The ship's name is myth-adjacent. Anyway, it's sprinkled in but unless I'm missing something that ties it together, it's reasonable but not the most anciently mythical thing I've seen this jam.
Layout: Truly impressive that you managed to keep the interior spread as comprehensible as you did, even if it's bursting at the seams a little bit in places (e.g. the explanation of the ! system for the doors could be better if you had more than one square nanometer to work with). Full marks anyway.
Utility: I'm a little torn here, in that there's a lot of work for the Warden if there's going to be more to do along the way than just beat up rich people, but it does "inspire game prep" as the guidelines suggest is one form of utility. I'd rather I didn't have to do that, but I do feel like it might be worth it for such a cool scenario. There is are also some things I'd have to house rule because I don't quite understand the intent... specifically, some of the non-reciprocal connections and why some sections have room numbers starting at 0 and others start at 1. I'm guessing that the Ballroom staircase is supposed to go to B0 not B2 so that it's reciprocal, and then the reason we can't roll B0 and C0 is that we only get there from the Bridge or the Promenade?
Favorability: I feel like I had to dock a star in Game Design and Utility for having chosen a vision that can't really be done justice in this format despite your extraordinarily valiant efforts. However, even though it might frustrate me if I was actually playing it, I love it as a technical achievement in terms of pushing the envelope on information density. If I'm ever going to prison and need to have someone smuggle me an entire RPG on a postcard, I know who to call. Full marks and then some.
Thank you for the detailed write-up, and yeah, you are on point with most of the things. Definitely too big of a scope for a project like this. But I got that inspiration and just wanted to try to fit the whole thing. As a result, some of the things have not been clarified as well as they could have. Once the jam is complete, I will go through the module and rewrite things, fix inconsistencies, and correct some of the mistakes you and others pointed out. For example, the idea behind the 0 rooms is that they are always accessible after you roll a few times, but I might have accidentally deleted that sentence while editing. So that's a big mistake. But this was my first time trying my hand at this and some mistakes were bound to happen. In any case, it was amazing, super fun to do, and I hope to do more in the future. Thanks for the feedback again.
This is awesome! I would really like to see this expanded out into something much larger, like a full-blown space station across several full pages. This almost reads like a teaser for all of the questionable things that could be going on. It's trying to do far too much for a trifold, and suffers from feeling like it's stuffed into a box, but that box is still full of cool stuff.
Well done.
Thank you for the feedback!
(errors: emmits = emits)
Thanks! To reply to your feedback, that's the ship, yes, and that's me being an amateur artist. The NPC art is actually made by my friend, and he did a great job! As for the masks, the idea is that the NPCs are both used to this parallel dimension and they have masks, while players only have masks.
In general, the idea was for the ship to be labyrinthine, that's correct, and to be a hectic escape from this ship full of mysteries. And more combat-heavy than the scenarios I usually run myself. Additionally, there is no map on board other than the first public section of the ship. The other parts are intentionally mysterious to confuse intruders, but they might be able to extract information from a captured NPC to roughly guide them. That's why they have better rolls if they do that. They can always backtrack through the rooms they discovered since that part of the map is fixed once they discovered it.
But I agree, it's too complex for this format, and is something that can be expanded further into a bigger adventure. Thanks again!
The vibe is excellent and it is full of cool ideas. I think it may be a little too overstuffed, and would better serve a Warden if it were pruned a little so that the more important parts can be emphasized more. The random encounter table is taking quite a bit of space for essentially being different combinations of 3 NPC types. The alert system doesn't appear to have a clear mechanical effect on the rest of the adventure.
I gave you very high marks for art, writing, game design, theme, and favorability, but I think layout and utility could be improved.
Honestly I would love to see you flesh this out into an adventure that is longer than a trifold. I think there is enough here that you could develop it into a really cool multi-page adventure.
Thank you very much for the feedback. I 100% agree with your remarks. After the jam is completed, I will definitely try to take a bit more time to improve the tri-fold and perhaps consider the multi-page adventure. As I started working on this, my ideas kept expanding, and I wanted to fit them all in to make the story and worldbuilding more coherent, but that definitely hurt the layout and utility. I would say it takes quite a lot of time for the GM to prep this. So perhaps it could be a multi-page adventure one day!
This is such a huge work in a small package. I think the effect of that however is that it's very dense. A single area has many symbols and text formats that need to be kept in mind. Some small tweaks could be made to improve the readability, but overall I think it's excellent. If you had room, one tweak I might make is to just say "to B2" after the "Type" symbol. That way you don't even need to mention "To" in the key.
Everything has had so much thought put into it. It's really an impressive accomplishment. I could easily see this being published and sold. One thing that is more of a personal preference, but I think it could use different cover/main art. Everything else is so polished, it just doesn't feel like it's up to the level of the rest of it. Not that it's bad, the rest of the package is just so good.
Thank you for the feedback. I agree with everything you said. It is a bit too dense, especially when I look at other people's submissions. They are all really clean and easily scannable. Mine is a little bit too much. This is the first time I designed one of these and working with such a format was interesting, but I need more practice to make sure I can adjust the scope of my ideas for the required task. As for the art, you are right. I'm not really a skilled artist. I did a few board game prototypes and things like that, but I always relied on people helping me with art or just grabbing stock images. But I decided to use this jam as an opportunity to try to expand as an artist and try to do some of it on my own. And I know it is a bit amateurish, compared to what I feel more comfortable with, such as charts, rules, and things like that. Thanks again for the feedback.
To be clear, you did a great job. The keying is well thought out and clever, it’s just dense.
Your art is good. I really like the art for the masked people (I’m not looking at the module right now, so I forget what they’re called).
I hope you continue making modules.
Really excellent showing, I especially enjoy how dense the interior is! Keying is sharp, locations are evocative, and objectives/endings are really clear! A couple things I want to mention:
Huge props for this one, I really think it hits a sweet spot of dense dungeon crawl/weird culty stuff/cool spaceship/oh god its the Warp From Warhammer Now. Could easily see PCs joining up just as likely as they'd try to disrupt the rituals! I also really like the Patrons as a trio of ruling NPCs - immediately had a great sense of how to roleplay them and have that impact the crew.
Thanks for the feedback. And yes, thanks for catching that. I used the header just as a placeholder when I initially started the design and forgot to swap it. Thanks again. Not sure if I can make the change right now that the voting has started. In general, I agree with all of your comments. I wish I had a bit more time to flesh things out, and I will definitely do that after the jam is over. Thanks again!