Alright. This is such an AMAZING reply. I'm going to pay my respect by answering some of the decisions I made.
I appreciate the Appendix N taste! It was a gamble because prior to this I have literally never known or read any Appendix N literature, and there were a lot of angles to take. Eventually, I decided to just mash every idea that I had onto a giant concept and work it out from there.
I'm glad you noticed the detail for the king :> I wanted to bring it way more examples that essentially the king and the people don't quite look the same but due to constraints, the fingers were a few examples that I managed to fit in.
- This was one of the problems that I faced when designing this adventure. To make a heist adventure, the most important part is the tension represented by the timer itself. I initially wanted to tie the heat rising mechanic onto something like a suspicion level (like in any heist games, if you get to a certain clock/point, you're busted and you failed), but the problem is that due to the small nature of the map, and the fact that the security room is on the first floor and very much accessible, makes it hard to use the heat rising as a security tracker. Regarding the random encounters, I actually did include a lot of environmental encounters, but throughout my personal playtesting, It was hard to justify the length that the words would've taken to write it down and the fun factor. True, random encounters are a random variable, but in my design prototyping, heist adventures need to not that much of a randomness so players can plan. The dimensional shifting was enough trouble they had to face, if i gave them more danger it would be too much, at least that's what I would think. And also, my initial table was a d4->d6->d8 yes...but I had to reduce them due to the size...I will make this table even crazier in the expanded version, you can trust me on that.
- it's true that I didn't include any real connections on what or why the tesseract space even exist in the first place (I wanted to put a sample mini lore that the tesseract space was their defense against another species actually that was four dimensional so they couldn't enter two dimensional), but I figured I had two reasons why I didn't put an information. First, I didn't think it was nessecary. In the spirit of Appendix N, you have all this weird magic and science especially when you visit an out of this world civilization. Especially when you're in a hurry, you're not gonna have enough time to piece out everything. In the adventure lore wise, you're not there for a field trip or to understand the martians - you're there to destroy the flame and that's it. I guess an explanation wasn't the biggest urgency here. And second reason, there. isn't. enough. space. Which means that I'll probably add some lore for the expanded version to justify this.
- This Into the Odd comment was actually accurate (LMAO). I chose it because it looked simple enough, I've played it like..5 times? I definitely should've researched more on how the system usually works and implement that to my entry. That part about swapping sounds so cool and I'm going to respectfully take note of that idea for the expanded version.
Splendid feedback. I'll definitely note all of them for future improvements. Thank you once again for the gorgeous insights!