Post by monodestoyer in Misbegotten Children of Izanami jam comments

Appx. N Jam 2026 » Entries » Misbegotten Children of Izanami

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This is a great little module. You've woven a really interesting narrative through this.

It was a little hard for me to follow at times. Might be useful to specify what the overall goal is, e.g., what does success/failure mean for the village?

Same with the individual villagers. What might happen if the players don't assist Ojin with hanging the bozu? This is a good chance to reward the players with helping (maybe he's more accommodating to visitors), or maybe a penalty for failure. I'm assuming that the players will have to do a lot of negotiating with different parties to get them to accept more and more refugees. Listing some basic wants or needs might help here. It would be a lot to come up with on the fly.

Layout-wise, very clean. You write well and have chosen a nice, readable font in a decent size. I like the drop-cap key numbers. Very economic with the space. If I were to nitpick anything, the subheads (NOON, 1st DAY) are probably a little too lightweight for my liking. The ordinal suffixes (the 'st' part of '1st') do not print well. You also switch between em-dashes and brackets, I'd say just pick one or the other to keep things consistent.

I really like the back page. You've used a lot of Japanese terminology here, and the Glossary will help a lot. Worth the space that it takes up.

I see in the credits that this is your first adventure. I hope you're proud of how it turned out. It's really great.

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Wormod1 day ago (2 edits)

Thank you for the review, and a lot of meat here for me to consider!

With respect to aimlessness, I think I have to bite that bullet. I hope players will consider success for themselves, and I expect some will try to save everybody, enrich themselves, gain power in the village, or simply take the blows as they come. (The ronin act as a foil to the party, whatever they choose, because they are also “adventurers” of a sort.)

That being said, I think you’re right I need to have some more detailed wants & needs, maybe even possible moves. A ton of the interactivity here relies on GMs playing the villagers “to the hilt,” following their desires. If Ojin didn’t get anybody to the bozu dolls on the first day, I’d have him asking refugees to do it on the second, and have the refugees asking him why nobody has helped him yet. It ought to come across that Ojin would be upset with someone sheltering in the shrine, too… You’ve given me much to think about for after-judging revisions. In an earlier version of the module, I had much more written for the characters, but I couldn’t fit it with the schedule of events added later.

All your advice for layout seems dead on to me, and I thank you for it. The weight of the Jost calendar headings was me trying to lend them a kind of movie quality, but they’re out of whack with the weight of… all the other Jost in the PDF. I don’t know I have the heart to get rid of my brackets, though (and I’d have to—I find em-dashes too useful to get rid of them, either!).

Thank you for the thoughtful review. The time you take does not go unappreciated. <3

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