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Art: Very good and an impressive amount of it for the amount of time we had.

Writing: Also very good. The "Will Help If/Hiding" format is a clever way of presenting NPC motivations in a compact format. The concept is really creative.

Game Design: There's an impressive amount of game here. I suspect Mothership's ruleset isn't a perfect fit for what you're doing with this scenario, in that its defining mechanic involves mortal terror, which starts to make less sense when, after a few loops, the characters realize that death isn't permanent. The endgame is maybe a little unsatisfying in comparison to the everything up to that point, and it's not clear how the players are meant to deduce that they need to destroy the pillars. I guess maybe one could get accidentally destroyed in the battle and the Curator's reaction could tip his hand.

Theme: You'd get a seven out of five if I could do that. A turducken of myths, integrated throughout and in a creative way.

Layout: Really good. Does exactly enough to be visually interesting, but otherwise keeps it simple and easy to use.

Utility: I feel like the literally epic nature of the myths isn't going to come through if they're dealt with in a perfunctory way in the game. I could see an argument for giving full marks for Utility if one was just going to run it exactly as it's written, but then gameplay would suffer because nothing would feel really mythical if it's just  a few rounds and then on to the next one. So I'd probably end up doing a bunch of work to flesh out each myth into its own mini-scenario. 

Favorability: Love it. Likely to be in my top five, but I think I've already said that about maybe four things and I've only reviewed half the modules, so competition is looking tight.

I really appreciate your feedback! It's true that deaths causing resets really causes some issues with mood and stakes. I've been thinking about ways to compensate for that, but I might just have to allow people to die. The main reason I didn't is just because I felt that I'd have to put a content warning about child death on the module. Lots of tweaking to do!

Thank you!

(2 edits)

You could rework it, but I think die-and-reset is totally fine on its own. For me it's that the Stress and Panic mechanics make less sense in combination with that. 

However, maybe the answer is that when you do reset after dying or witnessing a death, it's like waking from a nightmare. And you're not sure if you're actually in a time loop, just imagining things, or having prophetic visions of impending doom. So then the resets are actually provoking Stress and Panic, and become much more Mothershippy.

Ooh, great idea!